When we use to ride motorcycle we had a rule "Better be alive than right". So instead of arguing with the car drivers about the rules they need to adhere to to ensure safety of bikers, we are supposed to take precautions from our side that even the dumb car driver can not put us in harms way.
One thing I realized listening to Milton Friedman's videos was that he had this amazing ability to put forward his views while totally appearing to be on the side of the other person. Countless videos of Mr. Friedman shows him arguing with socialists, communists, feminists, eco-activists, partisan politicians and so on and at no point Mr. Friedman would sound acrimonious. Hence no matter how badly anyone disagrees with him it is simply hard to **hate** him. Similarly, my interactions with you (David) in real life quickly gave away the vibe that you were inherently a kind person and genuine in your desire to be intellectually honest. Somehow that kindness when displayed makes other person much more open to your ideas fostering a better environment for exchanging ideas. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet are other two people who fall in the same category as the Friedmans. I can not say the same about Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams. Sowell for example argues really well and is factually correct but comes across as someone who has disdain for the other side on certain occasions.
I think modern day politicians and activists should be more like Milton rather than acrimonious communicators they try to be. Perhaps social media and modern media rewards the latter behavior than former in short run and hence people like to use expletives in their speech, call other retards, mentally ill etc.
My above statement should not be seen as any kind of justification of violence what so ever. As a matter of principle I feel political violence is an evil and we must do whatever in our power to stop it.
PS. : I had not known anything about Mr. Kirk until this tragedy happened. I feel deeply sorry for his family and pray they find strength to go through this difficult times.
I think your overall point is quite well taken, but the idea that Warren Buffett showed/shows only openness to those he disagrees with and never disdain for “the other side” does not match with my interpretation of many of the things Buffett has said.
I have practically read every single non technical book and hundreds of hours of video lectures by Milton. I have read David's MoF book and have read all his substacks and watched many videos and interviews. I have met David many times and talked to him. Given that I can make a strong claim about Friedmans.
You could be right about Buffet because I have probably only seen handful of his interviews and 1-2 minute clips that my more "Buffety" peers shared. So you could be right.
Fine and true in theory, yet missing the truth about the current norms on Free Speech in the USA—many Republicans/ conservatives have been punished by being fired for their speech. Like Amy Wax is fighting.
On Charlie Kirk, many Dems claim, without evidence, that he is hateful & promotes hate, then use this to justify celebrating his murder. It is ok to celebrate the death of Mussolini, as a genuine enemy.
It’s not ok to celebrate the death of a peaceful politician, even with policies you don’t like.
The murder celebrants should all be fired.
Firing them will be the most likely path towards a norm against assassinations, as well as a tit against the many Dem tats, which is the most likely path towards a broader Free Speech norm. One that’s in accord with Rule of Law, so that Dems are less willing to cancel Republicans for speech.
The partisan Harvard should lose its tax exemptions, for being non-partisan, until it has at least 30% Republican professors & 30% Dems.
“It’s not ok to celebrate the death of a peaceful politician, even with policies you don’t like.
The murder celebrants should all be fired.”
You are absolutely within your rights to express such a view. Moreover, if you’re an employer with employees who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death, I fully support your right to terminate their employment. However, the government (and its agents) must never put its finger on the scale of justice.
I agree with the thrust of this comment, but we should not stop looking at the consequences of speech with just economic consequences.
Since at least the 1970s, the Left has had and used a major asset that the Right does not possess: a following, not formally organized, of thousands of angry idiots, whom leftist pundits can reliably induce to commit assassinations, riots, and other serious crimes merely by broadcasting language that demonizes the targets. I submit that doing so ought to give rise to liability.
I am not willing to believe that either the existence of this group, nor most activations of them, are unintended or unplanned. Nor have I found any similar situation on the Right, though it is sometimes faked (for instance, the FBI has now admitted before Congress to having 274 agents provocateurs embedded in the crowd to turn the Capitol confrontation violent on January 6, 2021).
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is horrible. While I disagree with many of his views, he was an effective advocate, and political disputes never justify violence.
Some Democrats may have celebrated, but that behavior isn’t unique to one party. Fringe celebrants appear whenever a perceived opponent dies or is attacked. We saw it after Melissa Hortman was assassinated this summer, and, in 2020, a prominent pastor even called Justice Ginsburg’s death “divine providence.” While none of this is socially acceptable, negative consequences should not come from the government.
"Fringe celebrants appear whenever a perceived opponent dies or is attacked."
Sorry, but the whole point here is that it is not merely a small fringe. It is a large number of those on the left.
And while it is true that finally in the case of *this* assassination, most Dem politicians did explicitly condemn it in no uncertain terms (even as influential leftists like Kimmel did no such thing, in terms of "no uncertain"), all of the prior violence from the left they did not openly and unequivocally condemn.
E.g. Elizabeth Warren's "people can only be pushed so far” comment re: Luigi Mangione killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
And Tom did not say the consequences should come from the government.
I don't know which "left" you're looking at, but it is not the left that I see. Meanwhile, the President of the United States has made light of the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband on several occasions, as did Representative Higgins. Senator Mike Lee, conservative influencers Collin Rugg and Mike Cernovich, and Greg Gutfeld mocked Melissa Hortman's assassination.
My point is that there are plenty of extreme views by small groups of people on all sides of the political spectrum. Perhaps it is just my own naiveté thinking that most people, liberal or conservative, are fundamentally good and caring people. If you have evidence that liberals are significantly more likely to celebrate or advocate harm to conservatives than the reverse, please present it.
And, yes, I know what Tom said when he said the celebrants should "all be fired". I agree that private individuals and companies should have the right to fire people based on this behavior. I just disagree with Tom's use of the word, "all".
All I can find on the people you say "mocked Melissa Hortman's assassination" is a reference to putting out a false conjecture on the motive. Do you have more than that?
I believe that Senator MIke Lee posted tweets saying "Nightmare on Waltz Street", "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way", "My guess: He's not MAGA", and "Marxism is a deadly mental illness."
After the assassination, Collin Rugg wrote ""Flashback to when Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman said her job was to 'impede' the 'white nationalist' agenda of her Republican colleagues. Wild." Mike Cernovich wrote "Hortman hears a who?"
Greg Gutfeld wrote "The media is acting like this is the end of the world. I'm sorry, but who the h--- is Melissa Hortman? Nobody knew who she was yesterday, and now we're supposed to act like we lost a founding father? Give me a f---ing break."
As for putting out a false conjecture on the motive, is that so different from Kimmel's saying that conservatives were trying to characterize Kirk's assassin as not a conservative?
Check the Harvard-Harris poll numbers on 18-24 year olds who back Hamas. It’s about 50%, which means it’s gotta be north of 75% of that age bracket that votes Dem.
Relatively big numbers of somewhat older people chose “Back Hamas” as well, even when given 3 choices, not just 2.
And if you doubt that most of the people who chose “Back Hamas” wish harm to Jewish Israelis - at bare minimum - then there is simply no reasoning with you.
See also the numbers who support oppressor-oppressed ideology.
To be more precise, however, I don’t consider the people who hold these views to be “liberals”. But they are (almost entirely) surely leftists.
Generalizing, people who believe in oppressor-oppressed ideology, which holds that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors by *any means necessary*, are far more likely to advocate and celebrate violence against others. And this is the ideology of much of the left today.
I have now read both polls. According to the second, 63% of Democrats believed the US should be supporting Israel against Hamas. On oppressor/oppressed ideology, the young group splits 51/49, but that is on whether it justified affirmative action not whether it justified violence.
Your conclusion might be correct but the polls you cite don't give much evidence for it.
I agree that in the absence of information like the statement by the Harvard groups and what oppressor-oppressed theory is and who it is that believes in it, the polls alone would not give much evidence of it.
But much such evidence exists and is not difficult to find.
OTOH, If you are suggesting that the fairly large numbers of Democrats - especially among the younger ones whom it is well known are responsible for most violent behavior - who support terrorists in the wake of a murder / rape / hostage taking rampage is not evidence of support for violence against those with whom they disagree - is not evidence (not proof, but evidence) for my position, then perhaps we have different definitions of evidence.
Remember, my only strong statements here to omar were about hardcore, mostly younger, leftists. And specifically the ones who believe in oppressor-oppressed theory. And those polls are powerful evidence - though not conclusive proof by themselves - that there are quite a lot of them.
I looked through the first poll. On most of the questions, a majority of the 18-24 group take the position against Hamas. None of the relevant data is separated Republican/Democrat. There is no evidence there that leftists are more likely to be pro-Hamas — you are deducing that by first assuming it. And there is nothing about violence against conservatives.
I deduce based on the answers about oppressor-oppressed ideology, essentially.
Which of course was enunciated on October 8th in the letter stating “we hold Israel responsible for all unfolding violence in the region.”
“There is no evidence there that leftists are more likely to be pro-Hamas — you are deducing that by first assuming it“
Beyond the teachings of oppressor-oppressed ideology, the absence of any polling anywhere showing support for Hamas from anywhere but the political left. So I concede fully that the idea that leftists are overwhelmingly *more* likely to be pro-Hamas is not within that poll.
