Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

I seem to recall reading "You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28684250

I hope substack can really change the game here because their business model delivers content you paid to receive rather than competing for your attention. More on that here: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...

> No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions.

I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets.

Capitalism is a symptom of power and information asymmetries. A few years ago, Zuckerberg said that all problems would be solved if everybody told the truth all the time. It's not that simple though. There's a Greg Egan story about a couple that undergoes a procedure to experience all the thoughts and feelings of each other for a period of time, which ultimately results in their breakup.

Reading the comments here, I get the impression that a lot of folks view censorship as a tool of oppression by those in power and free speech as the shield against it.

If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it's that both "free speech" and censorship can be weaponised by those in power who wish to manipulate the discourse for their own personal gain.

If we want regular folks to have a greater say in public discourse again, we need to strike a balance that limits the use of both sides as tools of oppression.

I'd personally be in favour of fines or other punishments for deliberately or negligently propagating misinformation, assuming that the decision was made by a jury and not an unelected body.

I reckon it's a human condition issue, bare metal type shit. People, in general, simply can't possess the merits of blind trust and must be scrutinized. This striated opinion on a spectrum of trust, and in time resolution in to facts. Dialectics of account. Naive interventions only stand to exacerbate the condition, by my reckoning, and I don't suspect there is a real way to make smart interventions at scale. I think the best resolution is to have modular multi-scalar and largely decentralized modes with far more outgrowths given the capacity for representation of their given polity.

But even in that case it doesn't fully rectify the problem, because at the basest levels information is imperfect in practical terms. It is in those terms that experts and professionals tend to be lost to public account - that is to say that making wide sweeping claims and saying it was some unexpected event that overturned their predictions frees them from being held accountable, and that is where trust is lost. If you tell me in 10 years that SPY will have gained 60%, versus if you said "Look I don't know, I can't tell you where the price is going to end at close today, let alone in 10 years, but historically the odds look good, that's not without caveats, the fed, the government, the people are all constantly evolving against their peers and there's a lot of novel forces, so you could end up with negative yields." The latter case is, let's say hypothetically, realistic, and thus eschews liability.

Now if the former case turns out to be true, certainly the latter form will be lambasted for the potential gains lost. In the latter coming to fruit, will the financier be celebrated? Will the former be able to excuse himself, despite bad calls?