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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

> "I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions and want to be taken seriously, or want a megaphone – both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them."

Convenient that we're only doing that because "we have unpopular opinions". But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?

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> But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?

Bold claims have a heavy burden of proof. One could quickly retort with the opposite, i.e. perhaps they are unpopular because they have been refuted many times but the proponents believe the 97th time will be the charm. Who's right?

It's possible, but if, say, pro-pinapple speech and reesearch is effectively and heavily suppressed, then even if the lone nutters who are pro-pinapple (and you'd have to be a bit of a nutter to be pro-pinapple in an anti-pinapple world, both due to lack of exposure to anti-pinapple resources and for social reasons) speak up they are probably not going to make a good case, not having had the opportunity to explore the idea with a large number of different people helping them figure out the arguments and doing the experiments.

That retort does not work when the suggested policies work every single time as promised when they have been implemented and their primary reason for failure is that they have been made illegal and brought to court.

Also, the refutals that supposedly make them unpopular seemingly have no impact in reality. That kind of suggests that either the models used for refutal are grossly incomplete or big errors have been made due to political reasoning.

If you believe you have the best ideas with the best evidence backing them and find you can’t reach and convince people with the plethora of modern communications tools, I’d spend at least as much time examining possible faults in your beliefs as I would the possible faults in communications.

> But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?

Notwithstanding my ignorance of the particular unpopular opinion you hold, did it ever occur to you that no matter how fully you express your mind, and no matter how rationally you believe your points, the popular resistance to your unpopular ideas may simply be proof that they do not have merit?

If history shows us anything it’s that intelligent people can become convinced by unintelligent ideas.

History has also shown us, that it doesn't matter how many people say you're wrong, you could be right. In fact, this is usually how major progress was made in science.

The whole "popular opinion" game is very one-sided from the start, especially in a setting where only a few people have immediate access to reach others like today. I've seen popular, but ultimately wrong, news travel around and solidify often enough to conclude, at least for myself, that "resistance to your unpopular ideas" is not sufficient to make any statement about its quality.

Do you think the flat earthers might be proved right some day?

Given the information currently available, probably not, but that doesn't mean they should be silenced.

Does that mean their speech should be considered equally authoritative as those whose model of the earth's shape you prefer?

The entire point is that popularity is not a relevant factor in this decision.

After all both opinions are or were popular so which one are we supposed to pick among the popular options?

Given all information that has ever been observable, absolutely not… and while that doesn’t mean they should be silenced, it absolutely means they shouldn’t be allowed to present their idiot ideas as facts, absent opposition and loud disclaim.

People are free to hold stupid ideas, and they’re free to state those ideas in public, and the rest of us are free to jeer them for doing so… freedom of speech does not imply freedom from being laughed at and abused for holding on to such manifestly stupid ideas.

That’s just it: I believe they must be allowed to present their (manifestly stupid) ideas as facts. The rest of us must also be allowed to present evidence and data to prove their ideas are wrong, but they have to, in moments and mediums they choose, be able to say “yup, the earth is definitely flat.”

Not to their children, or to anyone else’s, in any context in which there isn’t an overwhelming voice of opposition always present. Allowing someone infected with stupidity to willfully infect those who cannot consent in an informed manner is unethical in the extreme.

Are you proposing that we interfere with parents teaching their children their beliefs? That is more unethical and fraught with peril than the alternative, IMO.

If someone believes in a powerful sky wizard who oversees all of humanity, they can teach their children of this magical being. They can even take them once a week to a place of education about this belief. IMO, it’s none of my or your business or right to be constantly present to present alternative points of view.

In every part of the world that has developed public education standards the public good already interferes with parents teaching kids their beliefs about physics, math, basic world history, economics, etc, and for a very good and entirely ethical reason… a basically functioning and employable human being must be capable of basic arithmetic and the usage of technology that rises above simple machines in order to survive within a modern society. That’s why home-schooled children raised to hold their parents non-falsifiable beliefs — ie belief in particular sky wizard(s) — still have to be able to pass qualification tests that demonstrate that they have sufficient exposure to the facts that belie their falsifiable ones — ie belief that they live on a constantly accelerating disk, possibly atop elephants and a turtle — to at least handle the minimum cognitive dissonance required to both actually live on an oblate spheroid around which satellites travel and promote their parents’ fictional ideas using technology that depends in its entirety on the entirely self-evident and easily observable fact that the world isn’t flat.

