Dissident Speech And Freedom Of Reach

         

Eternal Problems And Pat Solutions

Imagine being unceremoniously thrown out of a new friend’s home after saying one thing that caught him off-guard. In the moment you figured that your line would be interpreted as another benign statement, but it utterly repelled him. The line’s contents are irrelevant for our purposes. For all we care; a spin on the recent news, a twistedly crass joke, a thinly-veiled threat directed at someone you both know, a flawless syllogism getting at a sacrilegious truth. It could’ve been anything. Apart from the isolated utterance, suppose also that you had ample reason to suspect that the unapologetically opinionated personality you’ve been told you have many times over could have gone on to ruffle the friend you’ve just begun to know. You had a sense that it could happen, or would happen, somewhere down the line. You didn’t figure it would be this soon, but there you go. What’s important is that you chose to speak in a free-wheeling manner, as you tend to, instead of letting your apprehension of a possibly unpleasant confrontation stop you.

 

You believe exactly what the impartial spectator believes. The impartial spectator can at once understand that you were not entitled to remain guested in the salty friend’s pad, while grasping that he acted like a jerk for booting you. As a conversationalist, your friend is free to have an intensely negative overreaction to what you said, and indeed to any statement, for any reason. But as a host, and especially as one who considers himself to be at least somewhat gracious, he is morally analyzable in this circumstance. He is capable of properly handling vs. mishandling his follow-up action to the gut-level reaction that any statement spawns in him. This is something he can do well or badly even when he’s not in the midst of hosting company, but he can do it egregiously poorly whenever an opportunity to mistreat a guest he’s invited into his home arises.

 

So I want to be clear that the host’s knee-jerk sensibilities are not what lands him in the wrong. His freely acting on those sensibilities, to the tune of that gut-level defensiveness, is what makes him wrong and a graceless bastard. By catering to primal hankerings; by welcoming the outburst, the ex-friend shows himself to be inadequately introspective of his first-order mental faculties.

 

This behavior is improper in some moral ways (he wronged you) and in some non-moral ways as well (he’s plain undisciplined and incurious). His giving you the boot entails what I like to call dualistic misconduct as it captures two main sources of misconduct; epistemic and moral. 

 

To recap; you have no rights claims (i.e. legal, constitutional, contractual) to remain on this person’s property, and you know it. Yet this sheds zero light as to the evaluative status of the host’s decision to expunge you from his home and, presumably, to end the friendship over it.

 

If you see nothing wrong with this summary, consider yourself conceptually spared from about ~99% of False Dilemma arguments surrounding Big Tech deplatforming supposed ideological groups on ideological or non-ideological grounds. Maybe the ~99% estimate is pushing it, but honestly I can’t see it being much lower than that. It would take me less than twenty seconds to recount the totality of people who frequently discuss these themes and who manage to avoid indulging various low-resolution mental models for calibrating the problem-deliberation-solution dynamics and stakes. Most of the commentators with whom I’m familiar have shown themselves to favor something akin to one (or two) of the following three proposition-paragraphs:

 

(1)“Tech industry giants did nothing wrong in the aftermath of MAGA seditionists’ invading the Capitol. The wrongs of inaction are the only genuine mistakes Big Tech has made, and those mistakes spanned for at least four years. It is by permabanning a powerful and incendiary figure like DJT, and his more ardent — probably violence-tolerating — supporters, that Big Tech course-corrected as much as possible in the Fourth Quarter.”

 

(2)“The platforms controlled by tech industry giants ought to be treated like public utilities, even though they’re strictly speaking not public utilities in any sense as of now. What’s critical is that we are marshalling impossible-to-refute arguments for why they should be turned into public utilities. Consequently, we can say that their recent decisions are violations of people's speech rights after all, if not ipso facto legally or contractually, then surely symbolically.”

 

(3) “To Censure Is To Censor”.

 

(1) ought to be, if nothing else, open to debate. This is if you believe that the host at the top of the post is capable of botching how he deals with an opinionated guest, or a potentially repulsive guest, or a potentially dangerous guest, inasmuch as those guests are initially told that they are welcome to use his streaming services and “broadcast themselves” to the world during their stay.

 

(2) and (3) share affinities. (3) is plainly false, because the Overton Window is a thing. And it’s always around. The Overton Window (henceforth OW) is nothing new. Far from being self-generating or self-sustaining, the OW relies on the art of individual discretion, increment by increment. Like other social phenomena, it is open to collective action problems, but not to the point where we cannot say “The OW is an aggregated product of individual discretion”. Part of what I mean by individual discretion is the very-switched-on and outspoken people’s willingness to apply negative social pressures ala rules of censure against bundles of eccentric views and foul civic agents.

 

No one is going around making principled arguments against the mere existence of an OW in a free society. And if a handful of influential or semi-influential speakers did make such arguments, this debate would be a hell of a lot more interesting than it is. As of now, none do. Fascinatingly, opinionated people are usually more invested in applying OW pressures against norm-breakers than non-opinionated or minimally-opinionated people are. The irony of this cannot be overstated. I’ve been putting this to the test, on and off but for nearly fifteen years, and the pattern is as entrenched as any other social pattern I’ve observed and written about before. When I’m in the proximity of a colleague who has shown clear signs of being consumed by prospected personal achievements, clamoring for promotions and raises and the like, and I offhandedly mutter a stock controversial opinion with their reaction in mind, I am not scolded or shunned, in the spirit of OW, for expressing the vile view. Externally, they are immune, and I would wager that their inner lives are no different. I cannot say the same for people who are a lot less (personally) ambitious.

