One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.
And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.
The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'.
It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.
However, science isn't the final arbiter for marking out the optimal societal norms, whatever those may be, although this seems to be the meaning of 'truth' as you use it in this context. An authoriarian state with zero personal freedom might be just as capable of feeding its human population as a libertarian state with a minimal set of legal restrictions, for example.
Science does too, although the debaters are generally expected to be working towards developing empirical ways of settling their disagreements. I believe it was Gell-Mann who famously tells a story of holding on to his theory because of its beauty despite several experiments indicating it was wrong, and eventually being vindicated.
There are arguments that need to be expressed even though ideologues may think that they are harmful. That's the point of open discussion. There are questions that need to be asked even if others believe they may have inconvenient answers. That's the point of objective science. Because of sentiment like yours, we increasingly have neither, and we are all worse off for it.
Suffering is not necessarily bad.
One can live a full life in the midst of hurting.
The fact that Santa does not exist angers a lot of people each year…
Yes, pain = experienced disutility = harm.
> Suffering is not necessarily bad.
Suffering is itself bad, but may be an acceptable cost for some greater good, sure.
> One can live a full life in the midst of hurting.
Sure, it's possible to do one despite the other, but that doesn't negate that the latter is bad compared to it's absence, all other things being equal.
Exercising is painful, yet it is not harm. There is “good pain” (ie, muscles being stretched out and hurting after a good workout) and “bad pain” (ie, popping a joint out of socket causing an injury).
Not all pain is harmful.
Emotionally, grief is painful, but it’s sometimes necessary and helpful to grieve over a loss.
I think this is the crux of the issue. The internet (including social media/the internet/blogosphere) originated in academia and was first populated by academics. People like PG (and myself) who grew up in that environment still feel like the internet is-and-ought-to-be a free marketplace of ideas, where academically-minded people can dispassionately debate on any topic. In our view, the Internet's virtues are the age-old virtues of the liberal arts, and that it would be a liberalizing and liberating force as it spread to the public.
But the internet has grown organically. It has been September for almost three decades now.
The internet is more representative of the population at large, and we are being reminded why academia is described as an ivory tower and concepts like tenure exist. Fundamentally, not everyone can be an academic, nor can they tolerate the existence of academics. The "towers" and "tenure" exist as a two way shield: it both mitigates self-censorship among academics by protecting them from mob backlash, and it prevents the "think with our gut" mob from getting indigestion and hurting themselves.
So I think both that you're right, and that it is a shame. The internet has not changed the public's unworthiness to engage in academic conversation despite the oceans of information it has made available. The public will misunderstand and misconstrue and mistrust and misuse academic ideas in ways that harm people, and that harm will be the fault of the academics for not knowing better than to keep their ideas to themselves. Just like it is the witches fault for admitting that they thought differently than their community.
Further, a marketplace of ideas is a marketplace. Marketplaces are not emotionless voids where consumers dispassionately select the product that will provide them with precisely the best utility-to-cost ratio. They are emotional places where concepts like marketing and signaling are extremely important. Similarly, we'd expect a "marketplace of ideas" to be an emotional place and for human emotion to be a consideration when adopting ideas.
Rationally, only one thing can be true. This is what's most useful when applying the scientific method. Scientifically, there isn't such a thing as heresy - only rejecting the null hypothesis, or failing to reject it.
But people are not rational beings. The same message, delivered in the same way, can upset some people and not others. People do not react rationally. Trying to deny this (and claim that people are rational beings), in and of itself, denies a scientific truth.
that doesn't necessarily imply that all speakers should accept the burden to be so inoffensive that _no_ listener would react negatively.
No, it doesn't imply that. But let's unpack the presumption behind your statement.
We all know that there are people in the world with whom we have deep and fundamental disagreement. Religious people are aware that there are atheists; classical liberals are aware that there are autocrats and theocrats, etc. Does that, in and of itself, upset us so deeply that we take offense at it? I daresay no.
What causes one to take offense is the uttering of "heresy" by someone nearby, where such utterance affects them personally. Which means that it is incumbent upon us to know who is listening to us. There is a wide emotional gulf between a preacher who preaches to his congregation and a preacher who proselytizes and seeks converts. Same message, different audience. In the first case, the preacher is among fellows. In the second, the preacher is among those who may not be so open to what he has to say. The preacher who decides to proselytize fundamentally accepts an additional burden, if the preacher has any hope at succeeding. And a preacher who does not accept that burden, does not even recognize that such a burden exists, who tries to communicate the same message in the same way regardless of who is in the audience, well, that preacher should only see his failure as foreseeable and expected.
"Preacher", above, if it wasn't clear, is not a religious term. It refers to anybody who has any kind of message that actually tries to persuade others, rather than merely seeking the empathy of like-minded friends and family.
but these are pragmatic matters for people who are actually trying to proselytize. I fundamentally disagree that the speaker is somehow morally responsible to not violate the listeners preconceptions - that undermines the greatest tool we have as a society.
If you do end up offending somebody, it's because you veered away from the objective and started to put your subjective viewpoint into it. If you're describing your subjective viewpoint to another person, you're either looking to persuade them or to feel better about yourself (i.e. seeking empathy).
Humans don't communicate by simply listing context-free facts at one another. Connotation, implication, and context all play a major role. The idea isn't that the words themselves become evil when said in a different context, but that we recognize that they do different things in different contexts.
Let's consider a totally different scenario: the justice system. In criminal cases, the standard of evidence is way higher than in civil cases. This is a recognition of the fact that the state is capable of causing far greater harm and it should hold itself to a higher standard. Nothing has changed about the truth of say, OJ Simpson's actions, that meant that he was found not guilty in a criminal trial but was able to be punished in a civil trial.
Similarly, we might recognize that somebody with a powerful voice and a large following has a greater responsibility to careful communication than the person working the counter at the local Starbucks.
"They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they have to recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like something that can be banned."