I’m actually very familiar with freedom of speech and I’m getting more familiar with your dismissive and elitist tone.
Freedom of speech applies, in the US, to the relationship between the government and the people. It doesn’t apply to the relationship between Facebook and users, as exemplified by their terms of use.
I’m not confusing Facebook and Google, Facebook also has a search feature and quite a lot of content can be found within Facebook itself.
But otherwise thanks for your reply, it’s stunning lack of detail gave me no insight whatsoever.
Freedom of speech applies, in the US, to the relationship between the government and the people
You seem to be mistaken about your familiarity with the freedom of speech. In particular, you’re confusing it with the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. That’s a category error.
elitist tone
LOL. Would you assert that you represent the masses?
it’s stunning lack of detail gave me no insight whatsoever
A stunning example of narcissism :-P Hint: it’s not all about you and your lack of insight.
So are you going to actually explain why “freedom of speech” (not a negative right, but platform owners allowing users to post whatever they want) is a good thing?
Can you at least try to articulate why you believe this? When you make a statement like this with very few arguments, in response to a genuine question, it doesn’t matter if you feel the post you’re responding to is incredibly misguided or based on poor understanding. It’s simply condescending to respond this way. Now, as of my writing this comment, your response has 6 upvotes. For a forum with a lot of posts with zero votes, it’s pretty rare to have posts with this many upvotes, unless a lot of community members feel your response added a lot of light to the conversation. So if anyone is reading this who upvoted Lumifer’s post, can you explain why you felt it was worthy? This a pretty deep mystery for me on a forum where people who argued things in such depth, like Eliezer or Yvain, are usually held as people we should try to emulate.
Can you at least try to articulate why you believe this? When you make a statement like this with very few arguments, in response to a genuine question, it doesn’t matter if you feel the post you’re responding to is incredibly misguided or based on poor understanding. It’s simply condescending to respond this way.
No, I don’t think so. A short answer does not implicitly accuse the question of being stupid or misguided.
It was a simple direct question. I have a simple direct answer to it without much in the way of hedging or iterating through hands or anything like that.
If someone asks you “vanilla or chocolate?” and you’re a chocoholic, you answer with one word and not with a three-page essay on how and why your love for chocolate arose and developed.
Now your question of “why?” could easily lead to multiple pages but tl;dr would be that I like freedom, I don’t like the Ministry of Truth, and I think that power corrupts.
why you felt it was worthy?
I would offer a guess that the upvotes say “I agree” and not “this was the most insightful thing evah!” :-)
Lumifer didn’t say anything about enforceability. E.g. the boy scouts have the right (as a private group, if you accept that a group with the U.S. president as their figurehead is in fact private) to disallow membership based on gender, sexual orientation, or religion. That doesn’t mean it is right for them to do so. One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that there should be regulatory action to enforce that.
Likewise, Facebook should be a public commons where freedom of speech is respected. But that doesn’t mean I’d call for regulatory enforcement of that.
One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation.
Agreed in principle, but there are certain situations where the boundaries are much less clear. Should I in a gentleman’s club allow women? Obviously not, and it’s not even discrimination.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
At the same time, I can create a social network which is devoted to the dissemination of only carefully verified news, and no one should be able to invoke freedom of speech to hijack this mission.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not
LW discusses theology all the time, it just uses weird terminology and likes to reinvent the wheel a lot.
The whole FAI problem is better phrased as “We will create God, how do we make sure He likes us?”. The Simulation Hypothesis is straight-up creationism: we were created by some, presumably higher, beings for their purposes. Etc.
I see no meaningful difference between a god and a fully-realized (in the EY sense) AI. And the Simulation Hypothesis is literally creationism. Not necessarily Christian creationism (or any particular historic one), but creationism nonetheless.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
I don’t think we have any ban on discussion on theology or that it was mentioned in any discussion we had about what might be valid reasons to ban a post.
Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed. On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way.
Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true.
I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test.
LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.
That’s a weird position to have: basically you’re saying that there’s no moral way to limit the topic of or the accessibility to a closed group. Am I representing you correctly? If not, where would you put the boundaries?
Gentlemen clubs are actually concentrations of power where informal deals happen. Admitting women to these institutions is vital to having gender equality at the highest echelons of civic power.
