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.
"My opinion is that it is other social norms that should change, namely the weight we give to information from various sources."
That isn't a social norm, it's part of your system for evaluating information. Unless by "weight" you mean something beyond the probability you assign to the information being true.
It's not quite the probability I assign to it being true. If I get the information that the Sun is going to rise tomorrow from a source with near-zero weight, it doesn't mean that I don't believe it to be true (I do, with a probability close to 1), it just means I do not take it into account. The point of ignoring television is not that what they show is mostly false, it is that their perspective is completely different from ours and it misleads our intuition. For example, there are on average about 8 fatalities on German roads every day. If television would show 3 of them every day (when there are at least 3) on prime time news, right before weather forecast, people would get the impression that it is very dangerous to drive in Germany. Even though none of the information shown would be false. Our intuition is reasonably well tuned for personal experiences and gossip, but not for broadcast media.
All that said, maybe "social norm" is not the right expression. The point is to exercise informational hygiene by deliberately ignoring a lot of information to which we are exposed.
I think your last paragraph there in particular is good advice. If I could build on it a little, I have had that argument about self censorship with many people, trying to point out that "Yea, sure, some people are going to get bent out of shape no matter how you say what you think, but if people who are more or less on your side are taking away something that you now claim you didn't mean, you are communicating poorly and should be more careful about what you write." In other words, it isn't so much self censorship to be careful what you say or write, but rather it is making sure you are saying and writing what you actually mean and not misrepresenting yourself. It often seems to me that people feel that any pause to consider before they spout out whatever is bad and wrong, as opposed to simply being careful to say what you mean.
Yes, but not misrepresenting oneself requires some knowledge about the conventions of other people in different camps. The same words have different meanings in different bubbles and it is very important not to misrepresent oneself by making assumptions about how other people interpret certain statements instead of actually "learning their language".
For example, the word "capitalism" is used very differently by different people. In libertarian circles, it is often interchangeable with free markets. Others use it specifically to mean market economies with a stock exchange, i. e. one with capital markets with a formal price discovery mechanism and certain legal constructs such as limited liability, legal personhood, joint-stock corporation, etc. Yet other people use it for an economy dominated by publicly traded joint stock corporations, favored by government policy as a minimum by creating administrative economies of scale. For the latter kind of people, it is almost the opposite of a free market. It is sometimes better not to use such an ambiguous word at all, even when it would be a convenient shorthand.
Excellent points. One can also achieve that end by avoiding such concept handles when they are used in many different ways. E.g. explaining what one means by capitalism before jumping in and using it willy nilly. Especially these days when it seems people like to use words because they sound smart instead of using them because they know what they mean and what the word means conveys what they intend.
Further, and sadly closer to some of my experiences, maybe don't complain about how Jews are really behind the destruction of institutions and advocate for expelling them from the country, if one doesn't want people to mistake one for an anti-semite. Somehow it never occurred to the person in question that was a possible interpretation... *sigh*
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.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ( C.S. Lewis from his 1948 book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology)
That's the one! I thought I'd googled it before. At some point either google or something else got it into my head that it was from Screwtape Letters, and hence might be something like his example of advice from the devil on how to best corrupt people. Even now, without having read the essay it's from, I'd cite the source, but I wouldn't cite it as an idea C.S. Lewis necessarily personally promoted. Just trying to highlight that the context in which one encounters a quote can be as important as the actual original source of the quote.
But you can probably see why I've been so itching to quote it as of late!
My thought is that if someone posted a message that was intended for wide release (NYT article, a blog that's trying to reach new readers) that it's fine to quote and attribute. If someone was posting for a more limited audience, that should also be taken into account and not shared. My personality says to err on the side of caution and undershare rather than overshare.
You can rephrase this as "do unto others as they would have you do unto them." I assume Nate Silver and The Washington Post both want more readers and welcome quoting. I think you (David Friedman) want more readers, but not so many that it changes the way you post or imposes costs on you. If you said something that a segment of the society would find inflammatory, then sharing your post in a way that gets their attention would be bad. Sharing your post for intellectual discussion would be good. In practice this is hard.
I want to think that anonymous posters should be treated differently than people posting under their real names, but ultimately I don't think it's a workable standard. People posting under their real names have either insulated themselves from blowback or limit what they say up front. Anonymous posters are doing neither of those things, so attention is more likely and more devastating and makes doxxing a real danger. Inasmuch as we want people to post real opinions, allowing them anonymity and freedom from external scrutiny (sharing outside of the context they wrote in) seems important.
If your median reader was significantly further to the left than yourself, there would be social pressure to move to the left, especially if the readers were vocal in your comments. If something you said gained widespread negative attention such that, say, Rationalists or the SCA were put under pressure to disavow you, that's a cost imposed on you that may affect your behavior.
Because you aren't posting for money and don't depend on this for your livelihood, the amount of pressure would be significantly less than for someone who does depend on it.
For the most part I think that quoting with a link that points to the text being quoted is exactly the right thing to do and that requesting permission for something that is visible to a search engine is not necessary. Quoting without attribution / link is generally worse than quoting with because a lot of the time having the link allows the reader to follow the context that the quoted text was made in.
