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Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view. Neither statement would be considered incendiary enough to merit censorship in the USA or Britain.
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Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
41–50 of 124 posts
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards. Which of course is arguably the point. There's just another type of "bad faith actor" who is lurking in the shadows with these arguments: Someone who wants to leverage censorship against disfavored viewpoints regardless of their truth value. Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying"…
> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…
It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth.
Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#43> We saw this last fall with the wide range of views around the Carlson lecture. If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation : > Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speak…
I don't understand, if he wrote an op-ed uncovering racial discrimination in academia, why would people who are (presumably) against racial discrimination want to cancel his lecture?
> why would people who are (presumably) against racial discrimination want to cancel his lecture?
Because they are not against racial discrimination.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, and for impiety." [0] I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates
No, that would be heretical, which is a different concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
Socrates claimed that he was not, in fact, corrupting the youth. Given that a group of Athenians then found him guilty of that to the point where he felt obliged to kill himself it seems fairly likely that his peers suspected him of arguing in bad faith.
A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days.
More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…
> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your argum…
>> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them
> How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that everyone is willing to play the same ends-justify-the-means game, where they're OK with shamelessly lying if it can momentarily get someone to align with their faction. What the GP describes is only a dilemma if you have a commitment to the truth.
Also what you describe (counter cheap lies with more cheap lies), would actually play into the hand of a disinformation actor. In many cases they're not looking to persuade anyone of of anything, just increase confusion, cynicism, and disengagement; which reduce their adversary's capacity for making decisions and taking action.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#46[flagged]
Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view. Neither statement would be considered incendiary enough to merit censorship in the USA or Britain.
You're speaking of what is, and I'm speaking of what I believe should be. These two things are not in contradiction. Laws can and do change. There was no individual right to bear arms in the United States until the 2008[1], changing establish law for the past 200+ years at the time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#47From the PDF [1]: > We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not exte…
No post body was provided.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…
It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth. Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
>> While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
> It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth.
> Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
That's a slogan, not a truth. For instance: what is "best"? The fastest? The most thorough? Something guaranteed to work, if given enough time?
Even if "best" means it's the "fastest" disinfectant, that doesn't mean it's fast enough to keep up with the infections the op describes.
There's also the question: if you prove something is a lie, will enough people pay attention? A 140 character lie could take pages to debunk. Given enough lies, that page count is going to build up to the point where no one has time for it. And the actual audience of the debunking is unlikely to be a superset of the audience of the lie.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#49One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "th…
> people who are not interested at all in truth
This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive).
I agree with you though.
A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect?
Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.
Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your argum…
>> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them > How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your ar…
You have reduced my capacity for action and I am disengaging from this conversation. Because of this thread I no longer recognize Plate Tectonics and now believe in Expanding Earth Theory.