And theology is discussed all the time on LW, even if it is often the subject of criticism.
I was just saying that those particular examples were poorly chosen. But since you have me engaged here, the problem with taking an absolutive view is when a private communication medium, e.g. Facebook, becomes a medium of debate over civic issues. Somewhere along the way it becomes a public commons vital to democracy where matters of free speech must be protected. In some countries (not the USA) this is arguably already the case with Facebook.
I agree there is a big danger of slipping down the free speech slope if we fight too hard against fake news, but I also think we need to consider a (successful) campaign effort of another nation to undermine the legitimacy of our elections as an act of hostile aggression, and in times of war most people agree some measured limitation of free speech can be justified.
No, at least not yet. That’s a good point. But Facebook is a private company, so filtering content that goes against their policy need not necessarily violate the constitution, right? I don’t know the legal details, though, I could be completely wrong.
I agree there is a big danger of slipping down the free speech slope if we fight too hard against fake news, but I also think we need to consider a (successful) campaign effort of another nation to undermine the legitimacy of our elections as an act of hostile aggression,
You know, your campaign against fake news might be taken slightly more seriously if you didn’t immediately follow it up by asserting a piece of fake news as fact.
I’ve just been skimming the wiki page on Russian involvement in the US election.
SecureWorks stated that the actor group was operating from Russia on behalf of the Russian government with “moderate” confidence level
The other claims seem to just be that there was Russian propaganda. If propaganda and possible spying counts as “war” then we will always be at war, because there is always propaganda (as if the US doesn’t do the same thing!). The parallels with 1984 go without saying, but I really think that the risk of totalitarianism isn’t Trump, its people overreacting to Trump.
Also, there are similar allegations of corruption between Clinton and Saudi Arabia.
It’s a horrible idea.
No.
You’re confusing FB and Google (and a library, etc.)
I wouldn’t.
I recommend acquiring some familiarity with the concept of the freedom of speech.
I’m actually very familiar with freedom of speech and I’m getting more familiar with your dismissive and elitist tone.
Freedom of speech applies, in the US, to the relationship between the government and the people. It doesn’t apply to the relationship between Facebook and users, as exemplified by their terms of use.
I’m not confusing Facebook and Google, Facebook also has a search feature and quite a lot of content can be found within Facebook itself.
But otherwise thanks for your reply, it’s stunning lack of detail gave me no insight whatsoever.
You seem to be mistaken about your familiarity with the freedom of speech. In particular, you’re confusing it with the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. That’s a category error.
LOL. Would you assert that you represent the masses?
A stunning example of narcissism :-P Hint: it’s not all about you and your lack of insight.
So are you going to actually explain why “freedom of speech” (not a negative right, but platform owners allowing users to post whatever they want) is a good thing?
Sniff… sniff… smells like a bad-faith question. You don’t imagine you’re setting a trap for me or anything like that?
Can you at least try to articulate why you believe this? When you make a statement like this with very few arguments, in response to a genuine question, it doesn’t matter if you feel the post you’re responding to is incredibly misguided or based on poor understanding. It’s simply condescending to respond this way. Now, as of my writing this comment, your response has 6 upvotes. For a forum with a lot of posts with zero votes, it’s pretty rare to have posts with this many upvotes, unless a lot of community members feel your response added a lot of light to the conversation. So if anyone is reading this who upvoted Lumifer’s post, can you explain why you felt it was worthy? This a pretty deep mystery for me on a forum where people who argued things in such depth, like Eliezer or Yvain, are usually held as people we should try to emulate.
No, I don’t think so. A short answer does not implicitly accuse the question of being stupid or misguided.
It was a simple direct question. I have a simple direct answer to it without much in the way of hedging or iterating through hands or anything like that.
If someone asks you “vanilla or chocolate?” and you’re a chocoholic, you answer with one word and not with a three-page essay on how and why your love for chocolate arose and developed.
Now your question of “why?” could easily lead to multiple pages but tl;dr would be that I like freedom, I don’t like the Ministry of Truth, and I think that power corrupts.