But I am not merely “assuming” it; there exists lots of evidence for that quite modest claim. I did not feel the need to include that bit in a comment response here.
I claim nothing like mathematical proof, but absolutely common sense logic.
To quote Bryan Caplan, I would be delighted to Bet on It.
FYI the majority of Jewish Israelis support Trump, so the “against ‘conservatives’” actually works there as well. But even if they were not, I stand by the assertion that people who support violence in this one instance are likely in general to support it against conservatives - given what oppressor-oppressed ideology teaches.
If I follow your logic correctly, it looks like this:
Liberals are significantly more likely to celebrate or advocate harm to conservatives than the reverse because:
1. In 2023, after Hamas attacked Israel, about 51% of 18- to 24-year-olds said that the attack was justified because of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
2. 18- to 24-year-olds are a representative proxy for liberals as a whole.
3. Therefore over 75% of Democrats in this age group believe the
attack was justified.
4. Most of these individuals also wish harm to Jewish Israelis.
5. And these people are not liberals, but leftists.
6. Leftists, because they believe the Palestinians were oppressed, believe Palestinians have the right to overthrow the Israelis by any means necessary.
7. Unstated, but presumably you feel that Hamas represents the Palestinians, at least in the minds of leftists.
8. And these leftists are, therefore, more likely to advocate and celebrate violence against other people, in general.
9. To connect back to the original topic, the argument must then equate the views of liberals with leftists (I am making a leap here because I did not see this).
10. Therefore, liberals are more likely to celebrate or advocate violence against conservatives.
Your chain of reasoning shows flaws when looked at closely:
-- this poll was conducted less than two weeks after the attack when emotions were raw and much information was not known and 49% of those 18 to 24 said they were not following the war closely or not following it at all;
-- your assumption that more than 75% of Democrats think the attack was justified is statistically weak;
-- I don't believe that most people who responded that they think Hamas was justified actually wish harm to Jewish Israelis.
-- if 18 to 24 year olds accurately characterized liberals as a group, then most liberals still live with their parents, are gamers, and are worried about their career prospects;
-- your shift from liberals to leftists, who you concede are a different group, undermines your claim about liberals;
-- your leap from how those who believe the oppressed have the right to use any means necessary to overthrow their oppressors to this is how the left (and, presumably, in your opinion, liberals) thinks is a leap too far.
Your data doesn’t show liberals are more violent—it only shows how shaky inferences can be when polling is stretched beyond its limits.
A free society, and even an unfree society, largely depends upon the domain of manners, the unwritten rules of conduct that enable smooth social intercourse.
Thus, an excessively legalistic society, where conduct is minutely regulated in the manner of Tocqueville's democratic despotism that he foresaw for America, is a hard and unnatural place for people to be in.
The best argument I have heard for free speech or free activity of anything short of aggression is to not cut rattles off snakes -- their silence is more dangerous to you than them.
I want the bigots out in the open, practicing their bigotry, not just so I can avoid the stores who forbid blacks, but so I can patronize the stores that forbid political talk inside.
The insistence by some that, by definition, only governments are able to infringe upon freedom of speech strikes me as difficult to take seriously. To the speaker, it would seem to make no difference whether he gets killed for his speech by someone representing a government or by an angry mob, or whether he refrains from speaking for fear of the former or for fear of the latter – his freedom is equally infringed in either case. Approval of assassinations in retaliation for speech, therefore, is an infringement on freedom of speech inasmuch as such approval increases the threat of such assassinations.
There are arguments against free speech that I didn't see discussed in the OP.
One is against speech that floods a venue with messages that are overwhelmingly likely not to be intended to share important ideas, and possibly to the point of crowding out messages that are. The central example of this is spammed advertising. Closely related is messaging that is intended to share an idea but still floods the venue, and may still crowd out other messages, aka crankery. If the venue is privately owned, then the same arguments for repressing speech for other reasons can apply here, but if the venue is public, there's still an extent to which such content floods the time the public has available for discussing the topics people consider important. (Imagine a town hall where one member keeps commandeering the megaphone to issue his one-hour statement about cryptocurrency.)
A second argument for repressing speech involves speech that puts innocent people in material danger. This includes doxxing (whereabouts of people that some other people would like to harm), and also information about the population's defenses (guard rotations; radio frequencies used for communicating with remote units; details of methods used to discover terrorist cells; names of moles in foreign countries). From an ideal libertarian perspective, the speech should be allowed, and only the act of harm punished; in practice, this is a good way to end any pure libertarian society.
The latter type of information turns out to be worth spending billions of dollars worldwide to uncover, and to protect. It also means that people will go to great effort to infer any of that information from even tiny, seemingly inconsequential leaks. Sharing something you know, that you could only know because Fred is secretly embedded in some terrorist camp and copying a USB key he's assigned to carry to nearby camps, means Fred is soon a dead man. The obvious solution is to suppress any such information, even minute details, unless it's whitelisted.
A weaker argument here involves speech that isn't going to lead to direct harm, but spreads some amount of circumstantial evidence that makes a person or organization look guilty of something of which they're innocent. One example would be a company working on its next flagship product, having to work secretly with suppliers, and producing partial information in receipts that falls into the hands of an intern who interprets it as embezzling. If the intern goes straight to the press, it smears the company faster than it can clean up the mess (and in the process, it loses its edge against competitors). Various organizations lay out rules for whistleblowing for this reason, requiring employees to share information up the management chain first, and stipulating penalties if they don't. This protects the organization, although it also protects management if it turns out to be actually embezzling, but if so, it's arguably just as dangerous to the intern either way.
A tougher argument for repressing speech involves speech that drives off other participants. This is ideally any speech that traduces reasonable norms for productive discussion - ad hominems, well poisoning, intellect bullying, Gish gallops, brigading, and so on. If the goal of speech is to share important ideas, and people in pursuit of that goal infer that a given venue will not support them because it's flooded with people waging war with words while hiding behind free speech protections, they will likely leave - which means free speech was functionally violated anyway.
It's a tough argument because people will disagree on what constitutes bullying, well poisoning, and all the rest. Such disagreements could be genuine or feigned, further confounding the problem. I've seen instances of repellent speech adorned with accusations of the other side engaging in similar tactics - occasionally the exact tactic employed by the repellent speech in question.
Part of the problem you raise is covered by the idea that you have the right to speak but not to have me listen. Part is covered by contract; an employer can make it a condition of employment that the employee agree not to reveal the employer's secrets.
I don't think freedom of speech requires all venues to be commons. A phone company can ban scam calls. A meeting can have rules about who can speak when and for how long.
I'd summarize my previous comment as expressing the following concerns: spam, cranks, revealing vulnerabilities, unrepairable damage, and driving out good speech.
I agree that the right to speech != the right to be heard. I take that to be meant to address the spam/crank concern. If so, then it's obviously possible in some cases for audiences to filter out spammers and cranks, but the fact remains that spam and crankery takes up space in the venue. Left unchecked, it can take up most of it. As I said above, this is straightforward to strike from private venues, but in public venues, someone can complain that it's unfair.
And even audience filtering doesn't always work, as in the case I mentioned with a town meeting. Audiences might not wish to spend their time in the parking lot waiting for the crank to finish his statement. That said, this might merely amount to an argument against town meetings for town business, and for online forums or video meetings with a notification mechanism for people to know when they can put down what they were doing and re-attend the meeting when the topic they don't care about is resolved.
Meetings can have time management rules, although this could work against topics that require a lot of time to resolve. A particular budget item might involve a lot of detail, taking time away from other items. If the time limit is hard, I can easily see people exploiting whatever the default decision will be by running out the clock. If the time limit is soft - i.e. it can be overridden if enough people call for more time - then a group of people can use that to crowd out time for items they don't want to be discussed. (There may be parliamentary norms I'm not aware of that mitigate these problems.)
The employment agreement would address the concern about willful disclosure of proprietary information, but it would not address the concern about an employee misinterpreting secret behavior as criminal.
And this appears to still leave the concerns about revealing vulnerabilities, unrepairable damage, and driving out good speech.
“Arguably the First Amendment is such a treaty, its broad outline accepted by each side in the belief that violation by their opponents will cost them more than violations by their supporters will gain them.”
Prior to 2020, I surely believed this was the case in the U.S. my entire life.
I don’t believe it to be the case now.
The left has made clear - both by polls and actions - that they would prefer not to have the First Amendment any longer. It survives only because it is so difficult to eliminate, not because it is in fact broadly accepted.
The younger left has made it *very* clear that they do not support the broad outline of the First Amendment at all.
Now if you want to argue that the Constitution in toto fits your description, I would concur.
But just as your claim has not been true of the Second Amendment for decades now, I don’t believe it is currently true of the First.