 

Some people don’t care, and because so many people are so painfully predictable, there’s a way to predict who will and won’t raise a stink. Now there may be those who desire to scold others but are too inhibited to go through with it for whatever reason — i.e. personality traits characterized as ranking high on agreeableness. Then there are those who are so apathetic and/or oblivious, the stock controversial utterance won’t even get you a quickie side-eye from them. Unless you get to know the person intimately, you’ll never know whether it’s their agreeability or brute carelessness keeping them from being OW enforcers, but this doesn’t undo the underlying point I’m raising. 

 

I want to ignore the agreeableness crowd and hone in on people whose monomaniacal personal ambitions leave them fully or largely oblivious to what the ideological online world is being apocalyptic about in-the-current-year. Journalists talk a lot about bubbles and how prevalent they’ve been in this era, but their complaints are regularly made against the backdrop of cyberworld-only datasets. The other, possibly larger bubble-like rift I never see considered examines the distance between online and offline social worlds, and how massively differently these social turfs shape the cognitive styles of their respective inhabitants. (The older I get, the more impatient and bored I grow with people who don’t argue with strangers on the internet (about anything) or by those who don’t find it interesting to read up on and follow along to the arguments between strangers on the internet. So clearly, arguing on the internet creates its own bubbling-effect, which has succeeded in ravaging the social dimensions of my psychology, leaving me next-level contemptuous of ho-hum and safe non-adversarial conversations, and which I’ve felt more sharply with the passing of time. I shudder to think what I might be like by 2025 or 2030, if current trends continue.) Certain journalists and other commentators tend to forget that most folks don’t argue online and have little to no awareness of online-infused controversies. The problem is not that majorities are not active participants, it’s that they have no interest in being passive, albeit conceptually engaged, onlookers. That’s the unforgivable part; that they don’t even bother reading and appreciating the contributions of the participative minority arguing for sport.

If I were motivated to hunt for the best stats revealing how people of different temperaments spend their free time, this post is where I’d make use of the data by effortfully converting it into a visually pleasing Awareness-To-Obliviousness diagram for grading the population’s impersonal ambitions. Picturing this graph, pre-empirically, I see full-time employed parents faring badly on endeavors marked by public spiritedness. I see them being overrepresented at the crest of the Obliviousness axis. Near them would be the compulsive raise-and-promotion clamorers, be they preoccupied with dependents or not. Since I am yet to muster enough motivation to embark on this type of project, it’s hard for me to pin down what percent of the total population is comprised of these two demographic clusters — the latter one is a spectrum, after all — but when I’m in their proximity, I do feel safe dropping random for-impolite-society-only zingers when the context calls for it. If anything, I feel a bit snubbed by their soulless non-risibility or offense-immunity.

 

Doug Stanhope’s brilliant 2016 Special “No Place Like Home” sees him devote a few minutes to a similar enough uncovering. He does a great job performatively pleading with the mob to care enough about him to cancel him or to at least demand that he apologize for any of the over-the-top offensive remarks he’s made throughout his career. Most of these remarks are staggeringly more insensitive and morbid than the ones A or B or C-list celebs have made and been forced to apologize for. Alas, no one satisfied Doug’s wishes to be reputationally mauled. That bit by him, though billed as Comedy, is more instructive about the inconsistency of the effects of the OW — and thus censure — in modern society than anything I can hope to relay here anecdotally.

 

I’m not even going to do a “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME: RESULTS MAY VARY” joke about the last five paragraphs because I’m that confident that the ambition-adjusted pattern I’ve described is near universalizable, so any cautionary gag would be ill-suited. Which is not to say that you can’t go wrong. You can misapply the judgment by overestimating just how personally ambitious or busy-busy with kids and errands the person you choose to test the proposition out on is. If you think their myopia score is 10/10 and they turn out to be at 7/10, leaving 3/10 room for their attentional concern to lend itself toward macro-level issues, the stock controversial opinion you utter might turn out to be the one that gets them all riled up and OW-trigger-happy.

So assess people’s myopia scores diligently, if you think you have a knack for it. Remember that you’re dealing with a spectrum, and that chatting up 1/10 or 10/10 types is the conversational equivalent of hitting the jackpot or rolling snake-eyes. Though I am yet to underestimate anyone, I’d do well to bear in mind that my circumstance is closer to unrepresentative than representative. Maybe.

It’s possible that my workplace might be more myopic compared to the typical American workplace. It’s 2021 and the average new hire who works within or near my department will reliably have no knowledge of a household name like, say, Richard Dawkins — or insert any other major internet celeb who’s been widely recognizable in our world for over fifteen years.

My current implicit expectations are “The average person should have heard of Derek Parfit by now, and if they haven’t, I am right to judge them negatively for focusing on all the wrong things too often. I don't expect the average person to have read anything by Parfit, but his name should, at a minimum, ring a bell the way Einstein’s name invariably does.” I’ve fallen into the habit of namedropping Einstein around the (now frequent) supplies of new colleagues, so I have anecdotal evidence that Einstein’s name is recognizable today just as it was in the man’s heyday. It may even be more recognizable now due to the internet and the Einstein memes. So we can say “People know Einstein”. Yet most of the people who know about him have never and will never read anything by him. If you believe there’s something wrong with this, consider that people are even more in the dark about the best philosophers of our age, starting with Parfit. I mean, Parfit doesn’t even make it to widespread meme-status for pete’s sake! Is there any excuse for the sheer Parfit-obliviousness? If your answer is “yes”, repose the question but add “...once we take into account thirty years of affordable internet in our parts of the world rendering Parft’s presence (and contributions!) accessible to the type of normie I’m gunning for here, i.e. the new hire.” So Parfit’s paradigm-shifting works run into the same problem that Einstein’s works do; being unread, but with the added bonus that his name also remains unrecognized, as do the attendant (mild) controversies surrounding his views — mostly on medical ethics and personal identity.

