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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

It is perfectly within your free speech rights to decide not to associate with anyone for any reason, and to argue that others should do the same. It is not pro free speech to use your free speech rights to attempt to suppress the speech of others.

Pro free speech would be for Young to use his visibility to highlight rebuttals of claimed misinformation. Arguments, not suppression, are how you win back people who have lost trust in institutions. Suppression just amplifies the distrust. It leaves a largely clear field for these heterodox doctors to command, because lacking rebuttals, many of their claims sound quite convincing. And people are being convinced in large numbers.

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Agreed, although there exists the problem where it's a lot easier to produce bullshit than refute it. Perhaps it's just a reality we must contend with.

Therefore information to refute BS becomes more valuable. That it's easy to lie is not a sufficient argument for censorship.

No one has yet proposed a mechanism other than some form of censorship that actually works to deal with the problem of the amount of BS totally overwhelming the time and ability of the average person to have even a ghost of chance of telling what is BS and what is not, except perhaps by becoming sufficiently authoritarian so take away the rights and powers of people to make decisions that believing the bullshit would affect.

But sufficiently authoritarian regimes usually also heavily censor, so you still end up censorship even in that case.

I'd love to hear an alternative that is actually known to work for societies that are both large and have near zero costs to produce and widely spread information.

I haven't yet read or heard a single argument for why Robert Malone is wrong. Not even a weak one. All I've seen so far are appeals to authority.

> easier to produce bullshit than refute it.

This goes both ways

What would going both ways be in this case?

What is your opinion on cloth masks and has that been your opinion throughout the pandemic? If not, why did it change and why was it different previously?

So someone can effectively break "the system" by drowning it in misinformation (or bullshit of any sort), because the only allowable response is "argument"? Hmm, this sounds like a well-known political strategy both at the national and international level.

This is also isomorphous to the problem that exists when deciding how tolerant to be of intolerance.

Your insistence that the only response to "the wrong thing" is "do the right thing" is a major weakness with "the right thing". I'm not saying that "do the right thing" is a bad idea, just that if that is your only response, you've got a massive weak spot that can be disastrously exploited by bad actors.

What bad actors? Since when is "argument" not effective? Who drowns the media in misinformation: normal people, or organizations?

Are you calling for an end to argumentation, and instead a resort to force? Are you saying Joe Rogan is a politically motivated misinformation source, intentionally trying to destabilize our society?

> Are you calling for an end to argumentation

I am pointing out a paradox. Since you seem particularly motivated by the misinformation context, I'll just point more the paradox of tolerance.

I believe that is good to be tolerant, even of intolerance. But there's also no doubt in my mind that if you are too tolerant of intolerance, you can end up allowing the destruction of a tolerant society. So what should one do? Clearly the answer is not "Don't be tolerant". But how can you know where the line is, or should be? The point is that certain stances toward the world, such as tolerance, have an inherent weak spot that can exploited by people who want to do so, and that AFAIK there is no way of defending that weak spot without risking violating those positions.

So it's a paradox.

So to repeat: I'm not calling for anything, I'm pointing out that things are not as simple as "defeat bad speech with more speech".

Tolerance is not a weakness, what you're referring to is an inept government and broken society. A strong culture and society has no issue with creating reasonable rules to live by that work for the majority of people.

Misinformation is an artifact of our decaying society, so what exactly is the "paradox" here? The paradox of suppressing discussion that tries to deal with societal rot? To what end? Why not actually fix the problem?

This problem should be easy to solve, but isn't because someone is getting in the way.

> A strong culture and society has no issue with creating reasonable rules to live by that work for the majority of people.

That must explain why people have written about the paradox of tolerance for hundreds of years, across many different cultures. Clearly, the authors must all have come from weak cultures, since it's so fucking obvious that there's no issue with this all.

Misinformation can be in part an artifact of a decaying society, it can also be be the result of deliberate attempts to undermine part of, or even the entirety of, an existing social order.

The paradox is that "the only (acceptable) way to defeat bad speech is with more speech that explains why the bad speech is wrong" is that simply by flooding a culture with bad speech, you can completely jam things up as everyone tries to respond to the flood of bullshit.

This is a documented strategy for both intra- and inter-national actors.

> Misinformation can be in part an artifact of a decaying society, it can also be be the result of deliberate attempts to undermine part of, or even the entirety of, an existing social order.

So who do you think is spreading said misinformation? Again, are you saying fucking Joe Rogan is trying to destroy social order? Think about this for one god damn second.

I think that the Russian state is quite interested in spreading (and encouraging the spread of) misinformation. The US has certainly done way more than its fair share of covert operations in other nations, but the playbook has tended to be different.

Do I think that Rogan is trying to destroy the social order? No, of course not. Do I think that Rogan doesn't see any downside to long extended chitchats, stoned or otherwise, about any random idea that is floating in the cultural ether? No, I don't think he does. Do I think that there are downsides to the "every POV is legitimate, lets just put it all out there" model of contemporary discourse? Yes, I do.

No, sorry. That's your opinion, and it doesn't have anything particularly "better" about it than anyone else's. You'll have to engage in explaining why you think other people aren't allowed to have one, and until you get your way you'll have to deal with their opinions.

I agree with your comment, but disagree about the use of the word "misinformation". That word is clearly a propaganda tool used to suppress dissent, similar to "conspiracy theorist" or "white supremacist". If people are going to argue against views they don't approve of, they should do it fairly and not resort to what is essentially state-sponsored slander.

I agree, and changed the reference to "claimed misinformation".

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