Seeing some of the mechanics of how social media censorship works has been eye opening. Like regulatory capture, the people and groups with the strongest incentive to censor others tend to take the reins, and in the narrative space those people are partisans. Even fact checking turns out to be a partisan hobby horse. The type of person who would do a good job doesn't want to exercise influence in that way as much as those who are convinced they have all the answers.
It's quite riveting to see one of the facts is the 97% consensus. I had read the paper myself and believed that Cook had happily allowed others to believe that the statistic referred to the position that humans are the main cause of warming, as well as it being extremely costly.
It's so interesting to see he specifically claims the 'main cause' interpretation was found by himself to be 97%, when in the paper it was transparently about humans having any effect more than zero. I have a radical belief that people consciously tell lies far less often than it appears - the corollary of that is that people also rarely apply conscious effort to know that what they say is true. I do not believe Cook is lying, and I believe there is little quality support for the position that 2°C is the necessary temperature limit, which is ultimately what most people think the 97% figure is in support of.
I find it hard to believe that Cook was not deliberately lying, given that he used the figure for his categories 1-3 with the description for category 1 — and category 1 was much smaller than 2 and 3. That looks like deliberate fraud.
I am less certain whether its response to my criticism, cited by David Henderson, was deliberate fraud, misstating my argument because he had no rebuttal, or whether he confused my criticism with something by someone else.
Fraud is certainly a strong likelihood for that in particular. The reason I could see otherwise is that I think climate change is primarily a "far mode" issue in Robin Hanson's framing - a big societal or moral issue where people are more moralizing, abstract, and less sensitive to trade offs.
Even when people in Cook's cultural group speak in practical, specific near mode, they are doing so in service to a sacred far mode shared belief. Cook may have specifically lied, but nobody else in the group reports that the 97% consensus is not true in the way it is claimed because they have chosen to treat the issue as one where truth is assumed, and which is so important that specific truths are reflexively subordinated if they don't service the cause. They are in a general state of not telling the truth.
Highly stimulating, and a highly useful distinction between narrow and broad definitions of free speech.
My major malfunction in recent years has been caused by university faculty uttering garbage and hiding behind the First Amendment. I had to think about this before jumping to conclusions.
If higher education were purely privately financed there would be no problem. Customers who want to consume junk are welcome to. In part this still applies to private universities, though there is too much government finance to exclusively rely on the market. I conclude that the most serious problem is the extension of First Amendment rights to entities clearly controlled by government -- the public colleges. At the very least public colleges should be allowed to get rid of faculty who hurt the university's reputation. Better, of course, to privatize.
This extension of First Amendment rights to publicly run colleges is just another symptom, though perhaps unintended, of blurring the distinction between the public and private sectors. And is an example of trying to blur the distinction between narrow and broad rights to free speech. We hardly know where one ends and the other begins.
Well, what could be the result of more strict societal limits on speech - in the longer run? A higher degree of segregation. For example, employees would be more aligned with the perspectives of their employers. Overall, positions would be more grounded existentially. On *this* ground, you can start a really open discussion *beyond* borders - with grounded opponents. Because one has not to fear cancellation, etc.
(Inspired by one of the comments…) What percentage of people, do you suppose, could identify with some version of this statement:
“I never heard of Charlie Kirk until I witnessed, with horror, people gloating about his death”?
I’ve now come across several people saying essentially that, and it describes my experience as well. I was in a group chat with my brother and some of his friends, and they were all gloating. (I did not want or attempt to censor them, but I did tell them I thought their behavior was foul. I defended that with arguments, and offered them alternative ways they could have acted that would not require them to change their views. These were dismissed out of hand and I gave up, not wanting to strain the relationship more than I already had.)
Anyway, if the percentage of people who identify with the statement above is significant, it suggests an odd pattern in our society. The way I’d describe this pattern is that some interactive combination of tribal identity and algorithmically-curated media exposes people disproportionately to instances of speech they see as wrong/stupid/evil—more readily even than the speakers’ intended audience are exposed to it!
How is it so many of Charlie Kirk’s haters knew who he was, had been following him with sneering contempt (for how long before he was killed??), and had memes and clever remarks ready to go the moment he was shot—meanwhile people who were indifferent or who may even have been supportive of him had no clue who he was until his assassination was the butt of so many jokes?
What does this say about the way our marketplace of ideas is arranged, and what does such an arrangement do to freedom of speech?
I don't remember hearing about Charlie Kirk before his assassination, but I heard about that before I heard about people gloating over his death and I don't think I have heard anyone gloating over his death yet. And I have not heard or heard of any jokes targeted at him.
Okay, but it seems to me a number of people did have the experience I had, of only learning who he was upon witnessing people gloating about his death. This suggests that our marketplace of ideas is arranged in a very non-ideal or at least convoluted way (with broadcast speech often reaching its anti-audience before it reaches its intended audience), do you agree? And if it is arranged that way, what are the implications for freedom of speech?
My guess is that those people are living in blue bubbles and so exposed largely to beliefs that the people in those bubbles want to hear and propagate. I am living in the Bay Area, which should be a blue bubble, but my sources of information are mostly online, which isn't.
So I don't think what you are observing is a general characteristic of the marketplace of ideas, beyond its tending to feed people the ideas they want to be fed.
Most people’s sources of information are mostly online, not just yours. The marketplace of ideas is largely online. Except for some outliers, people’s “bubbles” are virtual in derivation.
The marketplace of ideas does notice and respond to the indicators people give about what they want to be fed, but it feeds them based not on what they appear to want but based on what will make them pay attention for as long as possible. Outrage over an outgroup member expressing their “wrong” opinions is a tested and proven way to get most people’s attention.
Some of the world’s top cognitive psychologists and interaction designers work for the companies who operate the platforms that serve as the venue for the marketplace of ideas. These experts trade tips on how to keep users’ eyes glued to their screens. The world’s top computer engineers continually improve those designers’ capabilities, devising new paths, quicker paths, into users’ brains.
All the while information provenance grows harder and harder to trace, and the algorithms driving the spread of information become less and less transparent.
That is a radical and new development as far as idea-marketplaces go don’t you think?
But the non-geographicality of the clustering is at least as old as television since that media could easily reach across the country, and people all over simply had to choose what to watch based on their interests.
What about the fact that information is now dispatched by algorithms with surgical precision right into people’s pockets, based on work by teams of psychologists looking to maximize “time on task”? You think that is only a difference in kind from the way information found its way to audiences before social media?
Even assuming that censure does marginally limit nonsense in circulation - an unlikely but not heroic assumption - one is still confronted by the need to change societal beliefs as new evidence slowly accretes. At this in particular, censure is absolutely terrible.
Censorship concerns the false, the evil, the ugly.
You deal with falsehoods and you are right, freedom of expression allows criticism of falsehoods and we can hope that criticism will lead to the victory of truth. But perhaps we should think about the institutions that allow this criticism to be exercised properly. (Like the institutions of science that organize criticism). Emmanuel Macron had proposed an institution to supervise the press, but this idea was quickly fought and quickly forgotten.
For ugly, it is social norms (of good taste) that forbid it. But they are violated without too severe sanctions, and the problem is not very serious, alas.
The problem of freedom of expression arises above all for expressions that hurt or cause harm. For example pedophilia, nazism etc
The question is whether censorship, narrow or broad sense, does a better job of filtering than competition. One of the two major US parties contains a lot of people prone to describe those they disagree with as Nazis. Given a legal system where suppressing Nazi views by punishing those who express them is legal it could easily be used to suppress political views the incumbents don't like. Meanwhile, in a context where arguing for Nazism is legal, most of the small minority who identify as Nazis seem to have gotten their idea of Nazism from the general culture, not from writings by actual Nazis.
Arguably the most destructive idea in the US at present is climate catastrophism, not the idea that climate change is bad, which might be true, but that unless something drastic is done to prevent it the result will be catastrophe. I don't think there is any scientific basis for that but it is pretty widely believed with bad consequences. But that won't be censored, both because it is widely believed and because it provides arguments for things people want to do for other reasons.
So I think we are better off without censorship in either sense.
If the government, or anyone else, is more competent to identify things people should not read or watch, they can always publish a list of approved materials and leave it to individuals to accept or reject their judgement. That comes closer than censorship to the mechanism in science. I am free to publish my views on climate, and do, but I can't publish them in _Nature_ because they won't accept them. That leaves it up to interested individuals to decide what to trust.
“Arguably the most destructive idea in the US at present is climate catastrophism”
Well, I’d strongly agree that this one is in the top 3 or 5.
But I’d argue that the most destructive idea in the U.S. at present is that Dem politicians generally have good intentions, while GOP politicians have bad intentions and/or are stupid.
Eliminate this one idea, and while there would still be several blue states, Democrats would have no power nationally. Because on something like 75%+ of issues, voters nationally favor the relatively less interventionist policies of the GOP - whether those of the traditional center-right or even those of Trump “MAGA” - over those of the Democrats by at least 60-40, and often by much more than that.
I fully acknowledge that only on the policy questions rough percentages do I have hard data for my claim, not on the rest.