However there's a difference between what is permissible and what is polite. I think it is polite to ask someone, particularly a commenter on some third party's post/site, if they mind being quoted. The same applies to comments on other social media spots where you and the person you want to quote are both virtually in a third party's space and they may want to preserve some privacy.
If they say no I will typically paraphrase and not link but I tend to work on the assumption that if they don't reply at all to the request that provides implicit permission. But all of this depends heavily on what I want to quote. If someone, say, talks about something extremely personal I would probably not go on implicit permission. But that stems from me trying to be polite rather than feeling that I am required to do so.
I post anonymously, but I’ve always assumed that if someone was sufficiently determined they might be able to uncover me. After all, I’ve seen people’s past anonymous writings uncovered by enterprising journalists.
However, most of those people were “famous Internet personalities” posting under real names or perhaps involved with the press at the time of their doxing, whereas I’m not famous at all and just post on blogs. Many also were provocateurs of some kind, though not all. I think the fact that I have zero presence in twitter is probably a big help here too, that platform seems to be a rage magnet.
In other words, the time and effort it would take to dox me versus the low reward (what would someone even accomplish by doxing me) is basically my main defense.
Still, if I were simply to post under my real name that would reduce the work it would take to get me fired (from my job that has no relation to politics or what I write at all) to essentially zero. Then even someone who was sufficiently bored or spiteful could do it in an afternoon on a lark.
This seems common sentiment amongst many internet posters I know.
The function of twitter/substack is that it creates the kind of independent revenue stream for famous people to survive doxing. However, I would not hazard my career and family on the off chance of becoming super internet famous and writing for a living.
I'm old enough to have lived pre-internet and gotten the advice to never post anything at all. I used to use Facebook but only posted very normal family stuff (pictures of my kids). I never used Twitter or other social media and no longer even use Facebook. Too much possibility for trouble, not enough gain.
I don't know that anything I've posted anonymously online could get me fired, but I strongly suspect it's true. Maybe something I said that was non even controversial at the time, or the context of it was fine for that community. Probably things I don't remember saying as well, which seems to happen with those celebrity doxxings.
I've thought about what it would mean to become famous, like really famous, for someone starting out as a normal person. Google knows your search history and what sites you've gone to, and likely so does a bunch of other companies. It wouldn't take long for one of those companies to piece together your email address to your real name to your old postings. In fact, it may only take one middle level employee with an angle to do it. Just share the background stuff with a friendly journalist and let them do the digging.
Not that I was interested in becoming famous anyway, but I think for most people it provides either a worry or blackmail material pretty easily.
I have always posted under my own name. Back in the Usenet days, thirty or forty years ago, my wife worried that someone I had offended online would heave a brick through our window, but it never happened. My heterodox views are public in my books, my blog, and my substack. Obviously I can't know if they had invisible costs, jobs I wasn't offered or people who didn't become friends, but I don't think they have had any significant visible costs.
I think a lot of this is related to age. You're old enough to have had an established career and become a known quantity before the internet. Your social connections were already "priced in" so to speak before there was a danger of your views being exposed to new communities.
Most people do not throw bricks. Usenet involved very few people, so the chances that a random person on Usenet would also throw a brick when mad is small. Modern social media is quite large. Filtering the people throwing bricks (or pushing for someone to get fired) still comes up with positives despite a low baseline, because the numbers are large enough.
If I write 'someone said X interesting thing on line' without my giving a name or link, it is always possible for a reader to ask me who wrote it and where. At that point I can either provide the info or not, and give the info either publicly or in a private format like email. I control the dissemination of the name/source and can choose who and when to give it out. It may be a cumbersome process, but honestly I can't remember the last time someone asked for a source.
By the way, if David Friedman called me 'not very bright' I'd be ecstatic. I am pretty slow compared to many in this crowd.
I am not sure the person in question wouldn't agree, actually. In an online interaction many years later he commented on how rapidly I was producing arguments. But I still shouldn't have said it.
I've never been able to think of a reason to quote users on the internet directly and with attribution. Due to pseudonymity, a given quote could have been written by anybody, even the quoting author; so it's just as good to say, "someone on the internet said <my paraphrasing>." Posts under a real-life name might not fit this as well, but then again, how often does it matter who said the thing you're using to frame your presentation of the (usually) opposing case?
There are several reasons why it might be worth doing.
The simplest reason to quote someone directly is that he has said something very well, you don't think you can improve on it, and trying to say it as well in your own words is a waste of your time.
A reason to quote, attribute, and link is so that your reader can see the context, can see if you are leaving important things out. If you are disagreeing with the quote a reader might want to see if the author answered the arguments you are making.
Another reason to attribute is that some of your readers may be familiar with the person you are quoting and have an opinion about him, either because he is well known online (Bryan Caplan, for example) or because he, you, and your readers share a common bubble, such as libertarianism.
A final reason to attribute is to give credit where credit is due if someone has made an interesting point and put it well.
In that broader light, I guess the rule should be that a quote must be anonymized if it would have the effect of defaming the original speaker, and credited if it would benefit them for the public to know they had said it.
