Hacker News Reader

I think this idea that "free speech" means that you're not allowed to criticize or take actions based on the speech of others is a bigger problem. This idea that "free speech" makes you immune to consequences is somehow believed by a huge number of people who are otherwise well-educated. But the position seems to me to be impossible to support. It's just completely logically inconsistent.

How can defenders of "free speech" say that it's ok for them to say whatever they want, but it's unfair for other people to respond to them? This is a tactic especially favored by the alt-right. They claim they're being censored and appeal to "free speech" the instant someone calls out poor behavior, and then turn around and organize massive harassment campaigns against people who say things they don't like.

The position is logically inconsistent, but they've found that just saying "free speech" makes people want to defend both of their actions. It's a wonderful exploit targeting people who have been ingrained to enthusiastically defend people saying "free speech", regardless of whether or not what they're actually doing resembles respecting the rights of as many people as possible to speak.

I'd like to point out one more thing. This isn't censorship. This is what the real free market of ideas looks like. You say things that people find vile, and the market judges your ideas to be harmful and best avoided. That's how it's supposed to work.

A fair argument, as far as it goes. The Whig view of history is quite popular, but history is sometimes cyclical.

It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s. Sure, false flag and other political shenanigans hastened the process along - but it was the culture, or in your words, "the market", that managed to move rapidly to the right quite alright on its own.

Imagine if the nascent nationalist tendencies in the US and Europe really start ratcheting upward in a serious way over the next decade. Imagine that, at some point, "the market" judges pro-healthcare or pro-LGBT ideas to be harmful and best avoided. What then?

My point is that what you've done with your argument is handed Nazis all the moral authority they need to repress your ideas if their ideas become popular.

The argument for free speech is that we pay the small price of hearing vile ideas as insurance premiums against good ideas being censored if the pendulum ever swings the other way.

I don’t really think that Germany was actively suppressing anti Semitic sentiment during the time the Nazis rose to power- frankly, they were a minority party that rose to power and then started killing their competition- Nazis were anti free speech, as in they actively went out of their way to kill people expressing differing views.

It isn’t limiting free speech by not wanting to listen to or follow people whose speech you disagree with and the argument that doing so is equivalent to how Nazis came to power is entirely historically inaccurate.

> It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s

You're implying that the group of people - the subset of the German population - who were (allegedly) extremely liberal transformed into the group of people that were extremely fascist.

I don't have the time to research this, but it seems much more likely that these were largely - if not entirely - different population subsets, and that the latter arose in reaction to the former. It's not like the two groups had the same shared values with the new addition of "kill everybody that disagrees with me."

Or imagine a CEO saying "there isn't authoritative evidence that racial diversity would benefit our company, and bringing race into hiring decisions is inherently discriminatory." At least 40% of the country more-or-less agrees with that position, but basically any CEO would lose their job for saying it. While publicly supporting racial discrimination in favor of underrepresented groups is almost mandatory.

No CEO would say this, even if they thought it, because it could be used in evidence in a diversity lawsuit under the 80% rule of diverse impact, because the CEO was intentionally using neutral rules of hiring that ended in "discriminatory" results.

> because the CEO was intentionally using neutral rules of hiring that ended in "discriminatory" results.

Against what baseline? The results are only discriminatory against a baseline in which affirmative action is baked in. But this can't be the proper baseline, because if it is then any amount of affirmative action can be called into question.

Does your company practice some affirmative action? That has a disparate impact that hurts minorities, because you could be doing more affirmative action!

Edit: simplified my original reply

You can read more about the baseline known as the 80% rule here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact#The_80%_rule

Since the onus is on the employer to prove that they had a legitimate reason for this disparate impact, often these cases end in settlement.

Sure, if the employer separately has disparate impact problems, they could be in trouble based on those numbers. But merely saying that you do not practice affirmative action does not create additional legal problems.

I'm sure many of these cases end in settlement — 90% of all cases do. And yeah, it's not a great idea to go around saying stuff that will inflame people. But saying something that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said ("The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race") would not be great ammunition for a plaintiff.

Based on studies (ie: resumes with different names, etc.) the baseline is for hiring decisions to be racially motivated against minorities.

Those studies are deeply flawed because they pressupose that the average black college graduate is as prepared as the average white college graduate, or that race does not predict performance controlling for educational attainment. When you look at the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey, it immediately becomes apparent that that is not the case.

Those are flawed studies, as different names is as much a class distinction as a racial one. Even if it were true, however, a white candidate will on average be better than a black candidate with the same resume, because the white candidate had to pass higher standards to get into the same university.

If RMS had said "diversity is important but not our only goal", there wouldn't be any FSF drama. He didn't say that.

His comments are the wrong comments to defend, I think, for reasons adequately explained in the article. Minimizing the harm powerful people have caused to their victims is not "dissent" we should avoid stifling.

I wasn't defending his comments. I do think he's an ahole. Not my point though.

Fair enough! I think elevating his types of position to the level of "dissent" sounds like a defense, because dissent is something I think is admirable.

> His comments are the wrong comments to defend

What exact comments? His comments on Minsky controversy are totally just.

I think you need to pick a better example. I don’t believe a CEO saying “diversity is important, but not our only goal” would be pilloried by either of the currently polarized sides, while one that said “diversity is the best” would, likely, be pilloried by one side.