But imo our politics would be radically different, and arguably more like it was in the 1980s and 1990s, if the idea that “Democrat politicians have good intentions, better than those of GOP politicians” were eliminated.
For the institutions of science, I was thinking of the reading committees of journals, the reviewers on the papers presented in the colloquiums, PhD defense, the possibility of publishing articles that criticize articles that have already appeared, the evaluation of journals... These institutions work quite well and can be improved in the event of failure. It seems to me that it is these institutions that promote competition.
You regret the contemporary excesses that pervert these institutions. I am aware of this, but we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. First of all, as you say, it is only a question of a few controversial fields: economic science (as always) and recently, climate science, which has become curiously political. We must therefore now find a way to improve the institutions of science on these issues. The general problem is that there is no alternative. To bring out the famous intersubjective consensus described by Karl Popper, methodological and institutional rules are needed.
For censorship in general, you ask the right question. I was simply proposing that you approach the question from the angle of the three values; the true/false, the beautiful/ugly, the good/evil. On the question of Good/Evil, I think that there are words that can do harm or encourage evil. One can reasonably wonder if they should not be censored, i.e. punished in the same way as an assault.
How do you make it in the interest of the institution to support truth instead of using it to suppress views it dislikes, promote views it likes? "Fact-checkers" are supposed to be such an institution, but end up reflecting their own biases.
The best we can do is competition, not giving some authority a monopoly in establishing truth.
So far as science is concerned, the more people use it as a source of truth in controversial contexts, the greater the incentive for partisans to try to take control of institutions that outsiders look at to find out what science says and use them to push their side of a controversy, the greater the incentives for scientists who are partisans to try to block the efforts of other scientists on the other side. The whole process badly corrupts science. You can find examples in my posts on climate: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate. Or compare _Scientific American_ in recent decades to what it was sixty years ago.
But in the current context that you are writing about free speech - specifically with the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk - this is surely quite relevant.
False statements designed to outrage those who believe in oppressor-oppressed theory - one of whose tenets is that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY - do more damage than those designed to outrage the Amish, or classical liberals, or older-school tree-hugging progressives.
A disturbing aspect of our current political landscape is that a not insubstantial portion of the left indeed believe this quasi-religious oppressor-oppressed ideology, while most of the rest of the left, including virtually all of its leaders - John Fetterman seems to be one of the very few exceptions - refuses to push back at all on it.
Free speech, more accurately political speech, being a political question, demands a political context. The first duty of any State is to perpetuate itself. Hence, a State can not allow subversive political speech. Any speech that attacks the political formula, as Mosca puts it, the governing myth of a state, is liable to be proscribed.
That goes for all states, liberal, conservative, theocracies. Thus, in present liberal states with egalitarian political formula, speech tending to have racial overtones is subversive.
A country with free market economy that allows communist speech, has either very confident or very silly political leadership.
So, the criterion of correct beliefs does not require omniscient censor but the correctness is relative to the political formula of the state in which the speech is made.
In the US, the governing myth is democracy. Mencken attacked it entertainingly, was widely read, was not suppressed. It's still democracy.
I don't agree that the first duty of any state is to perpetuate itself — duty to whom? It may be better if the governing myth of a state is successfully attacked, changing it to a better state. The inhabitants of China and Russia are better off than they were under Mao and the USSR in part because the governing myths of those states were abandoned.
Thankfully the U.S. is still a constitutional republic with relatively strong protections for minority rights and not a “mob rule” representative democracy where slim majorities can impose their will and make fairly radical changes.
The American state, regardless of its ideological pretensions, has behaved quite as like any other state. At the very beginning, Washington suppressed Whiskey rebels. It has instigated wars, expanded its territory whenever it could.
Existence being pre-condition for action, anything that acts, must be directed first and foremost to self-perpetuation.
Many things that states do,that appear mysterious from individualistic perspective, may become clearer from the perspective of the state.
"Existence being pre-condition for action, anything that acts, must be directed first and foremost to self-perpetuation."
That is not true. Animals act and they put reproduction above self perpetuation, due to the effect of evolution. More generally, there is no need for action for self-perpetuation to be "first and foremost." A state might, for example, put spreading the religion its rulers believe in above its own survival, be willing to spend resources on that goal that could be used to strengthen it against its enemies.
You remind me of Ayn Rand's attempt to derive her moral views from life along similar lines.
Animals perpetuate themselves through their offspring. And the modern biologists assign agency to the genes, self-perpectuators par excellence.
My precise formulation is, material cause of the state is its land and people; the formal cause is the Constitution; the efficient cause is the collective will and action of people themselves along with the institutions that help formulate and execute political will; and the final cause is the Way of the state--the vision of what it seeks to realize in actuality.
So, a theocracy is directed to realize its vision.Normallythere should be no conflict with self-perpectuation but I suppose if the vision demands it, than so be it.
That liberalism is directed to freedom, could be an American conception. In 19c Britain, liberalism was perhaps more directed to Reform. The liberal governments passed several legislations, aiming to reform and improve conditions in factories, public health and established public education.
These laws made for bigger government though still much smaller by present standards and were opposed by Tories, which were consequently the party of smaller government in practice.
As an example of contradiction liberalism involves, is religious freedom. But Dostoevsky observes, a man does not merely want to worship by himself, he wants his neighbor to worship along with him, and if he doesn't, he will make his neighbor worship with him ( Brother Karamazov). Herein you have the trouble in nutshell.
Liberalism is the Great Denial for it denies the political nature of man whereby mankind is organized into particular, self-ruling, morally authoritative states.
The political nature then defines insider/outsider, neighbor/stranger, friend/enemy dichotomies.
A liberal might deny particularity, this is the left-liberal tendency, and which tends logically to the world state.
Or he might deny moral authority, which is the right-liberal tendency, and which tends to no state.
In world state, all men are neighbors to each other.
In no state, they are strangers to each other.
Kipling's poem Stranger gives clearest picture of what stranger is.
The right-liberal vision of no state, which is what you mean by freedom, involves contradictions. Significantly no such thing has yet appeared and none is on horizon.
Man, being a political animal, is naturally organized into states. Indeed, it is the unceasing struggle for pre-eminence among individuals that causes the state to be.
In any case, it should be easier to agree on "What Is" than on "What Should Be".
Well, kings may be allowed an occasional court jester. But the overweening confidence of the American state, that let it dismiss Mencken, didn't serve it so well against the decades of subversion, both from the left and the right, from those who did not write so well, and which partly accounts for the peril that the American establishment finds itself in.
Naturally a great deal might be added to the discussion.
And you think that if the state had the power to censor political speech it would have been used in a way that prevented that subversion rather than supporting it?
As I said, the self-confidence of the American state made it rather heedless of subversion. Otherwise, I do not doubt that ingenuity of judges, which they have displayed in many other contexts, would have found ways around the first amendment.
Is your point that suppression of political speech would only work to inflame subversion?
Not only, but I don't think that states consistently act in ways that preserve their current form, because the action is by individuals acting in their own interest. King John, to take a simple example, acted in ways that almost destroyed the British monarchy — when he died there was a French army in London and the heir to France was claiming the English throne.
The US intellectual class, at least since the New Deal, has been more hostile to capitalism than the population and largely influences the Federal government, so the power to block speech might well have been used against the supporters of capitalism. More generally, capitalism makes societies richer but governments less powerful, so governments have some tendency to do things that undermine capitalism.
Each individual has a vision of How Things Should Be, or the Way. These individuals struggle among themselves for pre-eminence. This struggle dynamically generates the Way of the State, and the State acts to realize the Way.
So, the thing is dynamic-- the State forms the minds of individuals and struggle amongindividuals continually generates the Way of the State.
Edit needed: “A somewhat different argument against freedom of speech, broadly or narrowly defined, was illustrated in the aftermath of the assassination of *Charley* Kirk…” “Charlie”
When we use to ride motorcycle we had a rule "Better be alive than right". So instead of arguing with the car drivers about the rules they need to adhere to to ensure safety of bikers, we are supposed to take precautions from our side that even the dumb car driver can not put us in harms way.
One thing I realized listening to Milton Friedman's videos was that he had this amazing ability to put forward his views while totally appearing to be on the side of the other person. Countless videos of Mr. Friedman shows him arguing with socialists, communists, feminists, eco-activists, partisan politicians and so on and at no point Mr. Friedman would sound acrimonious. Hence no matter how badly anyone disagrees with him it is simply hard to **hate** him. Similarly, my interactions with you (David) in real life quickly gave away the vibe that you were inherently a kind person and genuine in your desire to be intellectually honest. Somehow that kindness when displayed makes other person much more open to your ideas fostering a better environment for exchanging ideas. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet are other two people who fall in the same category as the Friedmans. I can not say the same about Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams. Sowell for example argues really well and is factually correct but comes across as someone who has disdain for the other side on certain occasions.
I think modern day politicians and activists should be more like Milton rather than acrimonious communicators they try to be. Perhaps social media and modern media rewards the latter behavior than former in short run and hence people like to use expletives in their speech, call other retards, mentally ill etc.