That's a good first approximation, but you also might want to credit and link to show the reader the context. The speaker may have responded, to you or someone else who was arguing with, in defense of his position. A sufficiently interested reader may want to interact with the speaker to get his response.
If the speaker was eloquent and their position well-defended a citation would be a credit to them as a thinker, but if the readership was known to be emotional or mob-like and such a sufficiently interested reader would not be expected, the same citation could defame the speaker. I find the higher-order solutions in the elaboration of the arrangement of the first-order interactions. ;-)
As to the specific arguments and cases you raise ...
>[The younger generation's] view is that online spaces are more nearly equivalent to your living room than to the public square, that as a rule you are not free to quote things written in them without the author’s permission
This is implausible, since no-one can invite themselves into your living room without your permission, but (by hypothesis) they can invite themselves into your open forum, even if not many actually do. A better analogy would be for the youngsters to claim that online spaces are more like cliques in some public place like a park, but this is still not quite right, since even then outsiders may not invite themselves into some clique without permission, even though the clique /is/ in a public place.
>An argument against that distinction [between naming and not naming an author] is that if I quote something someone wrote verbatim a Google search can find the source and identify the author, at least by the name he comments under.
Well, since I think everyone should own the publicly-accessible declarations they make, then that fact that they can (via google) be more easily attached to their words does not seem like a good argument against that distinction.
>some who responded were reacting ... to quoting something someone has said in order to attack him ... It is appropriate to quote someone saying something you disagree with in order to answer the argument but not in order to deter him from making it.
We agree here. Quoting someone /in order to/ deter them from making it is not consistent with furthering the intellectual discussion (your aim is deterrence, not truth), while answering the argument is consistent with this, even if it would predictably lead (so strong is your argument) to their being deterred from making it. [Complication: this also means it is inappropriate to try to convince other people, since that is to aim to deter them from a belief, and not just from saying it, which, arguably, is even more invasive).
I disagree with your final sentence. Getting someone to abandon a belief by offering convincing arguments that it is mistaken is legitimate — part of the point of arguing with people is to find out if your beliefs are wrong and if so to change them. What is wrong is to get someone to stop supporting a belief by making it costly to do so, which has nothing to do with whether the belief is true.
Yes, you're right. It /is/ appropriate to try to convince other people /by offering arguments/, but perhaps not without this qualification, if that indicates a preparedness to use other, truth-irrelevant, means to do so.
Even in your living room, you can't be sure nobody is listening — someone might have bugged the room or be just outside the door and have good hearing. It's just unlikely. The point of the privacy through obscurity argument is that obscurity also makes it unlikely for someone to know what you have said.
As in many other contexts we are mapping a continuous variable (more or less private) onto a discrete binary (private/public), and it is unclear where the line should be drawn (analogous to mapping the continuous transition from fertilized ovum to baby onto a binary category of fetus/person).
"someone might have bugged the room"—assuming they shouldn't have done so (or, more generally, eavesdropped), they have purposely and wrongfully discovered my comments. They have no right to them, and so no right to quote me for discussion. That's easy.
"or be just outside the door and have good hearing"—assuming they had a right to be outside and weren't eavesdropping, they have accidentally and permissibly discovered my comments. I want to say that, even in this case, they should not quote me, since they are not in the "intended audience" (= everyone apart from those I would exclude from my comments if I could do so without cost).
This gets the "right" answers, /if it is justified/. The nosy eavesdropper and the accidental over-hearer are not in the intended audience, since I would (eg) soundproof the walls of my living room if it cost me nothing, and so they may not quote me. By contrast, the rando who comes across a post on some obscure forum /is/ in the intended audience, if the moderators do not take any steps to exclude people (eg, they don't even bother adding the explicit condition "The comments on this forum may not be quoted elsewhere"). Those who rely on privacy through obscurity make a mistake, in my view—since the forum is obscure, they reasonably predict that their comments will have small circulation, which is all they want, but on this basis they require that they not be quoted elsewhere, but unreasonably, if it is not an explicit condition of the forum. In conversations IRL, we presume that others wish to exclude us (unless they say otherwise), while on online discussion forums, we presume (or at least should) that others do not wish to exclude us (unless they say otherwise).
But /is/ this reference to the "intended audience" justified? The more general issue is whether I have rights over the positive externalities I impose on others. If I play music in public, and you happen to overhear and enjoy, then I can hardly insist that you not enjoy it. Similarly, one might think, if I make some comment during a conversation with a friend in a park, and you accidentally overhear it and want to discuss it with your own friends, then I can hardly insist that you not do so—even if you are not in the intended audience. On reflection, then, perhaps innocent over-hearers /do/ have the right to discuss comments without permission.
I'm sympathetic to the youth on this one, a better example though would be a bar or restaurant. It's rude to repeat in public what you heard another table discussing intimately, even if that place is public, just because they were loud (drunk, loud voices, etc) or you were ease dropping.
If you aren't first party then you shouldn't be repeating with attribution unless the speaker was making a public speech. I detest leaks for that reason too.
I agree that overhearing a conversation at another table in a restaurant is a better example, thus my own example of a clique in a public park. Still, there is a relevant difference, isn't there?—You are not at the other table in the restaurant, nor can you invite yourself to the table without permission, but your /can/ invite yourself onto online forum A, even if you have not done so, but instead made comment on forum B quoting someone from forum A.