The point? Reams of publicly neglected controversies! Being way off the cultural radar gets tiring; one’s rarefied interests and unyieldingly byzantine notions of what makes for a worthwhile controversy always go unacknowledged from cradle to grave. Should we resign ourselves to this and stop bitching? Trained philosophers all too often choose exactly this, and seemingly uncritically. The unspoken rationale goes something like; mudwrestling with the unclean gets you filthy, necessarily, while it doesn’t actually clean the mud-lover up at all. Why even dip a toe?

But by stepping aside, these philosophers and analytic contrarians allow the popular clashes over censure and censorship to be inherited by low-brow troglodytes and mid-brow oversimplifiers (who energize the trogs by purposely casting wide audience nets). Well, I will never resign myself to this, though I can see why someone would think that there’s something sorta autistic in not doing so and in trying to hold the conversation hostage so that it comports more with crisp philosophic standards for underexposed and overexposed controversies. I can see someone who is okay with (or unaware of) the uncalibrated nature of popularized controversies hearing me complain about all this and eye-rolling through it:

Sheesh, stop being so intrusive! Leave the masses to their own damn tastes for determining which controversies will be headlined vs. sidelined! Can you even prove that philosophic parameters are superior to those of the trog?

Sure, I think that can be demonstrated, though answering the call would require an altogether separate post. What's more, the take I'm stridently double-downing on here — yearning to see a subculture within a subculture come to dominate the debate over censorship and norms of censure — could be taken as preliminary evidence of me being weakly neurodivergent, because I know a few people who are aware of the same sub-subculture, none of whom feel the way I do about its absence in this debate, which suggests that my complaint is pre-rational. Neurotypicals don't seem bothered by this in the slightest, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that our stark differences regarding the ideal OW can be causally traced to the inertly neural dissimilarities we have. But it doesn’t matter why I subjectively continue to be bothered by the state of this debate. What matters is that we objectively ought to be bothered by it. The new hire I chat up fails to detect even the names of intellectuals who are ten or fifteen times as recognizable as Parfit is.

This is not so much me setting unrealistic expectations as it is me going at it alone; finding myself bewildered by philosophers who come across as social masochists, having repressed their dialogical souls into thinking they are fine with not exerting pressure on non-philosophers; not shoving neglected controversies in the neglectors’ faces; not ambushing the mid-brow podcasters and pundits with pressure tests like: “Alright, so now that you've been introduced to all the ways in which on-first-blush outlandish views have some currency among seasoned philosophers who can outdebate you in their sleep, do you still swear by noble quote regurgitations signaling how you have mortal enemies with whom you disagree but are willing to Fight To The Death to protect their right to say their piece? You're telling me with a straight face that this isn't about the particular issues, and that you would be willing to symbolically or literally Fight To The Death to protect the speech or reach rights of inroads-making NAMBLA activists, to see them keep making inroads on de-tabooing adult attraction to minors? Do I have that right?”.

For other examples of vexingly neglected controversies, this community post by me from a while back has you covered. And just in case anyone you know is ever tempted to conflate the instrumental value of controversies with the oft-suggested value of having one’s political beliefs anchored by a spirit of rebelliousness, direct them to this rant. It’s missing the term Arrested Development, but that’s essentially the charge I’m levying against Steely in that post.

So anyway... that’s how much of an overinflated sense of themselves internet commentators have by not dipping their toes in many of the controversies philosophers attend to, or by being unmindful of the differences between online and offline social hemispheres, or by drawing neat and tidy comparisons between those hemispheres. No topical issue teases this point out better than the Overton-Window-to-Outrage-Culture pipeline topic. Internet culture needs to accept that there’s a push-pull at work here; the narrower someone’s personal ambition-set is, the wider their impersonal ambition-set stands to be. There’s one exception: The push-pull won’t apply if you’re dealing with the type of person who’s colloquially referred to as being “somewhat nihilistic”. In those cases less ambition in the personal domain will not necessarily carry over to more ambition being exerted towards the macro-level ideological check-lists, or vice-versa.

To carry out a granular, multilayered discussion regarding censorship in an actual or theoretical society, incorporating the population’s “personal vs. impersonal” ambition tallies is not optional. It is vital. This is because a society housing a population that scores maximally high on personal ambitions and maximally low on impersonal ones leaves the ideally rational dissident with strikingly different communicative challenges compared to those he’d face were he to find himself targeting a society housing a population that scores maximally high on impersonal ambitions and maximally low on personal ones. If any of this is unclear, replace the population’s ambition tallies with their raw smarts. A highly dimwitted population will, arguably, be easier to game than the significantly sharper one. Now combine the two currencies: A dimwitted-plus-impersonally-ambitious population will almost certainly be easier to game than the cognitively-sharp-and-personally-ambitious one that knows it wasn’t born yesterday.

If your goal in life is to transform one of these two societies, and it is entirely up to you to select which one to target, I sincerely doubt that your first task would be to figure out which one of the two authorizes and practices a higher degree of state interference with speech and expression. Suppose a dissident thought it wise to approach the challenge from this formalistic angle. He quickly discovers the answer sought out by him per his first task, and he opts for the society with less state interference. He does this, even though the difference in the two societies’ levels of state interference is marginal, and even when the upside of less formal interference comes with the side-effect of dealing with the sharp and personally ambitious population, thus passing on the opportunity to deal with the dimwitted and impersonally ambitious population; the taking candy from a baby population. Unlike him, the ideally rational agent tasked with the same obstacle would opt for the society with more censorship and lamb-like citizenry, and would be right to do so even when the greater levels of censorship enacted in said society surpass marginality.