My above statement should not be seen as any kind of justification of violence what so ever. As a matter of principle I feel political violence is an evil and we must do whatever in our power to stop it.
PS. : I had not known anything about Mr. Kirk until this tragedy happened. I feel deeply sorry for his family and pray they find strength to go through this difficult times.
The version of your motorcycle rule I am familiar with is a verse:
Here lies John Jay
Who died defending his right of way
He was in the right, his case was strong,
He's just as dead as if he was wrong.
My wife's version, which I think is better than mine:
This is the story of John O'Day
Who died defending his right of way.
He was right, dead right, as he strode along
But he's just as did as if he'd been wrong.
I think your overall point is quite well taken, but the idea that Warren Buffett showed/shows only openness to those he disagrees with and never disdain for “the other side” does not match with my interpretation of many of the things Buffett has said.
I have practically read every single non technical book and hundreds of hours of video lectures by Milton. I have read David's MoF book and have read all his substacks and watched many videos and interviews. I have met David many times and talked to him. Given that I can make a strong claim about Friedmans.
You could be right about Buffet because I have probably only seen handful of his interviews and 1-2 minute clips that my more "Buffety" peers shared. So you could be right.
I agree with you re: both of the Friedmans, even though my experience is much lesser than yours. My comment was solely re: Buffett.
Fine and true in theory, yet missing the truth about the current norms on Free Speech in the USA—many Republicans/ conservatives have been punished by being fired for their speech. Like Amy Wax is fighting.
On Charlie Kirk, many Dems claim, without evidence, that he is hateful & promotes hate, then use this to justify celebrating his murder. It is ok to celebrate the death of Mussolini, as a genuine enemy.
It’s not ok to celebrate the death of a peaceful politician, even with policies you don’t like.
The murder celebrants should all be fired.
Firing them will be the most likely path towards a norm against assassinations, as well as a tit against the many Dem tats, which is the most likely path towards a broader Free Speech norm. One that’s in accord with Rule of Law, so that Dems are less willing to cancel Republicans for speech.
The partisan Harvard should lose its tax exemptions, for being non-partisan, until it has at least 30% Republican professors & 30% Dems.
“It’s not ok to celebrate the death of a peaceful politician, even with policies you don’t like.
The murder celebrants should all be fired.”
You are absolutely within your rights to express such a view. Moreover, if you’re an employer with employees who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death, I fully support your right to terminate their employment. However, the government (and its agents) must never put its finger on the scale of justice.
I agree with the thrust of this comment, but we should not stop looking at the consequences of speech with just economic consequences.
Since at least the 1970s, the Left has had and used a major asset that the Right does not possess: a following, not formally organized, of thousands of angry idiots, whom leftist pundits can reliably induce to commit assassinations, riots, and other serious crimes merely by broadcasting language that demonizes the targets. I submit that doing so ought to give rise to liability.
I am not willing to believe that either the existence of this group, nor most activations of them, are unintended or unplanned. Nor have I found any similar situation on the Right, though it is sometimes faked (for instance, the FBI has now admitted before Congress to having 274 agents provocateurs embedded in the crowd to turn the Capitol confrontation violent on January 6, 2021).
I agree with your message, until the very last line about requiring Harvard to have 30% Republican professors.
[Though for the record I think all private universities should lose their tax-exempt status.]
Yes. Tax exempt status ought not to be a reward for doing what the party in power wants you to do.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is horrible. While I disagree with many of his views, he was an effective advocate, and political disputes never justify violence.
Some Democrats may have celebrated, but that behavior isn’t unique to one party. Fringe celebrants appear whenever a perceived opponent dies or is attacked. We saw it after Melissa Hortman was assassinated this summer, and, in 2020, a prominent pastor even called Justice Ginsburg’s death “divine providence.” While none of this is socially acceptable, negative consequences should not come from the government.
"Fringe celebrants appear whenever a perceived opponent dies or is attacked."
Sorry, but the whole point here is that it is not merely a small fringe. It is a large number of those on the left.
And while it is true that finally in the case of *this* assassination, most Dem politicians did explicitly condemn it in no uncertain terms (even as influential leftists like Kimmel did no such thing, in terms of "no uncertain"), all of the prior violence from the left they did not openly and unequivocally condemn.
E.g. Elizabeth Warren's "people can only be pushed so far” comment re: Luigi Mangione killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
And Tom did not say the consequences should come from the government.
I don't know which "left" you're looking at, but it is not the left that I see. Meanwhile, the President of the United States has made light of the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband on several occasions, as did Representative Higgins. Senator Mike Lee, conservative influencers Collin Rugg and Mike Cernovich, and Greg Gutfeld mocked Melissa Hortman's assassination.
My point is that there are plenty of extreme views by small groups of people on all sides of the political spectrum. Perhaps it is just my own naiveté thinking that most people, liberal or conservative, are fundamentally good and caring people. If you have evidence that liberals are significantly more likely to celebrate or advocate harm to conservatives than the reverse, please present it.
And, yes, I know what Tom said when he said the celebrants should "all be fired". I agree that private individuals and companies should have the right to fire people based on this behavior. I just disagree with Tom's use of the word, "all".
All I can find on the people you say "mocked Melissa Hortman's assassination" is a reference to putting out a false conjecture on the motive. Do you have more than that?
I believe that Senator MIke Lee posted tweets saying "Nightmare on Waltz Street", "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way", "My guess: He's not MAGA", and "Marxism is a deadly mental illness."
After the assassination, Collin Rugg wrote ""Flashback to when Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman said her job was to 'impede' the 'white nationalist' agenda of her Republican colleagues. Wild." Mike Cernovich wrote "Hortman hears a who?"
Greg Gutfeld wrote "The media is acting like this is the end of the world. I'm sorry, but who the h--- is Melissa Hortman? Nobody knew who she was yesterday, and now we're supposed to act like we lost a founding father? Give me a f---ing break."
As for putting out a false conjecture on the motive, is that so different from Kimmel's saying that conservatives were trying to characterize Kirk's assassin as not a conservative?
I agree that it is similar to what Kimmel said, but Kimmel was not mocking the assassination. Thanks for the others.
“If you have evidence that liberals are significantly more likely to celebrate or advocate harm to conservatives than the reverse, please present it.”
Here you go:
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf
Check the Harvard-Harris poll numbers on 18-24 year olds who back Hamas. It’s about 50%, which means it’s gotta be north of 75% of that age bracket that votes Dem.
Relatively big numbers of somewhat older people chose “Back Hamas” as well, even when given 3 choices, not just 2.
And if you doubt that most of the people who chose “Back Hamas” wish harm to Jewish Israelis - at bare minimum - then there is simply no reasoning with you.
See also the numbers who support oppressor-oppressed ideology.
To be more precise, however, I don’t consider the people who hold these views to be “liberals”. But they are (almost entirely) surely leftists.
Generalizing, people who believe in oppressor-oppressed ideology, which holds that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors by *any means necessary*, are far more likely to advocate and celebrate violence against others. And this is the ideology of much of the left today.
I have now read both polls. According to the second, 63% of Democrats believed the US should be supporting Israel against Hamas. On oppressor/oppressed ideology, the young group splits 51/49, but that is on whether it justified affirmative action not whether it justified violence.
Your conclusion might be correct but the polls you cite don't give much evidence for it.
I agree that in the absence of information like the statement by the Harvard groups and what oppressor-oppressed theory is and who it is that believes in it, the polls alone would not give much evidence of it.
But much such evidence exists and is not difficult to find.
OTOH, If you are suggesting that the fairly large numbers of Democrats - especially among the younger ones whom it is well known are responsible for most violent behavior - who support terrorists in the wake of a murder / rape / hostage taking rampage is not evidence of support for violence against those with whom they disagree - is not evidence (not proof, but evidence) for my position, then perhaps we have different definitions of evidence.
Remember, my only strong statements here to omar were about hardcore, mostly younger, leftists. And specifically the ones who believe in oppressor-oppressed theory. And those polls are powerful evidence - though not conclusive proof by themselves - that there are quite a lot of them.
I.e. that it is not merely a small fringe.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/anti-conservatism
While not 100% identical to my point, Kling articulates a highly overlapping idea extremely well.
I looked through the first poll. On most of the questions, a majority of the 18-24 group take the position against Hamas. None of the relevant data is separated Republican/Democrat. There is no evidence there that leftists are more likely to be pro-Hamas — you are deducing that by first assuming it. And there is nothing about violence against conservatives.
I deduce based on the answers about oppressor-oppressed ideology, essentially.
Which of course was enunciated on October 8th in the letter stating “we hold Israel responsible for all unfolding violence in the region.”
“There is no evidence there that leftists are more likely to be pro-Hamas — you are deducing that by first assuming it“
Beyond the teachings of oppressor-oppressed ideology, the absence of any polling anywhere showing support for Hamas from anywhere but the political left. So I concede fully that the idea that leftists are overwhelmingly *more* likely to be pro-Hamas is not within that poll.