A crucial assumption I am making is that if you may "see" the comments on forum A, then you may quote and discuss those comments on forum B for intellectual purposes. I can see (at least) two ways this might be mistaken. First, one might think that if you can comment on A, then you can discuss it /only on forum A/. Second, one might think that you need to have permission to /comment/ on A before you may discuss the comments appearing on that forum, whether there or somewhere else. I'm /inclined/ to disagree, since, if the original commenter's aim is intellectual discussion, then I cannot see the reasons for these restrictions.
A huge distinction here is that online messages continue to exist for years, potentially permanently. Even if we delete them, they may have been saved in various forms. The real danger here is not that someone comes up to us in the park when we didn't want them there (though that's a potential problem) but instead that by coming up to is in the park, they suddenly have a full recording of our entire conversation from long before they came to the park or we knew they might be listening.
>For what range of online publications should I feel free to quote without permission, for what range only with permission? Does the answer depend on whether I name the author?
First, some ground clearing. Discussions online (as IRL) have many aims, and the answer to the above may differ accordingly, so I shall focus on what we might (pretentiously) call "intellectual" discussions, in which the aim is to correctly answer some question, factual or evaluative. Further, I shall focus only on what will call "open" forums, which anyone can see (even if not many people do), in which there are no explicit conditions attached to being able to see it (eg, accepting terms of use).
In these terms, my initial—but not necessarily final—suggestion is to say that it is permissible to quote freely from intellectual discussions in open forums, for the purposes of furthering that discussion, and permissible as well to name the author, though it would be /polite/ to do so if and only if they make a good point. The justification for this is that anyone who presumes to influence the beliefs of others must allow those others to test their claims, and that this applies to everyone who might be influenced.
I would be happy to be quoted, even critically, if the person doing the quoting takes me seriously. But my tendency is to comment on substacks like this one, about philosophy or economics, so my perspective might be a bit warped.
I think that quoting someone's public posts is fine, and probably more important if you disagree with them; providing a link to the specific thread or post better still in that case. The reason being one that I don't think many young people appreciate: it lets the reader judge for themselves the case the writer in question made. I have had people misquote something I wrote out of context where it meant the opposite (whether by intent or inability to read is always in question) but being able to easily point out "I clearly said '[Not X], but I suppose in a very specific set of circumstances [X] is good' like two sentences prior" is useful.
At the same time, and Daniel Nagy noted here as well, I try to be a bit careful about what I say and not say things that I don't mean, whether through emotion or sloppiness. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who say all sorts of things they don't mean in front of a potentially huge audience; they certainly seem happy to collect any praise and positive attention they get, so they ought to own up to the criticism and negative attention as well I think. Although, that said I would be sympathetic to someone who said something dumb as a youth or college age adult since people can do a lot of learning in those years.
But hey, I am in my 40's so my finger isn't exactly on the pulse of the youth today. :D
If you publish something to the world, I think in principle that it should be freely quotable. But I suppose there’s a grey area, when you publish something in an obscure place where it can be seen by anyone, but where it’s likely to be seen by only a small group of people. In that case, you may be careless about what you write.
There’s also a time-lapse problem. You may well be embarrassed if someone digs up something you published to the world 20 years ago, and republishes it to a new and larger audience now. The context has changed, and your own opinions may have changed significantly since then.
This is a really interesting topic, and I don't have a clear answer, except to say that the expectations people have are useful guidance, and you are right to note them.
I have long considered the tangentially related question of defamation. Libel is considered more serious than slander because it is either permanent or widely disseminated. Much online content is similarly permanent, but people approach comments online the way they approach conversation. They are much less careful than they would be in a book or newspaper article. The notion of widespread dissemination is also breaking down. When the difference was between a conversation between a handful of friends or something broadcast on a TV show theoretically available to the whole nation, it was a big one. Now that there are blogs or social media posts with dozens or millions of followers, the distinction is much less clear.
I'll often quote and attribute to, rather than write my own lead, when posting a link to someone's essay elsewhere.
For example I just posted on formerly known as twitter; "For what range of online publications should I feel free to quote without permission, for what range only with permission?", David Friedman
Interesting. I often think of quoting you on a discussion board of low level academics I participate in -- left wingers almost all -- but I do so only occasionally. I never quote you by name because I know that that family name is like a red flag to a bull to these people! I say "a well respected libertarian economist has written" or some such.
You don't attack individuals, and I don't either, so that's not a problem.
I have quoted slightly longer things from other people, again only very occasionally. I make light of that by referring to the brouhaha about plagiarism: "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" follows.
When quoting or using published papers or results, I try to provide links, except to the types of cases already mentioned.
In keeping with academic journal norms, I assume I have permission for short quotes from you and others. Again, occasional weird attribution, for the sake of effectiveness, and for which sincere apologies. We live in interesting times and places.
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.
"My opinion is that it is other social norms that should change, namely the weight we give to information from various sources."
That isn't a social norm, it's part of your system for evaluating information. Unless by "weight" you mean something beyond the probability you assign to the information being true.
