781–790 of 996 posts
I’m going to start supporting pine and any other open alternatives more. Pine is the only mobile platform I’m even vaguely optimistic about.
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Any evidence at all that self-improvement is under attack, or are these all euphemisms for something else? Maybe "pick friends based on shared values" means "I wouldn't let my kids play with kids from the other side of the tracks", which should indeed get some pushback.
Here's one for you [0]. That's an infographic from the Smithsonian museum that attributed Enlightenment-age values, like individualism, family structure, and work ethic to "whiteness" and implied that it should be opposed. They removed it after pushback (search archive.org for more). That's the tip of the iceberg though. There's a whole industry of wrapping this narrative into struggle session-like training while cha…
That poster was at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, where you might expect to learn the differences between African-American culture and the dominant White-Anglo-American Culture. Context is important. In no way it implied that "Enlightenment-age values ... should be opposed." Also, it's kind of ironic to be cheering for the takedown of speech you didn't like on a thread where you complain about the silencing of the speech you do like. If you don't like what the poster said or how it said it, maybe oppose it with more speech.
About the whole industry of "training while charging 7 figures" isn't that just how the pendulum swings right now? Before it was prayer meetings and then survivalist tactics for team-building. Plus most employment in the US is at-will, so I suppose if employees don't like it, they are free to find other employers. Freedom cuts both ways too. Also, what's wrong with 7 figures? I thought the free-market and entrepreneurs charging for the value they bring to willing buyers were all good things.
When you conclude it's "purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them", well, that's the kind of hyperbole that's hard to take seriously. It is totally free of argument or evidence, and it sounds so much like the conservatives of the 50's and 60's about how the peace-activists, civil rights leaders, and hippies were going to turn their sons and daughters against their parents.
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I think it's obvious that if less people speak their mind, we could have a smarter, happier humanity. But I also think it's obvious that I shouldn't trust you to make the decision of who needs to shut up. And definitely not the government.
> But I also think it's obvious that I shouldn't trust you to make the decision of who needs to shut up. And definitely not the government. Well right now social media companies seem to have that power. How is that better? I hear this point all the time. Is there a better response than this?
It's not; we're attempting to fix that, and TFA is about Google maliciously attacking one such attempt.
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But you aren't concluding, because people disagree on precisely what qualifies as "murder," that there should be no laws against murder. That is the argument proposed in the earlier comment about why there should not be laws against hate speech.
No, there's a set of statutes that lay out what murder looks like, and ultimately it is up to a jury of your peers to determine if what you did satisfies the criterion. That's in fact exactly why the jury system was invented, because reasonable people can disagree, so the assumption becomes that "if a reasonable plurality of people DO agree, there's a good chance it is a good enough standard by which to act." The sub…
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Hey! I'm fiddling around with this right now for a submission. What I've found so far makes it look like hate speech is not easy to catch: 1) Slang evolves. 2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon. So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how wel…
If the CCP can do it —and they do it to catch all the circumventions Chinese internet users use to try to avoid censorship —which they do successfully, then we know it’s possible and if it’s possible the big players are doing it too.
So when we say big players, do you mean FB or do you mean the National Govs?
Side note - the CCP also employs manpower to handle the task, so its not just ML, my point hovers on the ML aspect of it.
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Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world. "We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so." At s…
It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, a…
> Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship , but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two. We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. An…
Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world. "We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so." At s…
They're really not -- or shouldn't be. Certainly not when you have a textualist/originalist majority on the court charged with deciding what is and isn't constitutional.
I get your broader point that societies and norms change. But the last thing any of us should want is a constitution that is lightly referenced and broadly interpreted because history shows such easily interpreted and changed documents benefit the oppressor far more than the oppressed.
Your final point is a strong one: Substantial parts (and, for some forms of speech, nearly all parts) of our freedom of speech runs through a handful of large social -media companies. There's little reason that can't be addressed with appropriate federal legislation but, if that's not enough, then let's get on with the heavy lift of actually amending the Constitution, rather than hoping our better angels prevail in interpreting it.
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It's worth noting that there's also a side that wants the opposite of that, to censor bad opinions, but not be able to refuse making a gay wedding cake. Hypocrites are not limited to specific groups, they're universal.
No one is forcing Google or their employees to write hate speech on a cake or an app though, that's a pretty massive difference in analogies. Nor are people asking for a free-for-all where Google can't delete any speech on their platforms. People were fine when they were deleting spam and had a limited content restriction policies against things like directly promoting violence or posting gore/cp and other obvious ti…
Both situations boil down to freedom of speech. Both have extra, specific laws that deal with their situations. Without a well thought out justification, a mismatch between the position on those is likely hypocritical, no matter which you are for or against. A well thought out positions may not be, but I don't think most people actually have a well thought out opinion on the intricacies of how these intersect, and what it means, and instead fall back on what they would like to be able to do in that situation, or on their impression based on the way it was presented to them (I think it far more likely contextual presentation is to blame for some of this than actual reasoning). It does little good to point out the hypocrisy of some group on a specific issue when that form of hypocrisy is widespread and rampant. We should also point out the cause of the hypocrisy itself.
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> It's not hyperbolic at all, or have you not seen the "Silence is Violence" rhetoric everywhere? It could literally come from Orwell's world of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" I’m aware of the “silence is violence” slogan. It means that inaction in the face of injustice is tacit support for the status quo. It doesn’t literally mean, for example, that all people are being violent while they…
That interpretation is entirely too generous. That expression "Silence is Violence" is explicitly intended to compel speech and its clear meaning is that if you don't, you are contributing to the violence against minorities. https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/129834428507983872... This is not an extreme example. The expression has always been used (at least in the current climate) to mean, you agree with us, v…
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It has been shown time and time again that giving unrestricted uncensored access to billions will lead to the worst ideas proliferating. Look at QAnon and conspiracy theories running wild. Look anti-vaxxers and how America, one of the most advanced countries in the world, is now having Measles outbreaks after decades of having nearly 0 cases. Look at how simple things such as wearing a mask has become a controversial…
It's easy to blame all the flaws of human character on its most highly available and proximate expression which is speech. There is violence, anger, hatred, envy, all kinds of evils in the world, the world isn't perfect, man isn't perfect, and trying to control others' thoughts isn't going to change that. That would actually be regressing several hundreds years back to the Dark Ages. If your assumption is that bannin…
Controlling the spread of misinformation is not "controlling others thoughts".
> your assumption is that banning free speech would improve things
Banning specific content such as anti-vaxx is not "banning free speech". If anything, let it go rampant on your platform is actually helping promote it. Private platforms have no such obligation. It's like if I came to your house and forced lies about you to your family, and when you threw me out, I claimed that you were trying to ban my free speech.