But I am not merely “assuming” it; there exists lots of evidence for that quite modest claim. I did not feel the need to include that bit in a comment response here.
I claim nothing like mathematical proof, but absolutely common sense logic.
To quote Bryan Caplan, I would be delighted to Bet on It.
FYI the majority of Jewish Israelis support Trump, so the “against ‘conservatives’” actually works there as well. But even if they were not, I stand by the assertion that people who support violence in this one instance are likely in general to support it against conservatives - given what oppressor-oppressed ideology teaches.
If I follow your logic correctly, it looks like this:
Liberals are significantly more likely to celebrate or advocate harm to conservatives than the reverse because:
1. In 2023, after Hamas attacked Israel, about 51% of 18- to 24-year-olds said that the attack was justified because of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
2. 18- to 24-year-olds are a representative proxy for liberals as a whole.
3. Therefore over 75% of Democrats in this age group believe the
attack was justified.
4. Most of these individuals also wish harm to Jewish Israelis.
5. And these people are not liberals, but leftists.
6. Leftists, because they believe the Palestinians were oppressed, believe Palestinians have the right to overthrow the Israelis by any means necessary.
7. Unstated, but presumably you feel that Hamas represents the Palestinians, at least in the minds of leftists.
8. And these leftists are, therefore, more likely to advocate and celebrate violence against other people, in general.
9. To connect back to the original topic, the argument must then equate the views of liberals with leftists (I am making a leap here because I did not see this).
10. Therefore, liberals are more likely to celebrate or advocate violence against conservatives.
Your chain of reasoning shows flaws when looked at closely:
-- this poll was conducted less than two weeks after the attack when emotions were raw and much information was not known and 49% of those 18 to 24 said they were not following the war closely or not following it at all;
-- your assumption that more than 75% of Democrats think the attack was justified is statistically weak;
-- I don't believe that most people who responded that they think Hamas was justified actually wish harm to Jewish Israelis.
-- if 18 to 24 year olds accurately characterized liberals as a group, then most liberals still live with their parents, are gamers, and are worried about their career prospects;
-- your shift from liberals to leftists, who you concede are a different group, undermines your claim about liberals;
-- your leap from how those who believe the oppressed have the right to use any means necessary to overthrow their oppressors to this is how the left (and, presumably, in your opinion, liberals) thinks is a leap too far.
Your data doesn’t show liberals are more violent—it only shows how shaky inferences can be when polling is stretched beyond its limits.
A free society, and even an unfree society, largely depends upon the domain of manners, the unwritten rules of conduct that enable smooth social intercourse.
Thus, an excessively legalistic society, where conduct is minutely regulated in the manner of Tocqueville's democratic despotism that he foresaw for America, is a hard and unnatural place for people to be in.
The best argument I have heard for free speech or free activity of anything short of aggression is to not cut rattles off snakes -- their silence is more dangerous to you than them.
I want the bigots out in the open, practicing their bigotry, not just so I can avoid the stores who forbid blacks, but so I can patronize the stores that forbid political talk inside.
I was 1000% with you until your last four words.
I don’t need “forbid politician talk inside”.
I merely want “are not explicit advocates for destructive policies.”
Different strokes for different folks.
The insistence by some that, by definition, only governments are able to infringe upon freedom of speech strikes me as difficult to take seriously. To the speaker, it would seem to make no difference whether he gets killed for his speech by someone representing a government or by an angry mob, or whether he refrains from speaking for fear of the former or for fear of the latter – his freedom is equally infringed in either case. Approval of assassinations in retaliation for speech, therefore, is an infringement on freedom of speech inasmuch as such approval increases the threat of such assassinations.
There are arguments against free speech that I didn't see discussed in the OP.
One is against speech that floods a venue with messages that are overwhelmingly likely not to be intended to share important ideas, and possibly to the point of crowding out messages that are. The central example of this is spammed advertising. Closely related is messaging that is intended to share an idea but still floods the venue, and may still crowd out other messages, aka crankery. If the venue is privately owned, then the same arguments for repressing speech for other reasons can apply here, but if the venue is public, there's still an extent to which such content floods the time the public has available for discussing the topics people consider important. (Imagine a town hall where one member keeps commandeering the megaphone to issue his one-hour statement about cryptocurrency.)
A second argument for repressing speech involves speech that puts innocent people in material danger. This includes doxxing (whereabouts of people that some other people would like to harm), and also information about the population's defenses (guard rotations; radio frequencies used for communicating with remote units; details of methods used to discover terrorist cells; names of moles in foreign countries). From an ideal libertarian perspective, the speech should be allowed, and only the act of harm punished; in practice, this is a good way to end any pure libertarian society.
The latter type of information turns out to be worth spending billions of dollars worldwide to uncover, and to protect. It also means that people will go to great effort to infer any of that information from even tiny, seemingly inconsequential leaks. Sharing something you know, that you could only know because Fred is secretly embedded in some terrorist camp and copying a USB key he's assigned to carry to nearby camps, means Fred is soon a dead man. The obvious solution is to suppress any such information, even minute details, unless it's whitelisted.
A weaker argument here involves speech that isn't going to lead to direct harm, but spreads some amount of circumstantial evidence that makes a person or organization look guilty of something of which they're innocent. One example would be a company working on its next flagship product, having to work secretly with suppliers, and producing partial information in receipts that falls into the hands of an intern who interprets it as embezzling. If the intern goes straight to the press, it smears the company faster than it can clean up the mess (and in the process, it loses its edge against competitors). Various organizations lay out rules for whistleblowing for this reason, requiring employees to share information up the management chain first, and stipulating penalties if they don't. This protects the organization, although it also protects management if it turns out to be actually embezzling, but if so, it's arguably just as dangerous to the intern either way.
A tougher argument for repressing speech involves speech that drives off other participants. This is ideally any speech that traduces reasonable norms for productive discussion - ad hominems, well poisoning, intellect bullying, Gish gallops, brigading, and so on. If the goal of speech is to share important ideas, and people in pursuit of that goal infer that a given venue will not support them because it's flooded with people waging war with words while hiding behind free speech protections, they will likely leave - which means free speech was functionally violated anyway.
It's a tough argument because people will disagree on what constitutes bullying, well poisoning, and all the rest. Such disagreements could be genuine or feigned, further confounding the problem. I've seen instances of repellent speech adorned with accusations of the other side engaging in similar tactics - occasionally the exact tactic employed by the repellent speech in question.
Part of the problem you raise is covered by the idea that you have the right to speak but not to have me listen. Part is covered by contract; an employer can make it a condition of employment that the employee agree not to reveal the employer's secrets.
I don't think freedom of speech requires all venues to be commons. A phone company can ban scam calls. A meeting can have rules about who can speak when and for how long.
I'd summarize my previous comment as expressing the following concerns: spam, cranks, revealing vulnerabilities, unrepairable damage, and driving out good speech.
I agree that the right to speech != the right to be heard. I take that to be meant to address the spam/crank concern. If so, then it's obviously possible in some cases for audiences to filter out spammers and cranks, but the fact remains that spam and crankery takes up space in the venue. Left unchecked, it can take up most of it. As I said above, this is straightforward to strike from private venues, but in public venues, someone can complain that it's unfair.
And even audience filtering doesn't always work, as in the case I mentioned with a town meeting. Audiences might not wish to spend their time in the parking lot waiting for the crank to finish his statement. That said, this might merely amount to an argument against town meetings for town business, and for online forums or video meetings with a notification mechanism for people to know when they can put down what they were doing and re-attend the meeting when the topic they don't care about is resolved.
Meetings can have time management rules, although this could work against topics that require a lot of time to resolve. A particular budget item might involve a lot of detail, taking time away from other items. If the time limit is hard, I can easily see people exploiting whatever the default decision will be by running out the clock. If the time limit is soft - i.e. it can be overridden if enough people call for more time - then a group of people can use that to crowd out time for items they don't want to be discussed. (There may be parliamentary norms I'm not aware of that mitigate these problems.)
The employment agreement would address the concern about willful disclosure of proprietary information, but it would not address the concern about an employee misinterpreting secret behavior as criminal.
And this appears to still leave the concerns about revealing vulnerabilities, unrepairable damage, and driving out good speech.
“Arguably the First Amendment is such a treaty, its broad outline accepted by each side in the belief that violation by their opponents will cost them more than violations by their supporters will gain them.”
Prior to 2020, I surely believed this was the case in the U.S. my entire life.
I don’t believe it to be the case now.
The left has made clear - both by polls and actions - that they would prefer not to have the First Amendment any longer. It survives only because it is so difficult to eliminate, not because it is in fact broadly accepted.
The younger left has made it *very* clear that they do not support the broad outline of the First Amendment at all.
Now if you want to argue that the Constitution in toto fits your description, I would concur.
But just as your claim has not been true of the Second Amendment for decades now, I don’t believe it is currently true of the First.
Sadly.
