Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

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The article seems to be suggesting that it's alright to limit freedom of speech a little, as long as some "suitable" Schelling points are established.

But that doesn't work because Schelling points are subjective. You can't reliably convince everyone that some specific arbitrary threshold should never be crossed, because it will surely lead to doom. Some might agree, and others will see things in a different way.

That's why it's pointless to even try, and that's why it's pointless to think about freedom of speech in terms of Schelling points.

So how about just pretending there's a Schelling point at 100% of freedom of speech? Any concession from that will inevitably lead to more, and besides, losing our freedom of speech is not a clear-cut phenomenon anyway.

It's a bit like new currency entering circulation at various points in the economy - some people's perceptions of what's acceptable will shift before others', but will in turn affect the perceptions of others around them. Freedom of speech rots in arbitrary, unpredictable and uneven ways.

> That's why it's pointless to even try

When applied to some action that hasn't been tried yet, I'm not sure that statement has ever been true. In fact, I largely see the advancement of humanity as people trying pointless things until they stumble upon the few things that work. I can imagine there have been many times and many peoples in the past that when considering their own government, thought that human nature and the the nature of power would never allow a different governing system than the one they knew.

Things change, and it's largely due to a few doing what the majority consider "pointless", and accomplishing the "impossible".

> When applied to some action that hasn't been tried yet, I'm not sure that statement has ever been true.

Alright. Try melting steel with your mind. It's reasonably likely that's never been attempted before, so I guess it's not pointless to try, right?

You're basically just saying "extreme statements are unlikely to be true", but while that's often an accurate observation, especially when discussing groups of people, it's not really relevant to what I said.

On the other hand, what I said earlier boils down to "it's pointless to attempt something that can't be done". I fail to see how that warrants lodging a complaint like yours.

I'm pretty sure that has been tried, likely millions of times before. How do we know we can't melt steel with our mind? Because we've tried, and it didn't work. We weren't born with some inherent knowledge of physics and the universe, we painstakingly experimented with everything until we developed a model of how things worked, and we've passed that along.

> On the other hand, what I said earlier boils down to "it's pointless to attempt something that can't be done". I fail to see how that warrants lodging a complaint like yours.

But you've provided no real evidence that it can't be done, have you? Trying provides that first bit of evidence, in whatever direction it goes. I'm all for prioritizing what we try, but stating something is pointless to try when it hasn't yet been tried implies you not only have perfect knowledge of all the variables that constitute the outcome, but can also use them to correctly predict the outcome. I feel fairly safe in asserting that neither you, nor any other person alive, is truly capable of that. As such, nothing is truly "pointless". It may be undesirable for a number of reasons, but pointless is not one of them.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for argument's sake. I truly believe that that the original idea has enough merit to at least try. That's not to say the outcome will be as hoped, but that doesn't mean we won't learn something in the doing. Is that not why we try things? To learn?

Try getting a bunch of open source developers to agree on which editor is the best.. and there you'll have support for the claim you've spent all this time pointlessly arguing against.

The discussion will likely bring to light facts that some in the discussion didn't know. Even with no immediate change accomplished, people get a feeling for another, a chance to formulate opinions that may have been tenuous before, and the past informs the future.

As to whether my actions were pointless, there decidedly were not. I enjoyed putting my opinions down, and thinking about the matter, so in that manner it entertained me for a while. An upvote received leads me to believe someone found some merit in what I said, whether it be a reinforcement of their existing views, a fresh look at something they hadn't thought much about, or some other reason. Your thoughts on how pointless it was for me are, to put it bluntly, irrelevant. To some degree, so are my own thoughts. We don't control how important something is, we simply strive to steer it to our desired level of influence. How much control do you truly have over whether you remember this exchange a year from now?

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