To borrow from those tedious, afterschool-special-esque “You cannot talk about Problem X without talking about Problem Y” lessons by intersectional theorists, I will say the following, at the risk of being similarly tedious and afterschool-special sounding: You cannot talk about Big Tech’s putative speech-suppression without talking about the Overton Window, and you cannot talk about “the” Overton Window in a society experiencing a Culture War at an accelerating pace. To speak of “the” Overton Window is to dubiously frame it as a blob. But when a Culture War gets this heated, or when old-and-nearly-forgotten Culture Wars get reinvigorated and enflamed, different types of Overton Windows will naturally emerge in different regions of the country. The taboos will scale accordingly. The ensuing dos and don’ts will be built around the differently encoded trip-wires of the rivalling camps. Seeing these trends for what they are, despite their nonidentical sources, and regardless of which side happens to have garnered more sway with Big Tech at this juncture, is really basic stuff. It takes a raging blind-spot to view the opposition’s trip-wires and taboos as evidence of their side’s belief in “wrongthink” whereas your side — or the side with which you sympathize a bit more, or a lot more — is the side whose trip-wires and taboos are for the most part reflections of a brave people’s propensity to guard that which is good or true or virtuous. And so, finally, you cannot talk about wrongthink without also talking about rightthink, whatever the hell you take that to be. Nor can you mock the concept of wrongthink without also mocking the concept of rightthink.

I believe in right-and-wrong-think, in right-and-wrong-act, in extending the taboos and trip-wires I've cultivated to anyone willing to lend me their ear and be persuaded. I believe all this and am ready to sustain whatever devastating blow the admission brings me. Because I know it’s not a unique position; it’s just me levelling with the reader. Others implying that people’s “wrongthink” is of no dialogical interest to them is just them not levelling with their readers and viewers. My reaction to a powerless bedridden sadist who relishes in fantasies of a future where everyone (but him) does nothing but suffer, is not neutral. Is yours neutral, or negative? If it is negative, like mine is, are you now prone to admonishing thoughtcrimes? So what if you are; the underlying question deals with whether or not you nod along to propositions like “some thoughts are wiser or truer or righter than others”. That answer, if yes, and if unspoken, and if mistaken, would itself be confined to an unacted “wrong-thought” of a non-perpetrator (you).

Do some mockers of the concept of thoughtcrimes engage in thought-inquisitions of their own when they abstractly rail against anyone who believes in thoughtcrimes without ever acting out their opposition to those particular admonished thoughtcrimes? The answer is yes. Looks like we are all anti-wrongthink and pro-rightthink to some degree on some issues. Even the global skeptic is anti-wrongthink and pro-rightthink on the issue of global skepticism.

If you take anything away from this post, let the above three-paragraph run-on argument be it. The argument is compatible with my denouncement of the ungracious host from the top of the post. I grant that it can be easy to miss that; to conclude the host wrongs his guest simply because he takes the guest to be guilty of wrongthink. But you can have a non-neutral / negative reaction to a conversationalist's presumed or proven wrongthink and still treat them rightly, i.e. by not being a big baby about it and debating the crap out of them; by caring about their convictions and unaired responses to your counterpoints. Booting the guest means not caring, or not letting oneself care, usually out of fear and self-esteem preservation. (Notice how this topic is a lot like a colossal jigsaw puzzle; one missing piece, one wrong analytical move taken, and the rest falls apart.)

 

Related to that, the following should be every bit as crystal clear: The prevalence of OW derived social pressures in a society won’t track the level of actual censorship in said society. It’s possible for a society to have an extremely Wide OW with strong anti-censorship codes and policies. It’s also possible for a society to have an extremely Narrow OW but with censorship-happy policies, though admittedly making sociological sense of the latter scenario would take a novel-length post and be explanatorily exasperating. Lightning would have to strike twice or thrice for it to happen, unlike with the “Wide OW but minimal-to-no censorship” society which is plenty more feasible.

 

Getting back to the (1) camp, which holds that the purge-happy steps Big Tech took post 2021-01-06 are either morally right, or fall beyond the moral dimension, because digital private property = begone from my home, digital intruder. I would like to think that there are enough people who latently believe in the conceptual version of walking-and-chewing-gum-at-the-same-time on this issue; where propositions (1) and (2) and (3) are all misfires. My sense is that such people just haven’t seen the flaws of each position articulated in ways I’ve introduced here. Mostly, I think that those who compare the storming of the Capitol with Pearl Harbor, invoking infamy, and who therefore side with (1), but who are nondogmatic and tentative on it, would benefit by recalling the hypothesized host from the top, and using him as a catchall cue for getting all sides to intuition-pump their way into setting up better goal-posts.

Terms Of Service

 

I will not do deep dives going over my skepticism of the TOS-based defenses of the seemingly coordinated decisions of Twitter/Facebook/others in removing many MAGA and MAGA aligned accounts, apart from emphasizing and applauding the points Robert Wright and Conor Friedersdorf raised against such defenses in what turned out to be my favorite edition of The Wright Show. TOS-minded arguments just won’t do, given how the TOS has no hope of being enforced consistently and non-duplicitously for as long as the following types of users continue to be allowed to run their own accounts and propagandize; leaders of nations or international bodies, polarizing radical parties, activists casually walking the symbolic-to-literal violence line (yes, that’s BLM), solo-act violent thugs and bullies, and even large-tent orgs comfortable with having any such people amidst their ranks (no matter how little clout they have or are perceived to have).

 

As Robert and Conor note, tech titans have made a huge mistake in light of all these accounts not having been wiped out alongside the 70K MAGA ones. It lends a measure of non-conspiratorial weight to allegations of bias in how they’ve handled assorted “Trumpists”. (If you are not reading this post in an ordinary way, and are instead listening to it being read out by Siri or whatever, know that I’ve placed inverted commas around my use of “Trumpist” and that the reason for this will become clear momentarily. I often don’t fret over my use of italics or inverted commas going unperceived by those who listen to posts, but in this case I think it’s worth the mention.)

Note that the “other baddies aren't banned” retort I just praised is not as devastating as Team MAGA imagines, given how our use of “Trumpist” ought to cover Trump-loving as well as Trump-ambivalent Q-tards, old-school conspiracists, neo-confederates, militia types, fair weather libertarians, nativists, evangelicals, white nationalists, and that this goes all the way to the semi-respectable Ted Cruise supporting insiders who won’t strongly denounce DJT.