It's not quite the probability I assign to it being true. If I get the information that the Sun is going to rise tomorrow from a source with near-zero weight, it doesn't mean that I don't believe it to be true (I do, with a probability close to 1), it just means I do not take it into account. The point of ignoring television is not that what they show is mostly false, it is that their perspective is completely different from ours and it misleads our intuition. For example, there are on average about 8 fatalities on German roads every day. If television would show 3 of them every day (when there are at least 3) on prime time news, right before weather forecast, people would get the impression that it is very dangerous to drive in Germany. Even though none of the information shown would be false. Our intuition is reasonably well tuned for personal experiences and gossip, but not for broadcast media.
All that said, maybe "social norm" is not the right expression. The point is to exercise informational hygiene by deliberately ignoring a lot of information to which we are exposed.
I think your last paragraph there in particular is good advice. If I could build on it a little, I have had that argument about self censorship with many people, trying to point out that "Yea, sure, some people are going to get bent out of shape no matter how you say what you think, but if people who are more or less on your side are taking away something that you now claim you didn't mean, you are communicating poorly and should be more careful about what you write." In other words, it isn't so much self censorship to be careful what you say or write, but rather it is making sure you are saying and writing what you actually mean and not misrepresenting yourself. It often seems to me that people feel that any pause to consider before they spout out whatever is bad and wrong, as opposed to simply being careful to say what you mean.
Yes, but not misrepresenting oneself requires some knowledge about the conventions of other people in different camps. The same words have different meanings in different bubbles and it is very important not to misrepresent oneself by making assumptions about how other people interpret certain statements instead of actually "learning their language".
For example, the word "capitalism" is used very differently by different people. In libertarian circles, it is often interchangeable with free markets. Others use it specifically to mean market economies with a stock exchange, i. e. one with capital markets with a formal price discovery mechanism and certain legal constructs such as limited liability, legal personhood, joint-stock corporation, etc. Yet other people use it for an economy dominated by publicly traded joint stock corporations, favored by government policy as a minimum by creating administrative economies of scale. For the latter kind of people, it is almost the opposite of a free market. It is sometimes better not to use such an ambiguous word at all, even when it would be a convenient shorthand.
Excellent points. One can also achieve that end by avoiding such concept handles when they are used in many different ways. E.g. explaining what one means by capitalism before jumping in and using it willy nilly. Especially these days when it seems people like to use words because they sound smart instead of using them because they know what they mean and what the word means conveys what they intend.
Further, and sadly closer to some of my experiences, maybe don't complain about how Jews are really behind the destruction of institutions and advocate for expelling them from the country, if one doesn't want people to mistake one for an anti-semite. Somehow it never occurred to the person in question that was a possible interpretation... *sigh*
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.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ( C.S. Lewis from his 1948 book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology)
Google is your friend.
That's the one! I thought I'd googled it before. At some point either google or something else got it into my head that it was from Screwtape Letters, and hence might be something like his example of advice from the devil on how to best corrupt people. Even now, without having read the essay it's from, I'd cite the source, but I wouldn't cite it as an idea C.S. Lewis necessarily personally promoted. Just trying to highlight that the context in which one encounters a quote can be as important as the actual original source of the quote.
But you can probably see why I've been so itching to quote it as of late!
My thought is that if someone posted a message that was intended for wide release (NYT article, a blog that's trying to reach new readers) that it's fine to quote and attribute. If someone was posting for a more limited audience, that should also be taken into account and not shared. My personality says to err on the side of caution and undershare rather than overshare.
You can rephrase this as "do unto others as they would have you do unto them." I assume Nate Silver and The Washington Post both want more readers and welcome quoting. I think you (David Friedman) want more readers, but not so many that it changes the way you post or imposes costs on you. If you said something that a segment of the society would find inflammatory, then sharing your post in a way that gets their attention would be bad. Sharing your post for intellectual discussion would be good. In practice this is hard.
I want to think that anonymous posters should be treated differently than people posting under their real names, but ultimately I don't think it's a workable standard. People posting under their real names have either insulated themselves from blowback or limit what they say up front. Anonymous posters are doing neither of those things, so attention is more likely and more devastating and makes doxxing a real danger. Inasmuch as we want people to post real opinions, allowing them anonymity and freedom from external scrutiny (sharing outside of the context they wrote in) seems important.
I find it hard to imagine that having more readers would change the way I post, although hostile readers might impose other costs.
If your median reader was significantly further to the left than yourself, there would be social pressure to move to the left, especially if the readers were vocal in your comments. If something you said gained widespread negative attention such that, say, Rationalists or the SCA were put under pressure to disavow you, that's a cost imposed on you that may affect your behavior.
Because you aren't posting for money and don't depend on this for your livelihood, the amount of pressure would be significantly less than for someone who does depend on it.
I'm not sure about the first, but your second is possible.
For the most part I think that quoting with a link that points to the text being quoted is exactly the right thing to do and that requesting permission for something that is visible to a search engine is not necessary. Quoting without attribution / link is generally worse than quoting with because a lot of the time having the link allows the reader to follow the context that the quoted text was made in.
