Thought for the Day

[MrFanti]

If Trish were to say that the Earth is round and you were to say the Earth is flat would that be a simple difference of opinion or would one of you be wrong? I don't actually think free speech absolutism is a coherent philosophy when enforced in private settings because it forces people not to use their critical reasoning ability to discriminate between differences of opinion and factually incorrect statements. Requiring online forums to publish harmful, false information brings on an epistemological crisis because it compels people to treat bad faith statements as though they are as worthy of a place in the discourse as good faith opinions.

If someone were to assert that it's their honest opinion that the election will be held the day after it's really held, is that something someone should allow to be published? In my opinion they would have a moral obligation to censor it because it's false and will lead to people not voting. If someone says that arsenic is a treatment for covid and it's their valid opinion should that be published? What about someone saying there are 50,000 destroyed ballots in a dumpster with a Chinese shipping receipt when there's just been an attempted coup?

The idea that governments should not proscribe speech protects society enough from the slippery slope. Forcing people to publish false, hateful nonsense or even deciding to publish such nonsense because you think it provides a forum for disagreement really enables the dissemination of propaganda and pollutes the discourse. Online forums are not like a sidewalk or a public space in my view.

I'll say it again...
BOTH sides can't stand when someone has a different opinion/view than themselves.

Hence why BOTH sides are vying for CONTROL.

Part of FREE speech is to be able to DISAGREE.
Both sides have side-stepped that or have forgot it.

It's also a slippery slope when government controls media (See Cuba/China/Russia/Venezuela/N Korea/WW-2 Germany)

[broncofan]

I'll say it again...
BOTH sides can't stand when someone has a different opinion/view than themselves.

Hence why BOTH sides are vying for CONTROL.

Part of FREE speech is to be able to DISAGREE.
Both sides have side-stepped that or have forgot it.

It's also a slippery slope when government controls media (See Cuba/China/Russia/Venezuela/N Korea/WW-2 Germany)

You don't have to say it again because you didn't say anything to begin with.
A. The government in the US has never controlled twitter. The question is whether misinformation and harassment should be allowed on the site by the people who OWN and MANAGE IT. The government has nothing to do with this discussion.
B. Certain things are not matters of opinion but matters of fact. It's not stating an opinion to assert nefarious things happened and then provide no evidence of it because none exists (ie the election fraud garbage). That's called lying. In a bunch of the examples you provided tyranny was actually enabled by systematic lying.

Also, just to move on since I know you're going to repeat yourself, Tesla has lost over 110 billion dollars of its market cap. The market cap is the total value of all the stock traded in a company. Tesla is trading at a PE ratio of 118, which means that if you buy Tesla and they paid out every penny of earnings to shareholders as dividends, you'd receive less than 1% of what you paid. The market must have built in assumptions about a fast growth rate for the company. It will be interesting to see what that's based on.

[filghy2]

Anything that is privately owned is usually incentivized to maintain decent ethics because people can find alternatives if they permit harassment, racism, or dangerous misinformation. Elon Musk has put almost no thought into what his construction of free speech means because he is now saying that he thinks speech should be permitted as long as it's legal. Yet what is legal varies a great deal depending on where you are.

As you suggest, minimal moderation is not going to be as easy as he seems to think. If Twitter turns into a troll-ridden cesspool that will be very off-putting for users and advertisers. He is probably not doing it for financial reasons, but he will still need to service his borrowings after paying 38% above market valuation for a company that is not profitable.

For a supposed business genius, Musk does not have great record of actually generating profits. Telsa made profits only in the past 2 years and his other projects are still making losses. I wonder how long financiers will continue to indulge his erratic behaviour, vanity projects and personal fixations? Tesla stocks (on which the Twitter financing is secured) have fallen since the announcement so it seems there are concerns already.

[filghy2]

But more than that, if you allow it to become a cesspool of conspiracy theories and misinformation about important civic matters, it will cause harm.

This is a good recent article on how social media have contributed to the breakdown on social cohesion and trust in institutions. In particular, it encourages aggressive/extreme views at the expense of more moderate views and promotes tribalistic mob dynamics and confirmation bias.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-babel/629369/

The textbook model, in which the unfettered market achieves the best outcomes because good products outcompete bad products, clearly does not apply to the market for information. For most products, people can generally make reasonable judgements about how well the product performs. This does not work for information because many people lack objective criteria for sorting good information from bad, and are influenced by various biases. This was less of a problem in the past because information was filtered through a limited number of mass media gatekeepers, but the digital age has led to a fragmentation of sources.

[Stavros]

I'll say it again...
BOTH sides can't stand when someone has a different opinion/view than themselves.

Hence why BOTH sides are vying for CONTROL.

Part of FREE speech is to be able to DISAGREE.
Both sides have side-stepped that or have forgot it.

It's also a slippery slope when government controls media (See Cuba/China/Russia/Venezuela/N Korea/WW-2 Germany)

1) I can't think of any country whose Government does not limit the media in terms of an absolute right of expression. The mere fact that it is illegal to encourage criminal behaviour suggests that there will always be legal constraints on the media. Moreover, I think most people if asked, would agree that this is a good thing.

2) The argument at issue here is not so much about content, but form, and instead of using the 'relative' concept, think in terms of what has been called 'Equal Validity'.

