Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#441

Post by salawat » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:10 AM UTC

trs8080 wrote: post #301

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one. > I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech. You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and…

It's troubling that you're unable to see the difference between restricting hate speech and protecting marginalized people so they can participate equitably in society.

They already can participate equitably. They just don't like having to follow the same processes everyone else has to.

There is no express route to stripping someone else of their civil liberty.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#442

Post by eyelidlessness » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:14 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #435

WalterBright wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. > arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth The only way that wealth would have grown is if that investment paid off in providing goods and services that the rest of the country preferred to buy, and…

> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely…

Phew this went somewhere entirely different than I thought it would when I wrote the first paragraph. My original point was going to be that freedom of market wasn’t the ingredient that allowed standards of living to increase in anything like tandem. It was freedom of society. As our “rising tide” lifted all boats, our economic policies mostly resembled socialist countries’, and their effectiveness was mostly attributable to living in a society where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that. And there’s no reason to conflate social freedom with it, if anything there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#443

Post by naniwaduni » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:14 AM UTC

weberer wrote: post #236

idlewords wrote: post #67

It's worth digging into the methodology here: the study participants were found through Mechanical Turk, and the proxy for cognitive ability is a vocabulary quiz. You can just as well use this study to show that the kind of highly educated people whose circumstances are dire enough they have to work for pennies an hour have been socialized into giving correct answers about questions pertaining to freedom of speech.

>It's worth digging into the methodology here: the study participants were found through Mechanical Turk That seems to be most studies these days. And 10 years ago it was mostly "we've recruited 200 students from [university performing the study]" and people complained about that too. And if you do a phone survey, then its "you're biasing toward the people who pick up calls from unknown numbers". There's always going…

Maybe we could fund the IRS to to conduct more audits by funneling them the grant money that otherwise funds mturk survey "research"!

(This definitely seems like a great idea and nothing can possibly go wrong)

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#444

Post by salawat » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:18 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #356

remarkEon wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not, but I understand how you could think that with regard to telling these companies they can't arbitrarily apply a speech to a user's speech (which is what adding a "misinformation" "warning" is doing) based on viewpoint. We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do,…

>It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not, No I'm not. Both have the same free speech. Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation. Only one of those is a First Amendment issue. >We already have tons of laws that restrict what busine…

>Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation.

Government is of, by and for the People. That Corporation is composed of the People which the Government is of and for, and through which the legal fiction is granted legitimacy.

As far as I'm concerned, corporations are de facto extensions of Government.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#445

Post by eternalban » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:22 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #279

The methodological flaw here is amusingly it’s own fascinating study: using some verbal sophistication proxy as a cognitive ability proxy to correlate political attitudes is arguably the key feature of modern hyper-polarized, Internet-speed news cycle politics. It’s difficult to watch a screen without hearing some version of “most people are stupid”. This is deeply wrong: most people are very smart , but this is diff…

> most people are very smart ... most people are inarticulate.

I share this view, though I would dial it down to just smart.

My pet theory is that people simply differ in what interests them: almost all people are highly articulate on topics/activities that interest them. (A common preoccupation is 'getting something for nothing' or 'how to get away with x'. There are a lot of geniuses in that field!)

Only a narrow subset of humans are fascinated by intellectual matters. And the rest call them egg-heads.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#446

Post by shitlord » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #275

houstonn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing campaign to get a legal forum completely removed from the internet. A twitch and twitter mob managed to pressure parts of internet infrastructure like Cloudflare and hCaptcha to drop them mere days after the campaign began. Even Archive.org reneged on their core mission and have removed all records. Archive.today is now under intense pressure to do the same because they still have a record of the…

do you mind sharing what the legal forum is? Also the internet is privately run (at least in the USA) and there is nothing keeping people from setting up a host and running their own forum there. If Gab can Truth social can stay up with all their calls-to-arms and domestic terrorism posts calling it "freedom of speech" I'm sure this forum can find a similar hosting service that allows anything.

They're probably talking about The Kiwi Farms, a site which has a lot of trouble finding a host or an ISP willing to tolerate them. They also have people petitioning foreign governments to seize their IP addresses.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#447

Post by remarkEon » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 1:01 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #429

remarkEon wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed, it’s explicitly left to local school districts to do that. All the law in question is saying is that when those rules are developed they still have to abide by those general standards referenced above. Seems like standard legalese and I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.

>Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed Another way to say that might be to say that no one knows what “in accordance with state standards” means because no state standards are defined. This comment is a great example of how to admit you are wrong without actually admitting you are wrong. Can you just admit that it is unclear to teachers what they can and can’t talk a about in ter…

Those are not the same things, and you’re either deliberately missing the point or insisting that something in the law exists when it doesn’t. There isn’t even a punishment attached to this language. I genuinely don’t understand how a law as simple as “can’t talk to kids about sex until third grade” has a bonafide conspiracy theory attached to it here. Is your worry that lots of gay teachers are talking about their home lives with very young children and now this law makes that, in your view, potentially out of bounds?

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#448

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 1:01 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #435

WalterBright wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. > arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth The only way that wealth would have grown is if that investment paid off in providing goods and services that the rest of the country preferred to buy, and…

> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely…

Consider all those hundreds of thousands of people that tramp thousands of miles just for a chance to get into the US? What do they know that you don't, or are they just fools?

Why is there not an exodus of hundreds of thousands of poor Americans tramping to other countries?

> Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust.

Much of that occurred long before government social programs, high taxes, unions, anti-trust, etc. Take a look at things like height statistics for Americans throughout the 19th century. Height statistics are a good proxy for standard of living - people don't grow tall if they are malnourished as children.

Amazon has scores of millions of customers. They wouldn't be shopping at Amazon if Amazon was cheating them.

Amazon turnover is such that the average employee works less than a year. This is incongruent with being forced to work there at subhuman conditions.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#449

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 1:04 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #442

eyelidlessness wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely…

Phew this went somewhere entirely different than I thought it would when I wrote the first paragraph. My original point was going to be that freedom of market wasn’t the ingredient that allowed standards of living to increase in anything like tandem. It was freedom of society. As our “rising tide” lifted all boats, our economic policies mostly resembled socialist countries’, and their effectiveness was mostly attribu…

The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy. Voting rights are not required for free market to deliver prosperity, as China has demonstrated.

> there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.

I don't know where that came from. I don't see any such relationship.

> where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that.

I'm not sure what you're thinking a free market is. A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#450

Post by As_You_Wish » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 1:06 AM UTC

MichaelCollins wrote: post #325

dev-3892 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing. instead I'm hearing 'there shouldn't be a law that requires a private entity to broadcast X' and 'you really shouldn't say X, and I would strongly suggest that you do not say X' and 'if you say X, there may not be legal consequences, but legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences' so i don't agree that 'the way i…

> that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing. You've never heard anybody in the US advocating for laws against hate speech? I mean 'hate speech' which isn't inciting imminent lawless action, the present standard set by Bradenburg v. Ohio. Something like "ethnic group X are bringing crime to our community" ; this sort of statement is called hate speech, but is legal in A…

I always notice that "hate speech" is how people want it defined.

For example, I personally think "toxic masculinity," "mansplaining," "patriarchy," showing men as stupid foolish and incapable in movies and tv shows, and all the rest of the anti-male bashing is hate speech. However, I'm shouted down every time I say one word about this on any online forums. That's because the matriarchy that we live in does not allow me to define those terms as hate speech. There's no corresponding "toxic femininity," "woman-nagging," "matriarchy," or showing women as stupid and inept. Well, there might be a few on either side, but the vast majority of hate speech is piled upon men.