Seeing some of the mechanics of how social media censorship works has been eye opening. Like regulatory capture, the people and groups with the strongest incentive to censor others tend to take the reins, and in the narrative space those people are partisans. Even fact checking turns out to be a partisan hobby horse. The type of person who would do a good job doesn't want to exercise influence in that way as much as those who are convinced they have all the answers.
I had a post on fact-checkers:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/checking-the-fact-checkers
It's quite riveting to see one of the facts is the 97% consensus. I had read the paper myself and believed that Cook had happily allowed others to believe that the statistic referred to the position that humans are the main cause of warming, as well as it being extremely costly.
It's so interesting to see he specifically claims the 'main cause' interpretation was found by himself to be 97%, when in the paper it was transparently about humans having any effect more than zero. I have a radical belief that people consciously tell lies far less often than it appears - the corollary of that is that people also rarely apply conscious effort to know that what they say is true. I do not believe Cook is lying, and I believe there is little quality support for the position that 2°C is the necessary temperature limit, which is ultimately what most people think the 97% figure is in support of.
I find it hard to believe that Cook was not deliberately lying, given that he used the figure for his categories 1-3 with the description for category 1 — and category 1 was much smaller than 2 and 3. That looks like deliberate fraud.
I am less certain whether its response to my criticism, cited by David Henderson, was deliberate fraud, misstating my argument because he had no rebuttal, or whether he confused my criticism with something by someone else.
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/john-cooks-response-to-my-criticism.html
Fraud is certainly a strong likelihood for that in particular. The reason I could see otherwise is that I think climate change is primarily a "far mode" issue in Robin Hanson's framing - a big societal or moral issue where people are more moralizing, abstract, and less sensitive to trade offs.
Even when people in Cook's cultural group speak in practical, specific near mode, they are doing so in service to a sacred far mode shared belief. Cook may have specifically lied, but nobody else in the group reports that the 97% consensus is not true in the way it is claimed because they have chosen to treat the issue as one where truth is assumed, and which is so important that specific truths are reflexively subordinated if they don't service the cause. They are in a general state of not telling the truth.
Highly stimulating, and a highly useful distinction between narrow and broad definitions of free speech.
My major malfunction in recent years has been caused by university faculty uttering garbage and hiding behind the First Amendment. I had to think about this before jumping to conclusions.
If higher education were purely privately financed there would be no problem. Customers who want to consume junk are welcome to. In part this still applies to private universities, though there is too much government finance to exclusively rely on the market. I conclude that the most serious problem is the extension of First Amendment rights to entities clearly controlled by government -- the public colleges. At the very least public colleges should be allowed to get rid of faculty who hurt the university's reputation. Better, of course, to privatize.
This extension of First Amendment rights to publicly run colleges is just another symptom, though perhaps unintended, of blurring the distinction between the public and private sectors. And is an example of trying to blur the distinction between narrow and broad rights to free speech. We hardly know where one ends and the other begins.
Well, what could be the result of more strict societal limits on speech - in the longer run? A higher degree of segregation. For example, employees would be more aligned with the perspectives of their employers. Overall, positions would be more grounded existentially. On *this* ground, you can start a really open discussion *beyond* borders - with grounded opponents. Because one has not to fear cancellation, etc.
(Inspired by one of the comments…) What percentage of people, do you suppose, could identify with some version of this statement:
“I never heard of Charlie Kirk until I witnessed, with horror, people gloating about his death”?
I’ve now come across several people saying essentially that, and it describes my experience as well. I was in a group chat with my brother and some of his friends, and they were all gloating. (I did not want or attempt to censor them, but I did tell them I thought their behavior was foul. I defended that with arguments, and offered them alternative ways they could have acted that would not require them to change their views. These were dismissed out of hand and I gave up, not wanting to strain the relationship more than I already had.)
Anyway, if the percentage of people who identify with the statement above is significant, it suggests an odd pattern in our society. The way I’d describe this pattern is that some interactive combination of tribal identity and algorithmically-curated media exposes people disproportionately to instances of speech they see as wrong/stupid/evil—more readily even than the speakers’ intended audience are exposed to it!
How is it so many of Charlie Kirk’s haters knew who he was, had been following him with sneering contempt (for how long before he was killed??), and had memes and clever remarks ready to go the moment he was shot—meanwhile people who were indifferent or who may even have been supportive of him had no clue who he was until his assassination was the butt of so many jokes?
What does this say about the way our marketplace of ideas is arranged, and what does such an arrangement do to freedom of speech?
I don't remember hearing about Charlie Kirk before his assassination, but I heard about that before I heard about people gloating over his death and I don't think I have heard anyone gloating over his death yet. And I have not heard or heard of any jokes targeted at him.
Okay, but it seems to me a number of people did have the experience I had, of only learning who he was upon witnessing people gloating about his death. This suggests that our marketplace of ideas is arranged in a very non-ideal or at least convoluted way (with broadcast speech often reaching its anti-audience before it reaches its intended audience), do you agree? And if it is arranged that way, what are the implications for freedom of speech?
My guess is that those people are living in blue bubbles and so exposed largely to beliefs that the people in those bubbles want to hear and propagate. I am living in the Bay Area, which should be a blue bubble, but my sources of information are mostly online, which isn't.
So I don't think what you are observing is a general characteristic of the marketplace of ideas, beyond its tending to feed people the ideas they want to be fed.
Most people’s sources of information are mostly online, not just yours. The marketplace of ideas is largely online. Except for some outliers, people’s “bubbles” are virtual in derivation.
The marketplace of ideas does notice and respond to the indicators people give about what they want to be fed, but it feeds them based not on what they appear to want but based on what will make them pay attention for as long as possible. Outrage over an outgroup member expressing their “wrong” opinions is a tested and proven way to get most people’s attention.
Some of the world’s top cognitive psychologists and interaction designers work for the companies who operate the platforms that serve as the venue for the marketplace of ideas. These experts trade tips on how to keep users’ eyes glued to their screens. The world’s top computer engineers continually improve those designers’ capabilities, devising new paths, quicker paths, into users’ brains.
All the while information provenance grows harder and harder to trace, and the algorithms driving the spread of information become less and less transparent.
That is a radical and new development as far as idea-marketplaces go don’t you think?
I think it is a difference of degree, not kind. The one difference in kind is that the clustering no longer has to be geographical.
You don’t think for example that the highly engineered interfaces and opaque algorithms governing who gets shown what is a difference in kind?
But the non-geographicality of the clustering is at least as old as television since that media could easily reach across the country, and people all over simply had to choose what to watch based on their interests.
What about the fact that information is now dispatched by algorithms with surgical precision right into people’s pockets, based on work by teams of psychologists looking to maximize “time on task”? You think that is only a difference in kind from the way information found its way to audiences before social media?
Even assuming that censure does marginally limit nonsense in circulation - an unlikely but not heroic assumption - one is still confronted by the need to change societal beliefs as new evidence slowly accretes. At this in particular, censure is absolutely terrible.
Censorship concerns the false, the evil, the ugly.
You deal with falsehoods and you are right, freedom of expression allows criticism of falsehoods and we can hope that criticism will lead to the victory of truth. But perhaps we should think about the institutions that allow this criticism to be exercised properly. (Like the institutions of science that organize criticism). Emmanuel Macron had proposed an institution to supervise the press, but this idea was quickly fought and quickly forgotten.
For ugly, it is social norms (of good taste) that forbid it. But they are violated without too severe sanctions, and the problem is not very serious, alas.
The problem of freedom of expression arises above all for expressions that hurt or cause harm. For example pedophilia, nazism etc
The question is whether censorship, narrow or broad sense, does a better job of filtering than competition. One of the two major US parties contains a lot of people prone to describe those they disagree with as Nazis. Given a legal system where suppressing Nazi views by punishing those who express them is legal it could easily be used to suppress political views the incumbents don't like. Meanwhile, in a context where arguing for Nazism is legal, most of the small minority who identify as Nazis seem to have gotten their idea of Nazism from the general culture, not from writings by actual Nazis.
Arguably the most destructive idea in the US at present is climate catastrophism, not the idea that climate change is bad, which might be true, but that unless something drastic is done to prevent it the result will be catastrophe. I don't think there is any scientific basis for that but it is pretty widely believed with bad consequences. But that won't be censored, both because it is widely believed and because it provides arguments for things people want to do for other reasons.
So I think we are better off without censorship in either sense.
If the government, or anyone else, is more competent to identify things people should not read or watch, they can always publish a list of approved materials and leave it to individuals to accept or reject their judgement. That comes closer than censorship to the mechanism in science. I am free to publish my views on climate, and do, but I can't publish them in _Nature_ because they won't accept them. That leaves it up to interested individuals to decide what to trust.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/critique-of-comprehensive-evidence
“Arguably the most destructive idea in the US at present is climate catastrophism”
Well, I’d strongly agree that this one is in the top 3 or 5.
But I’d argue that the most destructive idea in the U.S. at present is that Dem politicians generally have good intentions, while GOP politicians have bad intentions and/or are stupid.