However there's a difference between what is permissible and what is polite. I think it is polite to ask someone, particularly a commenter on some third party's post/site, if they mind being quoted. The same applies to comments on other social media spots where you and the person you want to quote are both virtually in a third party's space and they may want to preserve some privacy.
If they say no I will typically paraphrase and not link but I tend to work on the assumption that if they don't reply at all to the request that provides implicit permission. But all of this depends heavily on what I want to quote. If someone, say, talks about something extremely personal I would probably not go on implicit permission. But that stems from me trying to be polite rather than feeling that I am required to do so.
I post anonymously, but I’ve always assumed that if someone was sufficiently determined they might be able to uncover me. After all, I’ve seen people’s past anonymous writings uncovered by enterprising journalists.
However, most of those people were “famous Internet personalities” posting under real names or perhaps involved with the press at the time of their doxing, whereas I’m not famous at all and just post on blogs. Many also were provocateurs of some kind, though not all. I think the fact that I have zero presence in twitter is probably a big help here too, that platform seems to be a rage magnet.
In other words, the time and effort it would take to dox me versus the low reward (what would someone even accomplish by doxing me) is basically my main defense.
Still, if I were simply to post under my real name that would reduce the work it would take to get me fired (from my job that has no relation to politics or what I write at all) to essentially zero. Then even someone who was sufficiently bored or spiteful could do it in an afternoon on a lark.
This seems common sentiment amongst many internet posters I know.
The function of twitter/substack is that it creates the kind of independent revenue stream for famous people to survive doxing. However, I would not hazard my career and family on the off chance of becoming super internet famous and writing for a living.
I'm old enough to have lived pre-internet and gotten the advice to never post anything at all. I used to use Facebook but only posted very normal family stuff (pictures of my kids). I never used Twitter or other social media and no longer even use Facebook. Too much possibility for trouble, not enough gain.
I don't know that anything I've posted anonymously online could get me fired, but I strongly suspect it's true. Maybe something I said that was non even controversial at the time, or the context of it was fine for that community. Probably things I don't remember saying as well, which seems to happen with those celebrity doxxings.
I've thought about what it would mean to become famous, like really famous, for someone starting out as a normal person. Google knows your search history and what sites you've gone to, and likely so does a bunch of other companies. It wouldn't take long for one of those companies to piece together your email address to your real name to your old postings. In fact, it may only take one middle level employee with an angle to do it. Just share the background stuff with a friendly journalist and let them do the digging.
Not that I was interested in becoming famous anyway, but I think for most people it provides either a worry or blackmail material pretty easily.
I have always posted under my own name. Back in the Usenet days, thirty or forty years ago, my wife worried that someone I had offended online would heave a brick through our window, but it never happened. My heterodox views are public in my books, my blog, and my substack. Obviously I can't know if they had invisible costs, jobs I wasn't offered or people who didn't become friends, but I don't think they have had any significant visible costs.
I think a lot of this is related to age. You're old enough to have had an established career and become a known quantity before the internet. Your social connections were already "priced in" so to speak before there was a danger of your views being exposed to new communities.
Most people do not throw bricks. Usenet involved very few people, so the chances that a random person on Usenet would also throw a brick when mad is small. Modern social media is quite large. Filtering the people throwing bricks (or pushing for someone to get fired) still comes up with positives despite a low baseline, because the numbers are large enough.
If I write 'someone said X interesting thing on line' without my giving a name or link, it is always possible for a reader to ask me who wrote it and where. At that point I can either provide the info or not, and give the info either publicly or in a private format like email. I control the dissemination of the name/source and can choose who and when to give it out. It may be a cumbersome process, but honestly I can't remember the last time someone asked for a source.
By the way, if David Friedman called me 'not very bright' I'd be ecstatic. I am pretty slow compared to many in this crowd.
I am not sure the person in question wouldn't agree, actually. In an online interaction many years later he commented on how rapidly I was producing arguments. But I still shouldn't have said it.
I've never been able to think of a reason to quote users on the internet directly and with attribution. Due to pseudonymity, a given quote could have been written by anybody, even the quoting author; so it's just as good to say, "someone on the internet said <my paraphrasing>." Posts under a real-life name might not fit this as well, but then again, how often does it matter who said the thing you're using to frame your presentation of the (usually) opposing case?
There are several reasons why it might be worth doing.
The simplest reason to quote someone directly is that he has said something very well, you don't think you can improve on it, and trying to say it as well in your own words is a waste of your time.
A reason to quote, attribute, and link is so that your reader can see the context, can see if you are leaving important things out. If you are disagreeing with the quote a reader might want to see if the author answered the arguments you are making.
Another reason to attribute is that some of your readers may be familiar with the person you are quoting and have an opinion about him, either because he is well known online (Bryan Caplan, for example) or because he, you, and your readers share a common bubble, such as libertarianism.
A final reason to attribute is to give credit where credit is due if someone has made an interesting point and put it well.
In that broader light, I guess the rule should be that a quote must be anonymized if it would have the effect of defaming the original speaker, and credited if it would benefit them for the public to know they had said it.
