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Protect me from what I want

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Re: Protect me from what I want

#151

Post by drdeca »

petermcneeley wrote: post #29
HPsquared wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a logical contradiction. There seems to be some overloading of the word "tolerance".

Yes such overloading leads to paradoxes. My favorite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

Huh, does the unexpected hanging paradox come from such an overloading? It isn't obvious to me how it is. I don't mean that in a way to suggest that it seems unlikely to me. It seems quite plausible to me that it is. I just don't see in what way. Could you elaborate on how it comes from an overloading?

Re: Protect me from what I want

#152

Post by marcosdumay »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #47
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"paradox of tolerance" is a hypocrisy. If you are intolerant only to the intolerant you are not tolerant, it is as simple as that.

There's absolutely nothing hypocritical about e.g. "defending peace". It's realistic. between Karl Popper's well-known writings on the subject, and one accusatory sentence from someone on the internet, I'll take Karl Popper.

No, it's hypocritical. You defend the Rule of Law, or Democracy, or some people's self determination.

But if you start framing things as "defending peace (by force)", you may quite possibly have your arguments taken over by the people attacking whatever you want to defend. Because they can use the argument just as well as you.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#153

Post by pixl97 »

nostromo wrote: post #40
bitwize wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is ahistorical. Germany outlawed Nazi ideology and went 80 years without renazifying; the danger of such was very real after WWII. Marcuse, a German Jew, was considering the real, immediate, terrifying problem of how to prevent another Holocaust.

You're cherry picking. Look at Joseph McCarthy and see a counter-example. He used the exact same logic: to prevent a Soviet-style totalitarian government in the US, we had to be intolerant of everyone left of mainstream Democrats. It destroyed many peoples' lives, most of who were not at all sympathetic to Soviet-style communism. Similar to your example, we could also argue that McCarthy was indeed effective at preve…

Being moderate is a delicate balance where foes seek power in whatever way possible. With this said I get quite concerned when someone says it's their freedom to plot the end of my existence.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#154

Post by cxr »

jrmg wrote: post #79
Animats wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno. Mostly I don't want to see ads. I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network. But the news media suffer from a huge punditry to hard facts ratio problem. Today's first-screen news stories on major outlets that didn't begin as a press release or punditry: * Fox: "Remains of missing toddler Quinton Simon found in landfill, mother charged"…

I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network. I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.

I hold an opinion that can be considered somewhat opposite[1].

Similarly, a commenter from Reddit[2] writes:

> I haven’t personally met anyone active on Twitter for years. There are very specific types of people that want to be sharing things in that way and from my experience they are very narcissistic.

> Not that Reddit doesn’t have their share of asssholes, but I find that because it is anonymous it is also more tolerable. At least it was the case until a few years ago, now Reddit became very popular and the quality of the posts has declined immensely in almost all subs.

> Twitter is just a bunch of people self promoting themselves as more intelligent, more informed, more socially and environmentally conscious, etc. Basically IG for unattractive people.

Already implicit in the "What are you doing?" prompt is the hallmark of modern social media that focuses on positioning individual personality and punditry over common, for-the-greater-good, "kitchen table" discussion in service to a given topic—the focus is on you, the contributor, rather that taking backseat to whatever it is that you're supposed to be contributing to. I'm not sure that this can be rolled back at this point, though.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180315>

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/z59ccj/annaka_on...>

Re: Protect me from what I want

#155

Post by nullc »

I have to protest the assumption that if people are spending time on it is what they want.

It can be and often is what people fear-- what they DON'T want. It's a pretty good survival technique, in general, to pay attention to things that threaten you.

Companies monetize this human tendency, same as any other.

Playing on people's wants may waste their time or make them dull, but playing on their fears also harms them by producing constant stress.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#156

Post by BizarroLand »

nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

Isn't it odd that we are both always perfect and always getting better with time?

I don't know anyone who consistently looks at their own thoughts and opinions from a self-critical eye with the goal of probing their mental models for flaws in the structure for the express purpose of fixing their logical or factual errors, but surely we do gradually over time.

That is probably a very difficult thing to do all at once, although I suppose it does happen little by little. Surely, no matter how rarely or in what brilliant glimpses we get time chisels away our ignorance so long as our ignorance is more pliable than the steel of the chisel of our self-education.

I doubt many adults feel as though they have suddenly sprung fully formed from the womb of childhood, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of perfection, and yet most of us feel that as of right now, our small flaws aside, we are as close to perfection as we have ever been or possibly ever will be.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#157

Post by dumpsterdiver »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #131
ilyt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream. > Copyright violations. Beheading vide…

The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me. The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter. And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across…

> (parent) Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.

> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.

The parent commenter was simply saying that the abhorrent examples you provided were not a point of contention, and not relevant to a conversation about free speech. They weren't attempting to put the word of the law onto a pedestal as you seem to suggest, they were simply pointing out that the things you mentioned are universally considered bad all around the planet, whereas freedom of speech is not.

The situation you've outlined in which one political party successfully silences their opponents through legal means is exactly why a "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#158

Post by cxr »

toofy wrote: post #148
zmgsabst wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry — I didn’t realize you were being disingenuous. I don’t believe you’re sincerely unaware of the calls to censor misinformation in media; and we literally just explained which media companies based in politically biased bubbles we were discussing. Have a great evening!

im trying to understand what is being argued here. the person i responded to said it was a fact that "a chorus of coastal media types" are "asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum" the comment said this was a fact. and i still don't think thats a fact. now in this comment you say they're sending "calls to censor misinformation in media"--then sure. are you implying that…

From the last comment by the other person, it sounds like they're not going to answer. I'll answer for them (at my peril):

> "calls to censor misinformation in media"[...] are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation?

No, they weren't saying that.

> and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring?

Also no.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#159

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Once again I come to sing the praises of browser add-on Tweak New Twitter.

I see just tweets from people I follow, with their retweets available on a separate tab. No trending, no random tweets. Twitter the way I originally imagined it was supposed to be.

No need for any algorithm beyond what this offers, unless you're really keen on discovering random people to follow, and the people you already follow do not retweet. In which case ... you have my sympathy.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#160

Post by toofy »

cxr wrote: post #158
toofy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im trying to understand what is being argued here. the person i responded to said it was a fact that "a chorus of coastal media types" are "asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum" the comment said this was a fact. and i still don't think thats a fact. now in this comment you say they're sending "calls to censor misinformation in media"--then sure. are you implying that…

From the last comment by the other person, it sounds like they're not going to answer. I'll answer for them (at my peril): > "calls to censor misinformation in media"[...] are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation? No, they weren't saying that. > and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring? Also no.

when considering the context from above, what do you think they were implying?
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