The Best System for Determining What is True

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). Rauch has written an extraordinary book offering a detailed airtight case for why we need each other in order to determine what is true. We need a mediated social system in order to filter out the despots and crackpots, but who will mediate such a system? The incredible answer is no one in particular. The system powers the process, but the system cannot function in the absence of three prerequisites. The following passage sums up what we need to get the job done:

An epistemic regime—that is, a public system for adjudicating differences of belief and perception and for developing shared and warranted conclusions about truth—should provide three public goods.

First, knowledge. The system should be competent at distinguishing reality from non-reality, and at building on previous discoveries so that knowledge accumulates, thereby generating even more knowledge.

Second, freedom. The system should encourage rather than repress human autonomy, creativity, and empowerment. It should welcome and exploit human diversity, especially diversity of opinion, and it should not allow any person or faction to use force or intimidation to control what others say or believe.

Third, peace. The system should reward social conciliation, maximize the number of disagreements which are resolvable, and compartmentalize and marginalize disagreements when it cannot resolve them. It should inculcate intellectual values which abhor violence and bullying, and it should establish institutions and norms which tolerate and even embrace disagreement and doubt.

No one should expect any knowledge-producing system to be perfect, or close to it. Still, many centuries of history show that the liberal system—the reality-based community—comes closer to perfection than any other human social invention.

Next, we need two rules (p. 89):

The fallibilist rule: Ho one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and onlyinsofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’sfallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based. The Constitution of Knowledge

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

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The (Old) Solution to our Two Dominant Troll Cultures

From The Constitution of Knowledge, by Jonathan Rauch (2021):

We are in for a fight against two insurgencies: the spread of viral disinformation and alternative realities, sometimes called troll culture, and the spread of enforced conformity and ideological blacklisting, sometimes called cancel culture. One is predominantly right-wing and populist, the other predominantly left-wing and elitist. One employs chaos and confusion, the other conformity and social coercion. But their goals are similar, and often, weirdly, they act as de facto allies.

What troll culture and cancel culture have in common is that they are techniques of what propaganda experts often call information warfare. Rather than using rational persuasion to seek truth, they manipulate the social and media environments for political advantage. They may appear marginal, disorganized, or unhinged, but they are aggressive, expansionary, and rooted in a sophisticated understanding of human cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. They have captured commanding institutional heights, including (for four years) the White House and substantial parts of academia. They exploit the capabilities of digital technology to amplify their speed and reach. But they have also engendered encouraging pushback, as awareness of the methods they use and the dangers they pose has grown.

How do we protect ourselves from these trolls? We need to sustain and defend our most maligned and most important principle: Free Speech. Rauch explains:

The miracle is how robust free expression and liberal science have proved to be, despite unremitting attacks from every direction over hundreds of years. The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle 'A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It”

In all of human history, every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history. Those of us who favor it, and also our children, and also their children and their children, will need to get up every morning and explain and defend our counterintuitive social principle from scratch, and so we might as well embrace the task and perform it cheerfully.

Constitution of Knowledge, pp 17-19.

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Attack on Academic Freedom by Israeli Diplomat and Congressional Democrat

As Glenn Greenwald points out, to believe in free speech requires that we believe in free speech for everyone regardless of their point of view. UNC Ph.D. student Kylie Broderick has lost her job because her University failed to take a principled stand on free speech.

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SCOTUS: The Function of Free Speech is to Invite Dispute and Stir People to Anger

The next time someone tells you that you need to be silenced because your speech is offending them, mention this quote from the U.S. Supreme Court opinion of Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), reversing a disturbing-the-peace conviction of a hate-monger. Justice Douglas wrote the opinion, which included these gems:

The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion. As Chief Justice Hughes wrote in De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 365, 260, it is only through free debate and free exchange of ideas that government remains responsive to the will of the people and peaceful change is effected. The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.

Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, supra, 315 U.S. at pages 571-572, 62 S.Ct. at page 769, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. See Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 262, 193, 159 A.L.R. 1346; Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367, 373, 1253. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.

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The Free Speech “Absolutists” Strike Back against NPR.

A few weeks ago, NPR offered a program on "free speech" in which none of the participants took a strong stand in favor of free speech.

In this video, Matt Taibbi (Journalist/Commentator), Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU), Amna Khalid (Carlton College History Professor) and Nico Perrino (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) respond to the lopsided NPR presentation. Each of these participants recoiled at the idea that there is such a thing as a "free speech absolutist," an idea repeatedly promoted by the NPR panel. Matt Taibbi explains:

This idea that we're free speech absolutist is something that's been invented by people who are against the who want to regulate speech in a way that i think is new and very repressive. They're mischaracterizing the positions of people like all of us.

Nadine Strossen further explains:

Government may restrict speech if but only if it can satisfy an appropriately heavy burden of proof if it can show that the particular restriction is necessary and the least speech restrictive alternative in order to promote some countervailing goal of compelling importance whether that goal be public safety for example or individual safety and when you think about it that just makes common sense of course most of us would be willing to trade off free speech for you know public safety or even national security but it's a fool's choice to give up free speech if we're not gaining safety in return or worse yet as is often the case if the censorship no matter how well intended does more harm than good which is typically the case.

Taibbi points out that the NPR panel has no solutions to the "problem" that speech is often unruly and offensive:

It's so important to our conception of what our society is all about this idea of of being able to express ourselves that is preferable to the alternative. The alternative is that somebody would have to regulate the speech and that's the problem is once once we get into who's doing that regulating that that's where we get to the scary part and they don't address any of that. All they want to do is, in a very narrow way, say "Oh this libertarian hands off approach to to speech regulation doesn't work." But it's so much more complicated than that.

Amna Khalid accuses the NPR panelists of being myopic, over-focusing on the relatively functional state of American culture compared to the many vast oppressed populations in other parts of the world, where free speech is desperately needed:

In our current moment if you cast your eyes beyond the pond and look at the rest of the world you will see so many examples of how limitations on free speech are a way of shutting down the rights of minorities.

I've listened to the NPR presentation and repeatedly heard the NPR panel members attack the straw man they labeled "Free Speech Absolutist." It is as if those panel members never heard of widely recognized restrictions on free speech, including libel laws, incitement laws, laws prohibiting speech constituting hostile work environments and laws prohibiting fraud. I highly recommend this discussion:

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