Personally I’d go further… teaching children that the world is flat should be considered criminal child abuse, as you’re intentionally impairing a child’s ability to function in any society, including your own echo chamber.

I don’t mind (and in fact come close to insisting that we) have adequate public education to help mold our future society members.

What I do object to is insisting that there is never a time when parents can teach their children arbitrary topic X without always having someone from the societal ministry of truth to be there to fact-check/align it.

Depends in its entirety on the specifics of arbitrary topic X… for instance, if X involves putting ethic group Y in to gas chambers, then send in the ministry, post haste.

This does go both ways, doesn't it? Especially since a ministry was the main proponent of putting people into gas chambers once. They even killed anyone that would advocate for peace or provide help in this case.

There seems to be a significant power imbalance between the ministry and a parent.

That particular ministry was, of course, composed of those who’d been infected by rightly unpopular ideas that were allowed to grow and fester until the Overton Window had shifted to the far right, encouraged by parents and not sufficiently discouraged by the state.

A state of affairs that’s now pretty much been replicated, about a century after we first tried to learn the lesson that Fascism is a bad idea.

Should we lock parents up for "abusing" children because they lie about the existence of Santa Claus too? Or do you think it's possible that those children might grow up one day and become capable of forming their own conclusion in whether Santa exists or not?

If you're answer to that question is, "no, because those children were abused by others lying about Santa, they will never be capable of overcoming that lie and will continue to propagate that lie" then it begs the question: what right does anyone have to tell anyone anything since all of us have experienced some sort of indoctrination at some point? Are we not all "broken" in that sense?

Amen.

No, that isn't necessary, apparently all you need is propaganda. Once everyone believes it, you don't need to prove anything according to yawpitch.

Given the number of unusual beliefs we have today (e.g. equality, areligiosity), popularity seems like a very bad proxy for truth.

Those are, indeed, historically unusual beliefs… though the rise in their popularity being directly coincident with the spread of more-than-minimal literacy and the slow degradation of traditional and institutional obstacles to higher education does imply that inequality and religiosity are even worse proxies for “truth”.

>the popular resistance to your unpopular ideas may simply be proof that they do not have merit?

No matter how many people believe the earth is flat or the sun circles around the earth, it won't make it true. We have day and night cycles because earth is a sphere that is rotating so that only one side of earth is exposed at the same time.

No matter how unpopular this opinion is and no matter how big the mob's desire to lynch me is, it is still closer to the truth than the potentially popular opinion of earth being flat and the sun circling around the planet.

In all the thousands of years of recorded human history there has never been a time where you could find enough people who actually believe the Earth is flat to fill a room sufficiently large to constitute “popular” opinion.

That is, not until after the advent of the Internet and YouTube… both of which, ironically, depend on the Earth being non-flat to function.

Sheesh it entirely works both ways. 70 years ago most didn’t want to hear about equal rights for homosexuals. But after 70 years of discussion, celebrity, pop culture, expiration of the issue, society has basically done a 180.

The Majority is very often simply wrong.

In fact is, look at all progressive movements (those that you’d have to be pretty insane to dispute today). They all began with the majority opposing them. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, homosexual rights, etc.

Each of the movements responsible for those achievements went directly against the grain. You were crazy to side with any of those at certain dates in the past.

The most fascinating part is to think which movements haven’t occurred yet. Which topics are we all collectively wrong about. Whatever they are it’s the first amendment that will enable them to be rectified.

I have many ideas what these will turn out to be, but that’s another topic.

The observation has nothing to do with the correctness or goodness of the opinion. The intention of the comment was to point out that this is different from defending free speech; it's simply wanting people to listen to you. (And I don't think that's inherently a wrong desire!)

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