I would offer a guess that the upvotes say “I agree” and not “this was the most insightful thing evah!” :-)
I don’t think that freedom of speech is enforceable inside a private-owned network.
We’re talking about “should”, the normative approach. A private entity can do a lot of things—it doesn’t mean that it should do these things.
Freedom of speech is not just a legal term, it’s also a very important component of a civil society.
Still: should Lesswrong allow the discussion of any off-topic subject just because “free speech”?
...did anyone claim anything like that?
You did, implicitly.
I did not. You read me wrong.
Lumifer didn’t say anything about enforceability. E.g. the boy scouts have the right (as a private group, if you accept that a group with the U.S. president as their figurehead is in fact private) to disallow membership based on gender, sexual orientation, or religion. That doesn’t mean it is right for them to do so. One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that there should be regulatory action to enforce that.
Likewise, Facebook should be a public commons where freedom of speech is respected. But that doesn’t mean I’d call for regulatory enforcement of that.
Agreed in principle, but there are certain situations where the boundaries are much less clear. Should I in a gentleman’s club allow women? Obviously not, and it’s not even discrimination.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
At the same time, I can create a social network which is devoted to the dissemination of only carefully verified news, and no one should be able to invoke freedom of speech to hijack this mission.
LW discusses theology all the time, it just uses weird terminology and likes to reinvent the wheel a lot.
The whole FAI problem is better phrased as “We will create God, how do we make sure He likes us?”. The Simulation Hypothesis is straight-up creationism: we were created by some, presumably higher, beings for their purposes. Etc.
You are strawmanning both positions a lot...
No, I’m being quite literal here.
I see no meaningful difference between a god and a fully-realized (in the EY sense) AI. And the Simulation Hypothesis is literally creationism. Not necessarily Christian creationism (or any particular historic one), but creationism nonetheless.
Hell yeah, bro. Sufficiently advanced Superintelligence is indistinguishable from God.
I don’t think we have any ban on discussion on theology or that it was mentioned in any discussion we had about what might be valid reasons to ban a post.
Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way. Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true. I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test. LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.
Actually neither of those are obvious to me.
That’s a weird position to have: basically you’re saying that there’s no moral way to limit the topic of or the accessibility to a closed group.
Am I representing you correctly? If not, where would you put the boundaries?
Those specific examples are bad examples.
Gentlemen clubs are actually concentrations of power where informal deals happen. Admitting women to these institutions is vital to having gender equality at the highest echelons of civic power.
And theology is discussed all the time on LW, even if it is often the subject of criticism.
I was just saying that those particular examples were poorly chosen. But since you have me engaged here, the problem with taking an absolutive view is when a private communication medium, e.g. Facebook, becomes a medium of debate over civic issues. Somewhere along the way it becomes a public commons vital to democracy where matters of free speech must be protected. In some countries (not the USA) this is arguably already the case with Facebook.
I agree there is a big danger of slipping down the free speech slope if we fight too hard against fake news, but I also think we need to consider a (successful) campaign effort of another nation to undermine the legitimacy of our elections as an act of hostile aggression, and in times of war most people agree some measured limitation of free speech can be justified.
You shouldn’t uncritically ingest all the crap the media is feeding you. It’s bad for your health.
So we are at war with Russia? War serious enough to necessitate suspending the Constitution?
No, at least not yet. That’s a good point. But Facebook is a private company, so filtering content that goes against their policy need not necessarily violate the constitution, right? I don’t know the legal details, though, I could be completely wrong.
Facebook can filter the content, yes, but we’re not discussing the legalities, we’re discussing whether this is a good idea.
All of the information submitted to Wikileaks was real. Even if it came from Russia it was nothing to do with Fake News.
You know, your campaign against fake news might be taken slightly more seriously if you didn’t immediately follow it up by asserting a piece of fake news as fact.
I’ve just been skimming the wiki page on Russian involvement in the US election.
The other claims seem to just be that there was Russian propaganda. If propaganda and possible spying counts as “war” then we will always be at war, because there is always propaganda (as if the US doesn’t do the same thing!). The parallels with 1984 go without saying, but I really think that the risk of totalitarianism isn’t Trump, its people overreacting to Trump.
Also, there are similar allegations of corruption between Clinton and Saudi Arabia.