Hacker News Reader

Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

I have strong doubts about number 4. Paradoxically, the people with the strongest investment in that line of thinking are those with the biggest desire to manipulate the public. The whole discourse around information consumption on the web, with terms such as "viral" and "radicalization", seems purposely designed to paint the picture that we're all helpless to defend ourselves from information on the internet. I just don't buy it. If you ignore the screeching of traditional media pundits, and the various internet commentators, the general level of ignorance and cranky beliefs in the real world among real people seems to me to be about the same as always.

Sorry if that was a bit ranty. About the other 3 points, I agree completely.

P.S. Wasn't the paradox of tolerance mostly about violence, not just untrue or undesirable information?

View on HN

Here's Popper in his own words:

"Less well known [than Plato's paradoxes of freedom and of democracy] is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force…" (The Open Society and Its Enemies, ch. 7, note 4)

What's clear from this quotation is that Popper advocated neither unlimited suppression of all wrongthink (as the gleeful Nazi punchers sometimes misrepresent him, and indeed advocate themselves), nor the opposite extreme of unlimited tolerance of any political speech so long as no violence has yet been employed (as the more libertarian among us sometimes misrepresent him).

And that's the key to how I'd respond to your point about the "general level of ignorance". I think you may be right that the general level of ignorance has not worsened. It is in any case quite difficult to measure such a thing. But the prevalence of misinformation specifically about foundational matters of democratic governance, such as whether one can even trust the elections themselves, being promoted by actors with open disdain for open society, and a clear intent to end it, is the precise sort of situation I believe Popper had in mind with this passage.

I think the criterion of tolerance depends on if the beliefs are open to falsification or not. Nazis are not up for a debate about their ideas and so can be punched.

I think misinformation is not really that problematic as the truth is valuable to most people and we seek it out all on our own. Its self correcting in an open society.

Falsifiability was Popper’s demarcation of science, not his demarcation of tolerance (if he had one).

Note that he specifically says in that passage that he’s not advocating the suppression of all intolerant speech. Thus even if some speech were intolerant, that by itself would be insufficient for suppression.

---

Misinformation is problematic to the extent that it endangers the open society’s very existence, and with it its ability to self-correct.

The problem as I see it is not one of punching Nazis but identifying Nazis. The people I see who are the loudest advocates of Nazi-punching tend to be the same people who reflexively use "Nazi" to refer to anyone they disagree with, no matter how inaccurate the label. The inevitable result is that non-Nazis get punched, then they start punching back.

> Nazis are not up for a debate about their ideas and so can be punched

Many leftist would meet this criteria just as strongly ala "My <x> is not up for debate." or other statements conflating ones existence with ones identity with the same result: No discussion (outside a select, tautological group of gatekeepers) allowed.

Yeah, I don't think it's about us being helpless to defend ourselves from misinformation. It's the legions of people that desperately want to believe terrible things, or are just stupid, and unsophisticated with no ability to assess the credibility of the source. It's never been about you, me or 90%+ of users (who are also dumb/shitty people), that have the ability to recognize that some sources of information aren't reliable.

That's a gross oversimplification, and there's other issues at play. For instance the lack of trust in traditional media. I don't think the issue is that most people are susceptible to "viral radicalization", and can't tell the difference. Some small minority of people are vulnerable to these things, and can fall victim to it if exposed.

In a large population that winds up being many people, and is a huge issue. See the cult movement of the 60-80s. Most people knew it was a bad idea to go live in the woods with a bunch of free spirits. It's people who are absolutely fed up with reality and so anything that seems to bring back "community" looks attractive. On the commune people dance, sing, and share everything. In cases like Johnstown, it was often racial minorities that were just glad to find somewhere that seemed to treat them as real people (even though they were really props and pawns in a narcissists sick reality). It's so sad.

Perhaps you don't have a change in the number of crackpots, but you have a decent chance the crackpots are now all saying the same thing. Misled voters in a democracy seems like a bad thing to me (this extends to the way mass media is currently used of course).

There's an obvious slippery slope in these discussions - ultimately it's reducible to who you give the right to vote to, and discomfort about measures to keep the undesirables from rallying ought not to be ignored.

It seems to me that mass media has always been under the control of a small group of people; I believe that the current narrative that unrestricted, uncensored mass media is dangerous/an existential threat stems from the fact that digital communications systems stand to threaten that bottleneck, if properly deployed.

It strikes me that this is why Facebook et al are so eager to censor; otherwise an attempt will be made to destroy them, as they provide a bypass around centralized mass media narrative control.

Narratives are how the world is practically governed. The ability to propagate a narrative to millions of people is a power on par with a standing army.

The fact that mass media profits with curated information does not imply that "uncensored mass media", as you put it, has had a positive impact.

It has become apparent that the "uncensored mass media" can be controlled through money, ie. politicians steering the narrative on social media using disinformation campaigns. But now they are hidden behind millions of small agents that are so hard to fact check, hold accountable and prove the liason to said politician. With mass media big companies were in this sense vulnerable -- to 3rd parties attacks, to the legal system, to the public.

I'm hardly a fan of big corporations, but in the current state of affairs the common individual is helpless, drowned in a sea of noise à là Brave New World, and for the powerful chaos is indeed a ladder.

...the people with the strongest investment in that line of thinking are those with the biggest desire to manipulate the public Do you have any evidence of this? It seems to be a position that is extremely vulnerable to confirmation bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com