Just don't use your real name. You can post any controversial opinion you like on the internet but don't tie it back to your real identity if you don't want real world consequences. The internet is still a massive improvement to freedom of speech.

Anonymous speech is always the last refuge of freedom of speech. You can have that anywhere, it doesn't require a "free country".

thats observably not the case: countries where the government is unopposed in speech censorship do it pretty well. the only way people can engage in speech banned by the authorities is to do so on platforms run by countries who dont care about what they want to say

Subversive speech can survive despite the efforts of a government. Foreign platforms are one option, another is posters put up at night or materials circulated hand-to-hand.

But it's true that it's going to be a lot easier to remain anonymous when your opponents don't have the resources of a government.

This isn't new and it's a consequence of how publicity works. Some views make the news and others don't, depending on how outside the mainstream they are. Public figures are judged by all their attention-getting views.

Maybe it doesn't matter too much if nobody knows who you are, but it's why some authors write under pen names. (Back when the U.S. was founded, writing for newspapers using your real name was apparently pretty rare.)

This argument seems to assume that the media is a fair and impartial arbiter of acceptable opinion, which is a fairly controversial stance.

Fairness has little to do with it. It's almost maximally unfair, since people often get more attention because they're already famous, or they get it randomly for almost no reason.

Society has enforced social norms since as long as society has existed.

every time this issue gets discussed on HN the comments are filled with these weird implications that facebook invented the court of public opinion.

Society seems to be settling in on global norms due to the rise of social media. The more engaged you are with it, the more you know what's cancelled and what's trending.

> Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you.

I think the prudent strategy is to understand what's being cancelled today and make sure you're on the right side of it. It's really pretty easy to do just by reading HN.

Just know that you're always speaking to the mob and you won't get canceled. If you have views that disgust the mob, you're going to end up like RMS.

A lot of people are upset about cancel culture, but if you embrace it, it's pretty easy to exploit. You don't have to do the canceling yourself, but if you understand it, it's like a cheat sheet for being socially "right" on every hot button issue. I can fit in any liberal circle with ease because it's so predictable, and I know how to be edgy if I want. And because there's only two tribes that are pretty much opposite, I can do the same with conservatives.

You can still have all the radical opinions you want, you just can't do public stuff with them under your real identity, if you want to avoid being canceled. Maybe we'll see a resurgence of anonymous early-internet type culture, where people have aliases and keep their views disconnected from their public life. I think that works pretty well, because most activism can be done anonymously. It's not that hard to conform irl and do meaningful things under an alias online.

> If you have views that disgust the mob, you're going to end up like RMS.

Reading through those posts, is there any group in America that wouldn’t be angered by at least one of those posts?

I can think of a few: free speech advocates, libertarians, and long-time RMS supporters.

The thing I feel bad about with RMS is that he's clearly not able to read the room, which used to be considered quirky at best and unpleasant at worst, but now he finds himself unable to function at all in a society that he doesn't understand.

Most of the stuff he's saying would have been fringe in the 90s, but now it's unacceptable and worthy of exile.

While "don't be a distraction" is a reasonable principal, Stallman's problem here is clearly that he got on the wrong side of a single issue. He's constantly going on about how language and/or the world is technically incorrect on a battery of controversial issues, like abortion, race, the justice system, economic systems, climate change, etc, and not in a particularly different way. And no one cared as long as he was on the "correct side".

I don't know, if one is picking a single issue to use as a litmus test, sex trafficking of minors seems like the issue to do it with. Even if you believe that RMS's statements on that issue were taken out of context, his statements on that were callous, did not take into account the perspective of those who were suffering real harms, and were ill-timed in that they seemed to put RMS (in his position as one of the senior faculty at MIT) on the side of not understanding the real harms that had been done to MIT and people there. There is more to leadership than being technically correct (if he was even that), there is a degree of empathy and compassion to those you are leading that is expected of you. He failed that test of leadership at MIT so thoroughly that it called into serious question his ability to provide leadership at any other institution as well. In the face of that, he quite correctly resigned, and I think it's fair to applaud him in that narrow instance for making the right decision for the causes he has championed for so long, while being disappointed that he allowed it to get to the point where that was the correct decision.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Please tell me how taking a controversial position on sex advances the cause of software freedom. The free software movement isn't about providing a platform for people to discuss their sex lives.

Imagine you're in court, say you've been charged with something extremely serious and you're completely innocent. Your lawyer decides to argue your case by referring bitterly to a different, utterly hopeless case that he's losing. You wouldn't cheer him on for exercising his right to free speech -- you'd fire him and get an attorney that knew how to focus attention on a persuasive argument.

It doesn't advance the cause of software freedom. Should we all just shut up about anything that doesn't advance the cause of the organizations that we're part of?

FSF board members should.

Yeah that's what I disagree with. And its not about board members only - rank and file employees regularly get fired for expressing opinions not endorsed by their orgs.

What does that have to do with RMS?

Nothing. If you go back and read my first post, it's only about using what happened here to talk about a broader issue. I don't even like RMS

My point is eloquently summarized by someone else here:

"I guess free speech still exists in non-controversial matters, and for people who don't have to worry about employment."

you still have free speech - what you don't have is immunity to real world consequences if your views are so far out of whack with social norms regarding exploitation of vulnerable groups (eg. underage kids) that your coworkers and colleagues do not wish you to be representative of their organisation or their leader.