That's a good first approximation, but you also might want to credit and link to show the reader the context. The speaker may have responded, to you or someone else who was arguing with, in defense of his position. A sufficiently interested reader may want to interact with the speaker to get his response.
If the speaker was eloquent and their position well-defended a citation would be a credit to them as a thinker, but if the readership was known to be emotional or mob-like and such a sufficiently interested reader would not be expected, the same citation could defame the speaker. I find the higher-order solutions in the elaboration of the arrangement of the first-order interactions. ;-)
As to the specific arguments and cases you raise ...
>[The younger generation's] view is that online spaces are more nearly equivalent to your living room than to the public square, that as a rule you are not free to quote things written in them without the author’s permission
This is implausible, since no-one can invite themselves into your living room without your permission, but (by hypothesis) they can invite themselves into your open forum, even if not many actually do. A better analogy would be for the youngsters to claim that online spaces are more like cliques in some public place like a park, but this is still not quite right, since even then outsiders may not invite themselves into some clique without permission, even though the clique /is/ in a public place.
>An argument against that distinction [between naming and not naming an author] is that if I quote something someone wrote verbatim a Google search can find the source and identify the author, at least by the name he comments under.
Well, since I think everyone should own the publicly-accessible declarations they make, then that fact that they can (via google) be more easily attached to their words does not seem like a good argument against that distinction.
>some who responded were reacting ... to quoting something someone has said in order to attack him ... It is appropriate to quote someone saying something you disagree with in order to answer the argument but not in order to deter him from making it.
We agree here. Quoting someone /in order to/ deter them from making it is not consistent with furthering the intellectual discussion (your aim is deterrence, not truth), while answering the argument is consistent with this, even if it would predictably lead (so strong is your argument) to their being deterred from making it. [Complication: this also means it is inappropriate to try to convince other people, since that is to aim to deter them from a belief, and not just from saying it, which, arguably, is even more invasive).
I disagree with your final sentence. Getting someone to abandon a belief by offering convincing arguments that it is mistaken is legitimate — part of the point of arguing with people is to find out if your beliefs are wrong and if so to change them. What is wrong is to get someone to stop supporting a belief by making it costly to do so, which has nothing to do with whether the belief is true.
Yes, you're right. It /is/ appropriate to try to convince other people /by offering arguments/, but perhaps not without this qualification, if that indicates a preparedness to use other, truth-irrelevant, means to do so.
On the living room/park distinction ...
Even in your living room, you can't be sure nobody is listening — someone might have bugged the room or be just outside the door and have good hearing. It's just unlikely. The point of the privacy through obscurity argument is that obscurity also makes it unlikely for someone to know what you have said.
As in many other contexts we are mapping a continuous variable (more or less private) onto a discrete binary (private/public), and it is unclear where the line should be drawn (analogous to mapping the continuous transition from fertilized ovum to baby onto a binary category of fetus/person).
"someone might have bugged the room"—assuming they shouldn't have done so (or, more generally, eavesdropped), they have purposely and wrongfully discovered my comments. They have no right to them, and so no right to quote me for discussion. That's easy.
"or be just outside the door and have good hearing"—assuming they had a right to be outside and weren't eavesdropping, they have accidentally and permissibly discovered my comments. I want to say that, even in this case, they should not quote me, since they are not in the "intended audience" (= everyone apart from those I would exclude from my comments if I could do so without cost).
This gets the "right" answers, /if it is justified/. The nosy eavesdropper and the accidental over-hearer are not in the intended audience, since I would (eg) soundproof the walls of my living room if it cost me nothing, and so they may not quote me. By contrast, the rando who comes across a post on some obscure forum /is/ in the intended audience, if the moderators do not take any steps to exclude people (eg, they don't even bother adding the explicit condition "The comments on this forum may not be quoted elsewhere"). Those who rely on privacy through obscurity make a mistake, in my view—since the forum is obscure, they reasonably predict that their comments will have small circulation, which is all they want, but on this basis they require that they not be quoted elsewhere, but unreasonably, if it is not an explicit condition of the forum. In conversations IRL, we presume that others wish to exclude us (unless they say otherwise), while on online discussion forums, we presume (or at least should) that others do not wish to exclude us (unless they say otherwise).
But /is/ this reference to the "intended audience" justified? The more general issue is whether I have rights over the positive externalities I impose on others. If I play music in public, and you happen to overhear and enjoy, then I can hardly insist that you not enjoy it. Similarly, one might think, if I make some comment during a conversation with a friend in a park, and you accidentally overhear it and want to discuss it with your own friends, then I can hardly insist that you not do so—even if you are not in the intended audience. On reflection, then, perhaps innocent over-hearers /do/ have the right to discuss comments without permission.
I'm sympathetic to the youth on this one, a better example though would be a bar or restaurant. It's rude to repeat in public what you heard another table discussing intimately, even if that place is public, just because they were loud (drunk, loud voices, etc) or you were ease dropping.
If you aren't first party then you shouldn't be repeating with attribution unless the speaker was making a public speech. I detest leaks for that reason too.