The assumption here is that two contradictory statements are equally valid: Abortion would be a fair topic to discuss. But Abortion appears to be a good example because of its complexity, and even then the validity of one argument can, it seems to me, only be valid if those opposed to it agree that legal as well as moral rights are taken away from the citizen in order to 'preserve life'. The validity of one side of the argument, thus depends on the denial of the other, but where this denial in reality is more than a difference of opinion, but impacts the human subject in real time, and in terms of the practice of the law. Moreover, denial of abortion can in some instances, cause harm to the pregnant woman, so the 'free from harm' argument with regard to the foetus suggests either that the pregnant woman's value is diminished by her foetus, or that the argument is so flawed that it cannot be right.

But think of the statement 'The Earth is Flat' -is the disagreement in fact two sides of an 'equally valid' claim? If science can prove the Earth is not flat, surely there is no equality in the claim that it is? On this basis, the Equal Validity argument is without merit.
There is an interesting discussion of this in a review of Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge-
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame


3) The Elite, not the Social Construction of Reality. Rather than the more familiar 'social construction of reality' I want to suggest that most of our dominant discourses in politics and philosophy have been created by elites -not just western philosophy. It was sort of amusing to see Boris Johnson in India having a red dot painted onto his brow, being the signifier of a Brahmin, for what other caste could he be in a Hindu context? The point is that I have taken up Derrida again, and can now see how he argues that so many real people have been left out of the dominant discourses, or 'marginalized' that the 'disappearance of humanity' that you find in the philosophies of Nietzsche through Heidegger to Derrida expresses the way in which people can often 'see' the world they live in and assume they are unequal and unrepresented because they just ain't worth it. It is the link between Marx and the present, and the prevailing idea that as long as elites determine the discourse, real change will not happen. It also explains why there has been so much hostility to the idea of being transgendered, as well as its real political challenges, in schools, in sports -the existence of a gender that cannot be simply defined in terms of 'Either/Or' or which insists on being an additional category, or a spectrum of categories, challenges the vertical control of the narrative as well as its legal forms, just as Critical Race Theory challenges these structures to both acknowledge the way they are shaped by Race, and do something to dismantle them.

These ideas, about what has been repressed, excluded, pushed to the margins, for the benefit of a few, emerges from this fascinating lecture, not as forbidding as it might seem-

[trish]

Sometimes people are so desperate to persuade others that they resort to lies, slander and deliberate misinformation. They say things they don’t even believe because they think those lies support their position and will help win others to their side. When you’ve lost this much intellectual integrity you’ve lost the right to claim the ears of your fellow citizens. Once you lose the attention of the intellectually honest, you limit your audience to those who are already on your side. There is no need to persuade them…they only need to know the new lies that are to be spread today.

[broncofan]

For most products, people can generally make reasonable judgements about how well the product performs. This does not work for information because many people lack objective criteria for sorting good information from bad, and are influenced by various biases. This was less of a problem in the past because information was filtered through a limited number of mass media gatekeepers, but the digital age has led to a fragmentation of sources.

This is a useful way to think about it. The other thing about information is it's not clear people are even attempting to sort their information based on accuracy. I suppose that's why you mention biases.

Do people want to be informed or entertained? Do they want to be outraged or frightened? The outrage works best if they tell themselves they're reading the truth, but also if what they're reading is selected to heighten that outrage or is simply untrue. The whole idea that people can hear every viewpoint and decide what is true depends on people actually wanting to listen to every viewpoint instead of just the ones that trigger the right part of their brain.

The word gatekeeper is often used negatively to imply a paternalism or an attempt to filter information in a way that might keep people in the dark. But it used to be that at least there were people making some judgements about what is credible and what is not which I think is preferable though we're not going back entirely.

Finally, I am interested in following Tesla stock simply because it will be interesting to see what happens if earnings growth isn't consistent in the next five years. It's not going to continue to trade at 184 times earnings (the site that said 118 used ebitda for the ratio which looked better for Tesla) if their earnings are flat. Musk's net worth is tied to the price of his stock, the stock is trading on great expectations, and the company's CEO is a very public clown. It will be interesting to see though I'm sure he'll be fine...

It is kind of an interesting strategy though to sell cars that are environmentally friendly and then clearly cater to people who are less environmentally conscious politically (he's retweeting Mike Cernovich on twitter).

[Stavros]

This is one of the best expositions of CRT applied to the law I have seen or read. The keywords are 'Preferential', 'Colour Blindness', 'Affirmative Action', 'Asymmetrical', with some fascinating insights into Plessy-v-Ferguson, Martin Luther King's 1963 speech at the climax of the March on Washington, and some brutal comments on the law....and it's not too long.

[filghy2]

It is kind of an interesting strategy though to sell cars that are environmentally friendly and then clearly cater to people who are less environmentally conscious politically (he's retweeting Mike Cernovich on twitter).

I guess you don't necessarily need to believe in something in order to make money from it. That said, it doesn't seem like a good strategy to antagonise your customer base by becoming too publicly associated with right-wing views.

I don't think there is much doubt that the market for electric vehicles is going to grow strongly. The question is what will happen to Tesla's market share once the established manufacturers get into EVs in a bigger way.

[broncofan]

I don't want to read any more about this disgusting human being who went to Buffalo to shoot African Americans at a grocery store and murdered 10 people.

He wrote a manifesto, which I also don't want to read, and the fact that he may have live streamed his shooting is repulsive beyond words. The forums he posted on are littered with the kind of stuff that will inevitably be in his demented manifesto. Again, I don't think it's an acceptable thing to facilitate discussions among white supremacists as they share their hateful ideas and feed off of each other's stupidity. You can't keep people from talking but you don't have to make it easier for every hateful person to find their group of likeminded haters and conspire to commit similar acts of mayhem and murder.