Of the subgroups listed, only the Q-tards, white nationalists and neo-confederates seem to have been purged roundly as users — and even there, they haven’t been removed systematically from YouTube and Facebook the way they appear to have been from Twitter. The evangelicals, assorted conspiracists, fair weather libertarians and many other ists have not been purged even from Twitter, despite identifying as “Trumpists” (or at least believing something like MAGA > GOP > DP). There’s more than enough ammunition here to dispel the histrionic accusation that there is something categorically ideological about the motivations behind the post 2021-01-06 permabans. Nevertheless, weather “Trumpists” are being sensible or crying wolf with all this, some of these people are sufferers of preexisting persecution complexes. This is not to be glossed over.

Unlike proponents of (1), I can see that there is nothing civically plausible in writing off the nutty concerns of those types of people. Their paranoia has been partly vindicated by the e-purges following the storming of the Capitol. Their distrust-o-meter is cranked to eleven right now. I have never seen discontentment at these scales, in modern times, within a Western democratic political culture. And for what? To defuse the circulation of disinformation on social media? It looks to be working, though it worked before too, in the happy days when people’s media options were limited. Which raises the question: What’s the payoff for “less bullshit being spread on popular platforms like Twitter”? Is reduction predictive of superior policies? Superior outcomes? Intuitively that sounds right, but it may turn out to be a leap as the causal story has not been told empirically and quantitatively; not by anyone orbiting the media outlets I frequent, and I keep up with a wide range of outlets. But the causal story definitely hasn’t been told by those who turrets-like softly hint that they have the proof in the bag. Had they something of interest — some form of evidence supporting causally-derived, purge-attributed better outcomes over the long or longish haul — they’d promptly dish out the verified statistical goods, setting aside all hints and coyness. 

But I’m inclined to speculate in the other direction; over the long stretch mass permabans embolden the backfire effect of the targeted users. No one is deluded enough to believe that the banished throw their hands up and stop using the internet after finding out that they’re no longer welcome to the big platform party. Our Big Tech overlords are well aware that the removed are relegated to smaller platforms, as are their falsehoods. Dangerous ideas don’t die just because their spreaders can no longer access Twitter. In the best case, spreaders settle for a short-lived lull as their leaders and organizers go back to the chalkboard. The only method carrying any hope of not seeing them consult the chalkboard is, oddly, the one for which there’s very little patience nowadays; the path of most resistance. Everyone who desperately wants to see these MAGA aligned accounts and beliefs gone forever needs to adopt or readopt the equal-footing mindset where X tries to convince Y that Y is mistaken, and to treat the task the way an interviewee desperate for a job treats their interview. Even if you quickly realize that your interviewer is a bonehead, if you absolutely need the job you’ve applied for, you’ll continue persuading the bonehead that you’re the best option he has.

So try it with the seditionists from Team MAGA, and keep trying it, even though it’s humiliating and beneath you. Or don’t, and simply stick with the alternative, path-of-least-resistance method where you write off Stop The Steal users as a lost cause unworthy of engagement. But understand that there’s a social price for that method too, and it might be costlier over the long stretch.

Even if all the purged accounts were to be reinstated immediately, there’s no going back. The damage is likely irreversible, because the persecution complex was there for the taking, and the ban-giddy crowd effectively went “Here's a gasoline bucket and some matches, enjoy”. Since it’s impossible to turn things around now, the decisions of these tech conglomerates that tipped those scales are as worthy of your scrutiny as anything else has been. Acquiring, maintaining and regaining trust is no small feat, even when dealing with naturally distrustful malcontents.

(From the paper "Trust In A Cynical Age" linked here and above)

It’s not hard to grant all of this and still remind the malcontents that, objectively speaking, their invocations of “Newspeak” or “rights violations” or any shorthand for “political persecution” remain misplaced. Such cavils are doubtless rhetorically effective, and since the truth-insensitive rules of mass democracy always make it tempting to prioritize persuasion over truth-telling, I can’t even intensely begrudge all the spreaders of overblown rhetoric (not on aim-given or Prisoner’s Dilemma grounds). As a group, the expelled are convinced or are pretending to be convinced that the powerful have repeatedly chosen “Defect” such that no intellectual honesty or “Cooperation” tokens can be expected in response. TOS is a fig-leaf, and they are half-right.

Epistemic Utopia

 

One observation I never see making the rounds questions the inordinate amount of time people of goodwill allot to the problem of censorship. And I mean actual censorship, not censure or anything connected to the OW. I’ve grown increasingly confident that censorship simpliciter is not the main thwarter of any fringe group’s ideological aims. I take this pretty far, because even if it made sense to label Big Tech’s seemingly coordinated purges “ideologically motivated censorship”, even then, looking at the actually-existing societies I’ve read up on, other non-structural factors — social, intellectual, personal — manage to explain a larger share of the dissident’s failure to discursively outcompete whatever it is that he brands as the mainstream consensus.

If censorship is construed in this wider way, where OW pressures can, under certain conditions, be declared censorious, there must be caveats to what I just said. This is because the structural vs. non-structural lines would become so blurred, what I presently attribute to “social, intellectual, personal” barriers to a given fringe group making inroads, might as well be intermingled with structural barriers to the same. But if we stick with a narrower conception of censorship, where nongovernmental OW forces are not viewed as constraining speech rights, then I am prepared to say the following: No actually-existing democratic polity censors a fringe group out of the group’s counterfactual massive headway and/or ultimate triumph. There are plenty of other, relatively boring explanations behind why many of us continue to find ourselves ideologically frustrated.

