Meaningful Discussions of Contentious Topics

The first question we must ask regarding EVERY controversy is whether one side is disproportionately well-funded, institutionally-fortified and ill-motivated (by $, power or ideology) and thus able to manufacture a false consensus. If so, meaningful discussion is impossible.

Excellent analysis of the problem with most transgender discussions by Geoffrey Miller here:

Miller Tweets:

Good thread, in principle. But in practice, the woke left has captured most of the biomedical scientific institutions. If we want studies challenging their narrative, who gives the research grants? Which academics would have the guts to run the studies, knowing it would nuke their careers? Who else is willing to collaborate on the studies? Which journals would even consider them? Who would review them objectively? How would journals withstand woke pressure to retract 'transphobic' studies? Which media would cover the results, rather than ignoring them? These problems seem very severe... and probably explain why we haven't already seen countervailing studies.

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FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, addressing the audience at FIRE's recent gala expanding its free speech mission beyond schools and colleges. I created the following transcript based on this video:

Athens. 375 BCE. The agora. A man goes before the agora, and he talks about a better world in which the smartest of us would would lead us the people who can understand the real and permanent truth that exists beyond our common understanding. It would be a new and better world led by the Guardian class. And a man stands up and says, "Plato, this sounds awful. Like really awful. "By philosopher kings, you mean like you right? And you really think us dummies sit and watched shadows all day?"

Fast forward ahead to the French Revolution. Robespierre is defending the terror by citing the general will. This same figure pops up again, and says, by "general will," you mean like yours, right?

Fast forward again, to default to the Bolshevik revolution. People say to Lenin, "You know, I don't know if you're seeing this. But your system makes good people into suckers and sociopaths and gives them superpowers, right?"

And then fast forward again to the Nazis. And someone stands up and says, "So you guys think you're really into evolution, and you don't understand biodiversity?"

And sometimes these people managed to survive because instead of saying any of this stuff, they stand up and instead say, "I don't want to get guillotine. Anybody else want to move to the United States?"

And a lot of us are descended from these very types of people. I am for one. And why do I bring this weirdo up? Because he is us. He is people like the people in this room. People who do not like the arrogance of power. People who do not like the idea that someone who thinks they're smarter than us is going to tell us what to say or what to think. It's the personality that brings us all together.

So one thing that all the weirdos that I work out at FIRE have in common is we hate bullies. What is our job? Our job is to fight the Guardians, now and forever. And the problem is, of course, that a lot of times, this is a population that self-elects in every generation, the ones who are going to save us from ourselves. Weirdly enough, they oftentimes claim to speak for the people, which doesn't really work. The funny thing is they usually talk about, "Oh, I speak to the people. I mean, maybe there's people over there. They're the real people. You might have false consciousness or something.

And whenever you hear this, and it's very important to say today, when someone says that they claim to speak for the people, you should say to them, "Why don't you let the people speak for themselves?" That is the wisdom of the First Amendment. So what do we get as we celebrate free speech, as we celebrate the First Amendment? We should remember what we fight for, because the fight is getting harder. But we need to remember why we fight for it. So what does free speech give us? Free speech does not give us certainty. And that's a good thing. Certainty is a dangerous illusion. But it does give us richness. It does give us complexity. It does give us nuance. It does give us awe if we're lucky. And it gives us the only chance we'll ever have to know the world as it really is. And what does free speech give us that's better than civility? Candor, and authenticity. Authenticity. You cannot be yourself if you're not allowed to speak. Censorship is a tactic used over and over again that societies use to lie to themselves that they're just fine. And that's why I've joked for years that censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. It makes you feel a little better about your horrible disease. But your horrible disease keeps getting worse.

What else can free speech give you that the Guardians can't? Individuality? You can't have individuality without freedom of speech. There's a cynicism that often goes with this. Just remember that when people talk about being unique individuals--and we have all of this kind of putting people in the groups--remember, your individual uniqueness is a scientific and mathematical fact. Not some goofy poetic vision. It's literally true and never let someone take that away from you.

On the Other Side, none of us are all that smart individually, except for maybe Steve Pinker, who's here tonight. But if we stay curious, intellectually humble and keep talking to each other, we can know a billion billion times more than any lone human being. It'll be messy. It'll be strange. It'll sometimes be troubling. But I'd rather live in the real world with the unruly and ever-evolving lot of you than to live in the dreary conformity of any utopia. I want nothing to do with utopia. It's a place where humans can't go and stay fully human. The chaotic paradise, the loud, creative cacophony of a free people, is where I want to be.

Continue ReadingFIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Taxonomy of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Matt Taibbi's most recent report fleshing out the taxonomies of the "Censorship Industrial Complex." This is what we know so far about the 50 groups (Funded by well-monied foundations, many of them with government support) dedicated to protecting you from your own thoughts. They see us as infantile and naive, defenseless and incapable of sorting through conflicting information. The existence of these sorts of organizations indicate some combination of grifting/rent-seeking or a substantial abandonment of the American Project, IMO.

Taibbi comments:

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense.

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And then almost predictably, we now know that Facebook it protecting us from Matt Taibbi's analysis. of the Censorship Industrial Complex:

As one of our contributors points out, Meta is indeed very big on irony. It seems the social media giant has deemed an announcement about the Racket report on censorhip to be “hate speech.”

I try to keep perspective about incidents like this, given that smaller independent outlets deal with much more serious threats to their livelihood when they have content blocked or receive strikes on sites like YouTube. But in this case, a lot of people apart from myself have put in a lot of work on a report that wasn’t intended to be sensationalistic or needlessly provocative. It’s a scrupulously researched project that is intended to provide other journalists and researchers a starting point for investigations into this space.

I’ve put in a query to Facebook, but if this is how the algorithm responds to this kind of content, it says a lot about their algorithm.

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Michael Shellenberger: Totalitarianism is on the Rise

If I heard anyone saying these things three years ago, I would have thought that person needed help for a mental condition. Based on many things I've read and seen in the past three years, however, I am gravely concerned that Michael Shellenberger is not overstating the problems we face:

Around the world, politicians have either just passed or are on the cusp of passing sweeping new laws, which would allow governments to censor ordinary citizens on social media and other Internet platforms.

Under the guise of preventing “harm” and holding large tech companies accountable, several countries are establishing a vast and interlinked censorship apparatus, a new investigation by Public finds.

Politicians, NGOs, and their enablers in the news media claim that their goal is merely to protect the public from “disinformation.” But vague definitions and loopholes in new laws will create avenues for broad application, overreach, and abuse.

In Ireland, for example, the government may soon be able to imprison citizens simply for possessing material that officials decide is “hateful.” Under the RESTRICT Act in the US, the government may soon have the authority to monitor the Internet activity of any American deemed a security risk.

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Bill Maher Presents “The Cojones Awards” to Honor Those who Resist Cancel Culture

In this episode, Bill Maher presents “The Cojones Awards. You can imagine what the trophies look like. Maher: “We present these solid brass balls to the individuals and organizations who others have tried to silence, but who answered ‘That's not a rule. Fuck you.’”

Continue ReadingBill Maher Presents “The Cojones Awards” to Honor Those who Resist Cancel Culture