Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Daniel A. Nagy's avatar

I think that this problem is older than the internet, although it did, indeed, become more pronounced. Journalists of popular publications had the power to character-assassinate people by publishing some obscure, but theoretically publicly available information about them that quickly became what they were known for by the vast majority of people who had any interest in them. I have seen it happen to an acquantance, with whom I had some business before his character assassination. I was really dismayed when my actual friends shared articles about him as outrage porn, without actually knowing anything about the person beyond what they had just read in that article, not realizing that they are actively turning a real person's life into hell. The person in question now struggles with alcoholism and in general had his life irreversibly destroyed by people who didn't even know him and whom he didn't hurt in any way; they just felt that they needed him as an example for a point to make. That is when I understood that the freedom of speech and the freedom of press are two very different things and the latter is actually journalist privilege rather than any freedom at all.

That being said, I don't think that there is a solution in the direction of trying to devise social norms about restricting what people can communicate to those who listen to them. If any of such social norm becomes enforcable, the very mechanism to do so will be abused as a means of censorship.

My opinion is that it is other social norms that should change, namely the weight we give to information from various sources. I know how hard it is to ignore information to which we have been exposed, but it can be learned. And it is worth learning. For example, I learned to ignore all professional journalism. The 2023 ACX prediction contest organized by Scott Alexander was about events that typically appear in traditional media; I do not think that these are the most important kinds of events, but nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot. I performed shockingly well, beating all major prediction markets and more than 99.5% of other participants, even though I really don't "follow" these kind of stories. I even admitted to my complete ignorance on many questions by setting their probability at 50% in my predictions. I think, that people who allow their worldview to be too strongly influenced by professional journalism and overly popular blogs that are, in essence, the same thing, do themselves a huge disservice, severing important links between reality and their mental model thereof. I think, people will learn, mostly the hard way.

However, I do believe that some discipline (self-censorship, if you want to call it that way) in what and how we write is warranted. Actually, I learned a great deal of that from you. In a world where I am very likely to disagree on some hot-button topic with almost everyone and "my tribe" by any definition of it is a small minority in almost any social context, it is worth giving a second thought to what and how we communicate with the rest of the world. I think, I did manage to get some fairly controversial opinions across and even convince some people with whom I previously disagreed, without significant backlash. While many of my firends complain about various platforms regularly censoring them either automagically or by some busybody reporting their posts, it never happened to me. I think, I have learned how to be acceptable and to some extent even respectable to people who otherwise consider "my kind" their outgroup. I even have friends like that.

Expand full comment
Jack Ditch's avatar

That abortion/gun control quote at the end of this column is definitely a keeper! I think if I were to quote it online I'd just...link here? Like, even if you had a link to the original. I'd want to be sharing the context I heard it in, since that's the context I understood it in.

There's a C.S. Lewis quote I absolutely love about "omnipotent moral busybodies" that I'm often afraid to share, because I haven't read the original work it's taken from, and for all I know, Lewis could be putting it in the mouth of an antagonist and the author's point might be quite the opposite of the quote itself.

Expand full comment
44 more comments...

No posts