Private discussion is nearly as efficient as public discussion for information-transmission, but has way fewer political consequences.
If this is a categorical claim, then what are academic journals for? Should we ban the printing press?
If your claim is just that some public forums are too corrupted to be worth fixing, not a categorical claim, then the obvious thing to do is to figure out what went wrong, coordinate to move to an uncorrupted forum, and add the new thing to the set of things we filter out of our new walled garden.
I don’t believe that academic journals are an efficient form of information transmission. Academics support academic journals (when they support academic journals) because journals serve other useful purposes.
Often non-epistemic consequences of words are useful, and often they aren’t a big deal. I wouldn’t use the word “corrupted” to describe “having political consequences,” it’s the default state of human discussions.
Public discussion is sometimes much more efficient than private discussion. A central example is when the writer’s time is much more valuable than the reader’s time, or when it would be high-friction for the reader to buy off the writer’s time. (Though in this case, what’s occurring isn’t really discourse.) There are of course other examples.
Doing things like “writing down your thoughts carefully, and then reusing what you’ve written down” is important whether discussion occurs in public or private.
If this is a categorical claim, then what are academic journals for? Should we ban the printing press?
If your claim is just that some public forums are too corrupted to be worth fixing, not a categorical claim, then the obvious thing to do is to figure out what went wrong, coordinate to move to an uncorrupted forum, and add the new thing to the set of things we filter out of our new walled garden.
I don’t believe that academic journals are an efficient form of information transmission. Academics support academic journals (when they support academic journals) because journals serve other useful purposes.
Often non-epistemic consequences of words are useful, and often they aren’t a big deal. I wouldn’t use the word “corrupted” to describe “having political consequences,” it’s the default state of human discussions.
Public discussion is sometimes much more efficient than private discussion. A central example is when the writer’s time is much more valuable than the reader’s time, or when it would be high-friction for the reader to buy off the writer’s time. (Though in this case, what’s occurring isn’t really discourse.) There are of course other examples.
Doing things like “writing down your thoughts carefully, and then reusing what you’ve written down” is important whether discussion occurs in public or private.