It’s possible to worry about censorship and its global effects for different reasons, some of which are evidently mutually-cancelling. But the moment’s loudest advocates of unhindered speech and expression who are direly fearful of the path taken by the abovementioned conglomerates, all have movement-building and agenda-pushing in mind. This is not as base as “We simply want victory, and complaining hyperbolically ad nauseam about Big Tech is more likely to get us there than showing real understanding for where its execs and stakeholders are coming from”. To wit, the fears are real. Not everyone’s! Like I said, cynics and attention-seekers will ride along as always. But what I’m seeing is a majority that is alarmed in earnest. I don’t think that Stefan Molyneux is one of the players belonging to the quivering majority. When I chided YouTube for wiping out his channel last July, I didn’t mince words as to why; it’s hard to stomach the bragging rights or any posture of irrefutability or invincibility that a post-banned Molyneux will have had imbued in him (directed to his audience). Because then the earnestly paranoid are loaded with even more false beliefs; convinced that Molyneux is anxious about the road to totalitarianism like they are. So that’s also a problem, but it’s not what I’m drilling down on here, insofar as the non-cynical majority is our focus — beyond Molyneux viewers. The alarmed majority derides mass permabans by recourse to public-reason-inspired strivings for intellectual meritocracy.

To do justice to these concerns, compare the meritocracy in question to an athletic meritocracy. The higher the number of aspiring athletes who are barred from applying for or partaking in the contest, the less likely it is that the eventual winner will have been the truly best competitor. The lower the number of aspiring athletes who are barred, the more likely it becomes that the eventual winner will have been the truly best competitor. On the intellectual meritocracy view, each purged or deplatformed user is roughly equivalent to one such prematurely barred competitor. The fewer platformed users around, goes the thought, the lower the odds become of the best arguments and intellectual contributions winning the day.

As an ideal, this is both noble and naïve. Noble because they back a type of meritocracy; one which rules out relativistic and egalitarian perspectives on belief. This sets the stage for dialogical norms which position belief qua belief as one of the public goods — on par with votes qua votes and general civic engagement. Such norms run counter to the anti-intrusive pro-private-sphere view where my cherished beliefs are none of your business and vice-versa. It’s always good to throw shade at the non-meritocratic perspectives.

But as a corresponding view of — or reaction to — state censorship, the meritocratic view is also naïve in that it takes censorship to be the force which thwarts their and other people’s capacity to emerge victorious in The Battle Of Ideas and to improve the world. It ranks up there as one of the most unempirical and ahistorical notions that I see respectable intellectuals clinging to. Of all the shoddy takes that tightly principled anti-authoritarians can’t seem to relinquish for whatever reason, this is the one I’m most astounded by. And boy do they cling to it fervently.

I will call it the "No Censorship = Epistemic Utopia" view, or NC=EU for short.

NC=EU is poised to deny (i) and (ii) per the following:

(i)             The best, the most diligent, maximally reasonable arguments in favor of X are those that will be too complex and/or boring-sounding for a large share of the public to decipher and understand. The best, the most diligent, maximally reasonable arguments opposing X are those that will be too complex and/or boring-sounding for a large share of the public to decipher and understand. Banding about words like “daunting complexity” can be code for laypeople and easily distracted people having serious time constraints on their informational gathering and vetting, which is rarely an impediment for the cognoscenti and the professional class. But sometimes “daunting complexity” is a polite way of saying “Time-related concerns aside, the conceptual schemes and argument-chains the wonks, intellectuals and their readers are immersed in are themselves too cognitively demanding for most people to muster”. Being plainspoken about these realities increases your odds of being called an out-of-touch elitist, or of being silently perceived as one by civic egalitarians and others who are too nice to tell you off. The renewed hostility toward such intellectual elitism merely reinforces the point. For instance, speedreading abilities equip the concerned citizen with the surest way to be extraordinarily informed without becoming a recluse, or even without sacrificing prohibitively large chunks of one's nonprofessional life to staying-on-top-of-everything newsy. Speed-readers are overrepresented in academic settings and in top-quintile/six-figure income households and underrepresented in low-income and working class households. We may deduce that this cognitive gift goes far in explaining why folks who rarely obtain accreditations are more likely to self-describe as populists, exhibit jingoism, respond positively to empty signifiers and demonization of unconstrued or vaguely-construed elites, thus inevitably find themselves drawn to classic demagogic approaches to Political Problem Solving. So is it any surprise that low-quality or mediocre-at-best arguments for and against X obtain more traction in the bastardized (popularized) version of the “Battle Of Ideas” than high-quality arguments ever do? Or that idealized appeals to Intellectual Meritocracy playing out in a democratic culture can ever hope to?

If you affirm (i), the right answer is "No, it's not surprising".

If you deny (i), the right answer is "Yes, it's surprising".

 

(ii)           The logical end-game of intellectual freedom and universalized open-ended inquiry leads to a tabooless society. Zero exceptions; no taboo shall be spared. Properly understood, limitless free inquiry is incompatible with the Overton Window as standard social practice. The former projects are in the business of increasing epistemic intrinsic value (or goods) and decreasing epistemic intrinsic disvalue (or bads). The latter project has an altogether different objective; maintaining an orderly-enough society and, arguably, encouraging people to be better to each other; to treat one another as fellows or some such. Why suggest that these are non-overlapping magisteria? Well, if you theoretically accept that we may turn out to be wrong about any number of commonsense taboo things, as our ancestors were routinely, and as even our parents and grandparents were, just less routinely, then the same stands to be true of the generations we happen to be overlapping with. Our best-placed taboos and trip-wires may be socially and morally justified, but they are not optimizing for open-ended epistemic pursuits. Tradeoffs between open inquiry and social stability are invariably a hard problem.

 

 I think denying either (i) or (ii) is motivated reasoning at work.

We know how effective advocacy works; hammer the oversimplifications, stick to non-technical down-to-earth language, short sentences, sloganeering, charismatic delivery, lots of flattery, lots of preying on the marks’ built-in biases and yearnings for belonging.

