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

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

#421

Post by Levitz »

michaelmrose wrote: post #274
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the “if you don’t like it, go build your own multi-billion dollar monopoly internet service” argument. And then it’s just one more step to call for public-private partnerships in combatting “misinformation.”

It's literally trivial to have your own twitter/facebook/youtube analog. You can in turn spread information about its existence through exciting means like email. You aren't entitled to an audience of hundreds of millions and indeed have never in the history of free speech been entitled to such.

And then one day your CDN drops you, another day your hosting service does, Google stops indexing you... You get the idea.

Justifiable or not, tales of those such as 8chan or now Kiwifarms do show that anyone wanting to host a website depends on companies.

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

#422

Post by lettergram »

rnk wrote: post #336
lettergram wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the Bible also isn’t taught in public schools. This is why I strongly support school choice. Let the parents decide how to raise their children. Also that said, those sections of the Bible typically aren’t highlighted, aren’t graphic, don’t appear in all bibles and kids will get abridged versions.

You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school. https://www.foxnews.com/us/all-florida-public-schools-to-dis... Similar things going on in the other new state determined to make laws agai…

> You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school.

Okay, but that’s not “the Bible” that’s “biblical in nature”

I’m simply making the point that the explicit parts are not taught. Anything related to sex for instance, or even any stories as far as I’m aware.

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

#423

Post by adhesive_wombat »

benreesman wrote: post #340
WalterBright wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your point is, but wealthy people are the source of investment capital. Less capital investment means a less prosperous economy, which negatively impacts about everybody.

Eh, I take your point but I think it’s at least debatable. Bell Labs via sanctioned, de-facto subsidized monopoly gave us everything from the transistor to the laser to Unix (you know the list, some readers might not). DoD/ARPA/DARPA funding was responsible for countless innovations, notable to this readership TCP/IP etc. (again, you know the list probably better than I do). Public funding for innovation demonstrably…

> TCP/IP etc.

Fun fact, that was building on earlier work on switched packet networks at the UK National Physical Laboratory during the 60s, which is also a public laboratory.

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

#424

Post by benreesman »

aeturnum wrote: post #409
WalterBright wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people are very smart Only half are above median intelligence. There's a difference between being smart and being well-educated. Wisdom is the combination of intelligence with knowledge. > coastal lefties are always befuddled Being well-educated in STEM is not indicative of being well-educated in history and/or economics, which most Americans seem very poorly educated in.

Not every measure follows a bell curve. The reason intelligence is seen as following a bell curve is at least partially that intelligence tests are designed with the assumption that it does - so every test that is accepted suggests that it's the case. Personally I think it's worthwhile to observe that what we call "intelligence" is also generally a self-driven and self-satisfying demonstration of socially-sourced mea…

I think both you and Walter make good points, and both of your comments reflect ways that mine could have been better: notably by creating a false categorical arrow referencing a very I’ll-defined term (“very smart”) and a still imprecise but much better-defined term (“articulate”).

I seem to have recklessly kicked off a red/blue/left/right thing, which was stupid of me.

The much more interesting thing to me is the epistemological failure mode of conflating modern liberal-inflected, coastal-inflected literacy with any other capability, a conceptual error that is well on its way to becoming institutionalized and is perhaps one of a very small handful of fundamental, avoidable mistakes driving a relatively very high level of divisiveness in society.

It’s more than a little meta that the fundamental conceptual error that you’ve highlighted (the siren song of the Central Limit Theorem: everything’s Gaussian until proven guilty) has caused more nation-level financial catastrophes than any other fallacy.

I think there’s ultimately a very compelling case for optimism here that I myself couldn’t have articulated prior to reading your comment in the context of mine: there are known, demonstrable, identifiable, and changeable epistemological practices that are sending shit into a tailspin (and have before), and right in this comment thread there are two of the big ones plain as day: conflating high-status articulation with other forms of merit, and shoving phenomena into convenient but wrong probability distributions.

Those are going to be tough habits to kick, but I see no fundamental reason why they can’t be.

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

#425

Post by tstrimple »

jen20 wrote: post #157
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complicated because the most serious threat to free speech in the US right now is cancel culture, but most aspects of cancel culture are explicitly protected under the first amendment: "...or abridging the freedom of speech [private corporations choosing what to host on their websites, calling someone's employer and requesting that they be fired for what they said], or of the press [this garbage https://parade.c…

> the most serious threat to free speech in the US right now is cancel culture Surely you cannot be serious?

I'm sure they are being completely genuine. They completely miss the irony that they are essentially saying "the most serious threat to free speech in the US right now is the free speech of people I disagree with".

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

#426

Post by timdev2 »

wyager wrote: post #412
timdev2 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious when that happened. I hear people say it all the time. But I'm old enough to have grown up before the commercial internet, and I don't remember there being any widespread conception of "free speech" apart from limitations on state censorship. For instance, I suspect if some antisemitic nuts in say, the 1960s, had wanted to buy a full page ad in the NYT with some elders-of-zion type conspiracy ad, complete…

> limitations on state censorship That's still what we're talking about. The state has just gotten better at outsourcing the work, so people who aren't paying close attention don't even recognize it as such. Hence my invocation of "the cathedral", as opposed to narrowly "the government".

I read "cathedral" as being exclusive of the state. Reading it as inclusive confuses me even more, I think.

If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provide it?

But that entire discussion falls well within the contours of the established legal framework. So I'm not sure what concept you were referring to originally.

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

#428

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

uoaei wrote: post #223
azeemh wrote: post #195

Freedom of speech is the freedom to vocalize, share, and evaluate thoughts. Thought Policing is quite un-American yet it is championed by authoritarian neofascists and neoliberals alike...

Freedom to vocalize extends to both sides. You are free to vocalize your opinion, and dissenters are free to vocalize theirs.

Is DDOSing considered speech?

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

#429

Post by slg »

remarkEon wrote: post #419
slg wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not looking for their general education standards. I am looking for their education standards specifically on how to teach about "sexual orientation or gender identity" in an "age appropriate or developmentally appropriate" way because that is what the law we are discussing references.

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 terms of their family life for fear that it might be construed as instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity?

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

#430

Post by oh_my_goodness »

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…

I agree, but unfortunately that doesn't address the complaint. If surveys are in fact whacked out by bias (idk), then we won't get certain kinds of meaningful data from those surveys. It's tough for the surveyors, but that doesn't overcome the objection.

I think in some fields this may be more obvious. If particles are too big for the LHC to find them, then we won't get meaningful data about those particles from those experiments. We can point out that we built a ridiculously, unbelievably huge collider and what do people expect? It's a valid point, but too bad for us.

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