Eliminate this one idea, and while there would still be several blue states, Democrats would have no power nationally. Because on something like 75%+ of issues, voters nationally favor the relatively less interventionist policies of the GOP - whether those of the traditional center-right or even those of Trump “MAGA” - over those of the Democrats by at least 60-40, and often by much more than that.
I fully acknowledge that only on the policy questions rough percentages do I have hard data for my claim, not on the rest.
But imo our politics would be radically different, and arguably more like it was in the 1980s and 1990s, if the idea that “Democrat politicians have good intentions, better than those of GOP politicians” were eliminated.
For the institutions of science, I was thinking of the reading committees of journals, the reviewers on the papers presented in the colloquiums, PhD defense, the possibility of publishing articles that criticize articles that have already appeared, the evaluation of journals... These institutions work quite well and can be improved in the event of failure. It seems to me that it is these institutions that promote competition.
You regret the contemporary excesses that pervert these institutions. I am aware of this, but we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. First of all, as you say, it is only a question of a few controversial fields: economic science (as always) and recently, climate science, which has become curiously political. We must therefore now find a way to improve the institutions of science on these issues. The general problem is that there is no alternative. To bring out the famous intersubjective consensus described by Karl Popper, methodological and institutional rules are needed.
For censorship in general, you ask the right question. I was simply proposing that you approach the question from the angle of the three values; the true/false, the beautiful/ugly, the good/evil. On the question of Good/Evil, I think that there are words that can do harm or encourage evil. One can reasonably wonder if they should not be censored, i.e. punished in the same way as an assault.
How do you make it in the interest of the institution to support truth instead of using it to suppress views it dislikes, promote views it likes? "Fact-checkers" are supposed to be such an institution, but end up reflecting their own biases.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/checking-the-fact-checkers
The best we can do is competition, not giving some authority a monopoly in establishing truth.
So far as science is concerned, the more people use it as a source of truth in controversial contexts, the greater the incentive for partisans to try to take control of institutions that outsiders look at to find out what science says and use them to push their side of a controversy, the greater the incentives for scientists who are partisans to try to block the efforts of other scientists on the other side. The whole process badly corrupts science. You can find examples in my posts on climate: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate. Or compare _Scientific American_ in recent decades to what it was sixty years ago.
“Not all false statements are equally bad, however. A falsehood believed by many does more damage than one believed by few.‘
Even if this last statement is surely true more often than not, even far more often, it is by no means generally true.
In particular, a falsehood believed by few can indeed do more damage if those few are much more prone to violence.
Almost any statement of that sort has an implicit ceteris paribus. Characteristic A makes something more likely, but A+B might make it less likely.
Fair enough.
But in the current context that you are writing about free speech - specifically with the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk - this is surely quite relevant.
False statements designed to outrage those who believe in oppressor-oppressed theory - one of whose tenets is that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY - do more damage than those designed to outrage the Amish, or classical liberals, or older-school tree-hugging progressives.
A disturbing aspect of our current political landscape is that a not insubstantial portion of the left indeed believe this quasi-religious oppressor-oppressed ideology, while most of the rest of the left, including virtually all of its leaders - John Fetterman seems to be one of the very few exceptions - refuses to push back at all on it.
Free speech, more accurately political speech, being a political question, demands a political context. The first duty of any State is to perpetuate itself. Hence, a State can not allow subversive political speech. Any speech that attacks the political formula, as Mosca puts it, the governing myth of a state, is liable to be proscribed.
That goes for all states, liberal, conservative, theocracies. Thus, in present liberal states with egalitarian political formula, speech tending to have racial overtones is subversive.
A country with free market economy that allows communist speech, has either very confident or very silly political leadership.
So, the criterion of correct beliefs does not require omniscient censor but the correctness is relative to the political formula of the state in which the speech is made.
In the US, the governing myth is democracy. Mencken attacked it entertainingly, was widely read, was not suppressed. It's still democracy.
I don't agree that the first duty of any state is to perpetuate itself — duty to whom? It may be better if the governing myth of a state is successfully attacked, changing it to a better state. The inhabitants of China and Russia are better off than they were under Mao and the USSR in part because the governing myths of those states were abandoned.
Thankfully the U.S. is still a constitutional republic with relatively strong protections for minority rights and not a “mob rule” representative democracy where slim majorities can impose their will and make fairly radical changes.
The American state, regardless of its ideological pretensions, has behaved quite as like any other state. At the very beginning, Washington suppressed Whiskey rebels. It has instigated wars, expanded its territory whenever it could.
Existence being pre-condition for action, anything that acts, must be directed first and foremost to self-perpetuation.
Many things that states do,that appear mysterious from individualistic perspective, may become clearer from the perspective of the state.
"Existence being pre-condition for action, anything that acts, must be directed first and foremost to self-perpetuation."
That is not true. Animals act and they put reproduction above self perpetuation, due to the effect of evolution. More generally, there is no need for action for self-perpetuation to be "first and foremost." A state might, for example, put spreading the religion its rulers believe in above its own survival, be willing to spend resources on that goal that could be used to strengthen it against its enemies.
You remind me of Ayn Rand's attempt to derive her moral views from life along similar lines.
Animals perpetuate themselves through their offspring. And the modern biologists assign agency to the genes, self-perpectuators par excellence.
My precise formulation is, material cause of the state is its land and people; the formal cause is the Constitution; the efficient cause is the collective will and action of people themselves along with the institutions that help formulate and execute political will; and the final cause is the Way of the state--the vision of what it seeks to realize in actuality.
So, a theocracy is directed to realize its vision.Normallythere should be no conflict with self-perpectuation but I suppose if the vision demands it, than so be it.
And, in your terms, a liberal societies vision is freedom, so if preserving itself conflicts with freedom it doesn't.
That liberalism is directed to freedom, could be an American conception. In 19c Britain, liberalism was perhaps more directed to Reform. The liberal governments passed several legislations, aiming to reform and improve conditions in factories, public health and established public education.
These laws made for bigger government though still much smaller by present standards and were opposed by Tories, which were consequently the party of smaller government in practice.
As an example of contradiction liberalism involves, is religious freedom. But Dostoevsky observes, a man does not merely want to worship by himself, he wants his neighbor to worship along with him, and if he doesn't, he will make his neighbor worship with him ( Brother Karamazov). Herein you have the trouble in nutshell.
Liberalism is the Great Denial for it denies the political nature of man whereby mankind is organized into particular, self-ruling, morally authoritative states.
The political nature then defines insider/outsider, neighbor/stranger, friend/enemy dichotomies.
A liberal might deny particularity, this is the left-liberal tendency, and which tends logically to the world state.
Or he might deny moral authority, which is the right-liberal tendency, and which tends to no state.
In world state, all men are neighbors to each other.
In no state, they are strangers to each other.
Kipling's poem Stranger gives clearest picture of what stranger is.
The right-liberal vision of no state, which is what you mean by freedom, involves contradictions. Significantly no such thing has yet appeared and none is on horizon.
That explains why states do things, not why they should do them. I am writing for humans, not for states.
Man, being a political animal, is naturally organized into states. Indeed, it is the unceasing struggle for pre-eminence among individuals that causes the state to be.
In any case, it should be easier to agree on "What Is" than on "What Should Be".
But less useful if your objective is deciding how to act, for instance how to vote.
Well, kings may be allowed an occasional court jester. But the overweening confidence of the American state, that let it dismiss Mencken, didn't serve it so well against the decades of subversion, both from the left and the right, from those who did not write so well, and which partly accounts for the peril that the American establishment finds itself in.
Naturally a great deal might be added to the discussion.
And you think that if the state had the power to censor political speech it would have been used in a way that prevented that subversion rather than supporting it?
As I said, the self-confidence of the American state made it rather heedless of subversion. Otherwise, I do not doubt that ingenuity of judges, which they have displayed in many other contexts, would have found ways around the first amendment.
Is your point that suppression of political speech would only work to inflame subversion?
Not only, but I don't think that states consistently act in ways that preserve their current form, because the action is by individuals acting in their own interest. King John, to take a simple example, acted in ways that almost destroyed the British monarchy — when he died there was a French army in London and the heir to France was claiming the English throne.
The US intellectual class, at least since the New Deal, has been more hostile to capitalism than the population and largely influences the Federal government, so the power to block speech might well have been used against the supporters of capitalism. More generally, capitalism makes societies richer but governments less powerful, so governments have some tendency to do things that undermine capitalism.
Each individual has a vision of How Things Should Be, or the Way. These individuals struggle among themselves for pre-eminence. This struggle dynamically generates the Way of the State, and the State acts to realize the Way.
So, the thing is dynamic-- the State forms the minds of individuals and struggle amongindividuals continually generates the Way of the State.
Edit needed: “A somewhat different argument against freedom of speech, broadly or narrowly defined, was illustrated in the aftermath of the assassination of *Charley* Kirk…” “Charlie”
Thanks. Fixed.