We also know how good philosophical inquiry works; the exact opposite of everything that makes for effective advocacy and movement-building.

I used to lowkey dislike philosophers for being so damn private compared to all the other intellectuals that I followed. But I get it now; the stronger a rapport philosophers build with their readerships and cohorts, the more they stand to move the needle (in the wrong direction) as it concerns their texts and arguments being impartially vetted by their now-fawning readers and cohorts. Seclusion serves as a decent bulwark against those bias-formations. The fact that an answer this elemental didn’t start occurring to me until 2016/2017 tells you all you need to know about how tainted the water we all grew up in, and still spend some time swimming in, really is.

You can optimize for impact, or you can optimize for insight. You cannot do both, and you're a sanguine fool for ever trying. I don’t care how good you think you are, how multitalented you’ve shown yourself to be; going for the balance-act will only water-down both your aims.

Now more than ever, I see that some of us are temperamentally cut out for philosophical inquiry, and others for “making the world a better place”. I imagine that living with trauma goes some way in explaining why certain inquirers, who do strike me as possessing the mental tools for dry inquiry, end up abandoning the optimized form of it on the altar of overoptimistic notions of a better tomorrow if only people like them participate in the process. It smacks of desperation when it infiltrates someone who starts out as a natural-born inquirer and morphs into an ideologically needy, tryhard, wannabe persuader-of-the-masses. It’s their choice, and their loss.

No part of me is cut out for the advocacy world, and I am all the luckier for it. There is a dignity to the inquiry-slanted world which I am cut out for, so staying in my lane isn't something I need to actively try doing; it comes naturally. I just wish I could inform my younger self of this. If we all knew to stay in our lanes, innumerate headaches and dialogical cul-de-sacs would be avoided.

Why do so few of us stay in our lanes?

As a lifelong inquirer, you can still make a positive impact, at the margin, because none of that involves worrying about what you should say and not say while being a public reasoner who debates other public reasoners. The unchosen lane is open to you in private, just not in public. Never in public. Trying to change the world = Always in public.

Wait a tic, might this lane talk be contradictive? Earlier I urged philosophers to exert pressure tests on the mid-brow pundits and daily yammerers with large audiences. Yes, I wanted, in a sense, to see philosophers “do something different” for once. But this request was confined to one theme; sidelined vs. overexposed controversies. What that isn't is me urging philosophers to dumb-down anything in their repertoire so as to assist in bringing about a better tomorrow. What that is, is me wanting to see a massacre for its own sake. It’s long overdue. Any further questions? Until I get one that gives me pause, the reductive split-lane approach is a view I’ll continue pushing hard.

Two-laned Sam 

Why can’t a smart cookie like Sam Harris realize that he keeps neglecting his pick-a-freaking-lane-already duties? There are only two lanes, Sammy! I’m singling out Harris because he hasn’t authored a full-length book in nearly seven years, all because “muh podcast reaches so many more people than my books did, meaning it must be making things better overall”. Give me a break.

Time to revisit something I wrote in a comment thread on 2019-12-15, shortly after Sam decided to turn the podcast, or parts of it, into a subscriber-only deal:

"But what do SH supporters have to say? Just the opposite: Many are booing the decision because they want the podcast to have as wide an audience as possible, and this will obviously impede that. The listenership is already too wide. The last discussion with any sustained philosophical acuity I can recall is the one with Benatar, which is two freaking years old now! But they're pushing for even more widening!

Watch: He'll never write another book. He won't engage or do justice to topics he considers too complex/alienating for the wide listenership he wants the podcast to have, especially now that he knows he's about to take some hits due to the cutoff to non-patrons (involving anything past the first hour). To make up for that, I predict he'll be extra accommodating to simpletons and others with bare minimalistic philosophical appetites.

The dumbest part of all this: He has convinced himself that Making Sense is "doing a bunch of good in the world" by reaching so many people. This is what he often says when he compares the rewards of hypothetically publishing a new book vs. releasing new material in podcast form. So, the podcast is roughly five years old, and it's "doing a bunch of good". But wait, he's also always bitching about this being the "Trumpism vs. Wokeism" era and how we've lost our collective minds. And then not realizing that these unfoldings coincided almost poetically in tune with the lifespan of the podcast."

It’s so on the money, I had to lamely quote myself. Sam launched the Making Sense podcast in January 2015, and DJT launched his (successful) presidential bid within six months of that. This is another one of those visually-pleasing diagrams I should create at some point; the spikes in irrationality (per Sam) mapping onto the emergence of Making Sense and the oh-so wonderful world-improving effects it’s been having. A more serious person who is willing to dumb-down their content, because they’re just that desperate to “make the world a better place” in a last-ditch effort way, would actually do some quantitative statistical work to check whether they’re just pissing in the wind. If no real positive change is discerned, year after year, how the hell do you justify not reverting back to the mindset where you are 100% comfortable alienating the lazy and/or the stupid?

It drives me up the wall, because unlike so many hecklers overusing the word “grifter”, I actually don’t think that Sam is in it for the money. I think he, like many reasonable people, simply hasn’t thought about this for long enough to embrace and internalize the importance of picking a fucking lane! His lane ought to be inquirer and public reasoner, which is incompatible with borderline infotainer. His books are littered with Daniel Kahneman references, passages, citations and many other introductions to compelling educative literature which I know he can expand on at great length if he were to just stop embarrassingly fretting over “might lose the masses if I overdo this” tightrope-walking. Lose them! They deserve it. They are trash.

Before I wrap this up, I also need to pick on Sam for this:

 

I took this screenshot around the time of Sam’s tweet, intending to do a community post on it, only to decide that the topic is too theatrical and punditry-riddled to serve as fodder for a post. But I’m not seeing the right questions posed, leading me to wonder whether they're even being contemplated. So I might as well indulge.