I agree that overhearing a conversation at another table in a restaurant is a better example, thus my own example of a clique in a public park. Still, there is a relevant difference, isn't there?—You are not at the other table in the restaurant, nor can you invite yourself to the table without permission, but your /can/ invite yourself onto online forum A, even if you have not done so, but instead made comment on forum B quoting someone from forum A.
A crucial assumption I am making is that if you may "see" the comments on forum A, then you may quote and discuss those comments on forum B for intellectual purposes. I can see (at least) two ways this might be mistaken. First, one might think that if you can comment on A, then you can discuss it /only on forum A/. Second, one might think that you need to have permission to /comment/ on A before you may discuss the comments appearing on that forum, whether there or somewhere else. I'm /inclined/ to disagree, since, if the original commenter's aim is intellectual discussion, then I cannot see the reasons for these restrictions.
A huge distinction here is that online messages continue to exist for years, potentially permanently. Even if we delete them, they may have been saved in various forms. The real danger here is not that someone comes up to us in the park when we didn't want them there (though that's a potential problem) but instead that by coming up to is in the park, they suddenly have a full recording of our entire conversation from long before they came to the park or we knew they might be listening.
That's a problem, but I don't think a problem in particular with quoting, since what I am quoting is already online forever.
>For what range of online publications should I feel free to quote without permission, for what range only with permission? Does the answer depend on whether I name the author?
First, some ground clearing. Discussions online (as IRL) have many aims, and the answer to the above may differ accordingly, so I shall focus on what we might (pretentiously) call "intellectual" discussions, in which the aim is to correctly answer some question, factual or evaluative. Further, I shall focus only on what will call "open" forums, which anyone can see (even if not many people do), in which there are no explicit conditions attached to being able to see it (eg, accepting terms of use).
In these terms, my initial—but not necessarily final—suggestion is to say that it is permissible to quote freely from intellectual discussions in open forums, for the purposes of furthering that discussion, and permissible as well to name the author, though it would be /polite/ to do so if and only if they make a good point. The justification for this is that anyone who presumes to influence the beliefs of others must allow those others to test their claims, and that this applies to everyone who might be influenced.
I would be happy to be quoted, even critically, if the person doing the quoting takes me seriously. But my tendency is to comment on substacks like this one, about philosophy or economics, so my perspective might be a bit warped.
I think that quoting someone's public posts is fine, and probably more important if you disagree with them; providing a link to the specific thread or post better still in that case. The reason being one that I don't think many young people appreciate: it lets the reader judge for themselves the case the writer in question made. I have had people misquote something I wrote out of context where it meant the opposite (whether by intent or inability to read is always in question) but being able to easily point out "I clearly said '[Not X], but I suppose in a very specific set of circumstances [X] is good' like two sentences prior" is useful.
At the same time, and Daniel Nagy noted here as well, I try to be a bit careful about what I say and not say things that I don't mean, whether through emotion or sloppiness. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who say all sorts of things they don't mean in front of a potentially huge audience; they certainly seem happy to collect any praise and positive attention they get, so they ought to own up to the criticism and negative attention as well I think. Although, that said I would be sympathetic to someone who said something dumb as a youth or college age adult since people can do a lot of learning in those years.
But hey, I am in my 40's so my finger isn't exactly on the pulse of the youth today. :D
If you publish something to the world, I think in principle that it should be freely quotable. But I suppose there’s a grey area, when you publish something in an obscure place where it can be seen by anyone, but where it’s likely to be seen by only a small group of people. In that case, you may be careless about what you write.
There’s also a time-lapse problem. You may well be embarrassed if someone digs up something you published to the world 20 years ago, and republishes it to a new and larger audience now. The context has changed, and your own opinions may have changed significantly since then.
This is a really interesting topic, and I don't have a clear answer, except to say that the expectations people have are useful guidance, and you are right to note them.
I have long considered the tangentially related question of defamation. Libel is considered more serious than slander because it is either permanent or widely disseminated. Much online content is similarly permanent, but people approach comments online the way they approach conversation. They are much less careful than they would be in a book or newspaper article. The notion of widespread dissemination is also breaking down. When the difference was between a conversation between a handful of friends or something broadcast on a TV show theoretically available to the whole nation, it was a big one. Now that there are blogs or social media posts with dozens or millions of followers, the distinction is much less clear.
I'll often quote and attribute to, rather than write my own lead, when posting a link to someone's essay elsewhere.
For example I just posted on formerly known as twitter; "For what range of online publications should I feel free to quote without permission, for what range only with permission?", David Friedman
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/norms-of-online-privacy
I assume such is acceptable?
Of course.
Interesting. I often think of quoting you on a discussion board of low level academics I participate in -- left wingers almost all -- but I do so only occasionally. I never quote you by name because I know that that family name is like a red flag to a bull to these people! I say "a well respected libertarian economist has written" or some such.
You don't attack individuals, and I don't either, so that's not a problem.
I have quoted slightly longer things from other people, again only very occasionally. I make light of that by referring to the brouhaha about plagiarism: "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" follows.
When quoting or using published papers or results, I try to provide links, except to the types of cases already mentioned.
In keeping with academic journal norms, I assume I have permission for short quotes from you and others. Again, occasional weird attribution, for the sake of effectiveness, and for which sincere apologies. We live in interesting times and places.