Mark in the Middle

Disagreement is not good in and of itself. Bad ideas are bad ideas, regardless if they're presented in a homogeneous or heterogeneous ideologocal space.

The dog whistle of "diversity of ideas" is a phrase that is used to justify social places/groups being exclusive. E.g it's used extensively by racists in business to justify keeping bossed hiring practices that unduly favor hiring and promoting white people. Or by sexists to justify the glass ceiling. This phrase is often used in retort, saying something like "well this white man is from Europe! he's different! We're diverse now." while ignoring Black applicants who live a few miles away with radically different perspectives than anyone that has been on an outbound recruting email.

Disagreement is society is ok when it's about which sports team is better. It leads to a civil war when it's about which humans matter.

I don't expect FB to see an exodus more than sub-1% over topics like this, but the company can feel outsized impact if the sub-1% are 10x engineers... Or decide you can air any dirty internal laundry you want once they're no longer buying your silence and there's good dirt to share.

One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and we don't need any analysis of what specifically the discourse was to make our determination, which is why your comment abstracts over any value it could be. Full disclosure, I don't fully understand this worldview because it seems to enforce a particular discourse on Mark Zuckerberg, which seems a bit contradictory to me although I assume there must be some way philosophically to resolve this objection.

The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis, and we don't need any analysis of what Zuckerberg "disagrees with" to decide if it's right to limit. Obviously the people who will advocate for removing a discourse are people who don't like it, but that's separate from analysis of whether the discourse itself is a force against democracy.

These ideas are at cross purposes, and success of the one is often at the expense of the other. For this reason we seem reluctant to just lay out the underlying value systems the way I did here, which is unfortunate, because I think the fundamental disagreement is really important to discuss.

This is another concept that confuses me 'dangerous ideas'. How is that different than what the church did with things like witchcraft and paganism, those were 'dangerous ideas'.

What makes an idea dangerous?

If there's dangerous ideas are there safe ideas?

What makes an idea safe?

Can you give me and example of a safe idea vs a dangerous idea?

Who decides which ideas are safe and which ones are dangerous?

Is this a static thing? Like once an idea is declared either safe or dangerous, do they stay that way or can a safe idea become a dangerous idea or vice versa?

That's not even beginning to get into the definition of 'dangerous'.

It seems like a pretty vague and arbitrary term to me. Say for example, if I decided to go free climbing, I'd be in a lot of danger. I have no experience, for me that would be a dangerous thing to do. But, for my Buddy who's been climbing most of their life, it's not so dangerous.

So can one build up skills that let them deal with these dangerous ideas effectively, such as with other dangerous things or is the danger of ideas just beyond anyone to deal with?

Is there some kind of elite group of people who can handle these dangerous ideas that us normal folks can't?

I hope you see where i'm going with all this.

The company being flexible and understanding with my time was enough for me.