Do Sam’s threat-comparisons hit the spot? If those terrible prices we paid are similar to DJT’s regular speech-shtick, so much so that they dub DJT’s Twitter account too hazardous for civil society, simply removing the account is not enough. Following the Inauguration (note: this was written pre-Inauguration), if DJT moves elsewhere (Parler 2.0, Gab, etc), amasses huge followings there, and his speech-acts are just as dangerous as Sam has speculated his past ones to be, how much control should Sam’s (or society’s) appointed rescuer have over those renegade platforms housing the erstwhile president? I say none, because I understand and accept the following:

The two-pronged Millian justification of speech curtailments appeals to (a) The Harm Principle, (b) The discernable directness of, and imminent danger posed by, a threat. The Harm Principle is not there to offer us speculative leeway. If you accept it and start from it, you have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the counterfactual — wherein no restrictive or regulative acts take place — contained at least one person who suffered unjustly for it. I am not convinced that this move is available to us, and I am near certain that it can’t be used once we take Sam’s “Trump should have been removed years ago” claim to heart. In that case, there is no need for tricky counterfactuals. We have the actual events on record. So the tradeoff task collapses into a simple Names Please. Who was seriously harmed, but wouldn’t have been, had Dorsey permabanned DJT in 2017/2018/2019? We did see some irresponsible tweets during those years, for sure (i.e. taunting Kim Jong-un), but the sky didn’t fall. When the sky doesn’t fall, it does not matter how bad the tweets were; the benefit of hindsight points to No Harm = No Foul. Or to no discernable harm, no discernable foul. A true No Foul overview means Dorsey’s counterfactual permabanning of DJT in 2017/2018/2019 or even 2020 would’ve been baseless.

People who agree with Sam on this — insisting they have knowledge that DJT remaining on Twitter during those years caused tangible harm — should be able to name every individual to whom these harms have accrued. Or at least a few dozen victims who suffered, if the list containing all the harmed persons is too long. Posing the challenge, relentlessly, is one way of humbling ban-approvers out of their flimsy conviction. Make them doubt; how does one go about finding and naming the actual victims? How does anyone prove that a tweet was decisive in causing a crazed MAGA devotee to track down and hurt his political enemies or visible minorities? What if playful innuendo is misinterpreted by a follower? The axe falls on the user? Really? Would different rules and thresholds apply based on how much power the user has? Would the axis for determining and weighting a user’s total power be as dumb and as doctrinally one-dimensional as the afterschool-special theorists’ axis of oppression/domination is?

Seeing all these questions and challenges posed, and unanswered, hopefully helps in getting the fence-sitter to see why Sam and co. are dead wrong. People are trained to say "Trump emboldens extremists" but they never provide the receipts on that, just speculations undergirded by motivated reasoning. This is not to say that we can’t prove anything ever. We can, for instance, prove that DJT is causally responsible for his supporters voting badly (duh). But all voters, including MAGAs, have a right to vote badly. If you’re looking for an external-motivational-culprit path for blame-spreading, I will always be here to remind you that MAGAs post-civic, post-democratic behavior is closer to indeterminate. If they commit crimes, they ought to be jailed for it as individuals. Their influencer doesn't become a criminal by way of social-media-osmosis.

Oh sure, some ban-approvers admit that they can’t show any of this definitively; that we need not establish a direct line; that the imminent vs. non-imminent thresholds for threat intolerance vs. tolerance are... bad. That Millian takes are bad? Okay, but the thing is, many of these people do sing Mill's praises, to this day. Maybe they haven't read him either. The moment a magnifying glass is placed on the finer points of his theory, they're willing to pass on it? Bummer.

Alternatively, they can appeal to the Offense Principle in their justifications of speech curtailment. As the SEP elaborates, most western democracies and Open Societies do depart from the Millian view. These polities practice, and have practiced for decades, elastic versions of the harm principle as well as the offense principle. How else does one justify laws prohibiting Hate Speech, Holocaust Denial, etc? If you think those policies were enacted because their enactors and supporters felt that only harm is on the line, well, then it must be the most indirect, non-imminent and speculative variant of "worrying about harm" in modern history.

Realistically, those laws are always about minimizing the amount of offense-taking in society. Something similar can be said — to whatever degree — about the post 2021-01-06 wiping out of DJT along with seventy thousand plus of his fawners and marks (70K just on Twitter). It was the neo-offense principle in action. Just as the negative reactions to the overthrow attempts were themselves partly motivated by offense. It is indisputably bad that a handful of innocent people died and that many others were injured. That about covers the harm aspect. Yet many condemners of 2021-01-06 also believe that certain symbolic insults — the icky confederate flag being flown inside the Capitol by the invaders — were also intrinsically bad in their own way. Sorry, but I don't follow. I don't care about the Capitol being deflowered by the flag-waving stormers and goofs. To my mind, action motivated by the offense principle is never justified, because offense as such is never on par with harm as such. I believe the hard problems, the eternal problems, are those arising from a commitment to open inquiry versus attending to the harm principle. That's it.

Turn this into one of those rules of thumb where we judge it better for the guilty to skirt incarceration so that one innocent doesn’t wind up wrongfully incarcerated for a dismally long period. This version: Better to have an unlimited profusion of offense-takers than to put up with one sufferer of tangible harm.

As a position in normative ethics, Mill’s Harm Principle makes no hard and fast distinctions between governmental and nongovernmental constraints on speech or other expressive behaviors. So I suspect that Mill would have agreed with me that, while Big Tech can never violate anyone’s expressive rights, it can wrongly suspend and permaban any user, have unreasonable TOS, or something in this ballpark. Mill would’ve summarized the hypothesized host from the top similarly to how I have, and would’ve agreed with me that (1), (2), (3) are all misfires.