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Comment by thejazzman | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?

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The idea is that people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it. Like, check for conflicts of interest, historical precedents, correlate independent sources, etc.

This skill only develops if people have to deal with lies on a daily basis. If we delegate the function of telling what's a truth and what's a lie to a 3rd party, it quickly starts abusing it for its own gain and the quality of life starts sliding downhill.

> people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it

Unfortunately, in America and I imagine abroad, those skills have been actively eroded so as to favor of consumerism. Moreover, the tools to pull one over on your fellow man have gotten more and more sophisticated such that you cannot trust recorded voices to be real, you cannot trust recorded video of people talking, and likely soon won't be able to trust recorded video at all.

There's a serious problem with that in its own. But it's compounded when people don't satisfy the very requirements you want of them.

Not to mention health conditions that prohibit people from sharing the mental capacity of people on here.

Or let's get specific. My 96yo great aunt with Alzheimer's who has been repeatedly preyed upon.

I'm kind of shocked and disappointed to see these attitudes amongst my colleagues. I thought we cared about each other.

There will always be lies out there. Sometimes the information is subjective to whomever is reading it. It's on the individual to determine first what he would like to read, and second, if it's true or false.

I care that everyone has a choice and blocking information has no place in a free society.

It’s further compounded by accelerating the atrophy. What you are describing is a vicious circle that ends with no freedom.

> This skill only develops if people have to deal with lies on a daily basis.

It's called critical thinking, and applies to every facet of life. A person can honestly believe what they are saying, but their belief is not, on its own, evidence that what they are saying is true.

I think schools in the US don't really teach critical thinking, so much as regurgitation. I almost wish schools required a full semester course of debate, pushing students to craft arguments both for and against various topics. I suspect our politics might look a lot different if people were generally more skeptical of the things they're told to just accept.

>Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?

Not GP, but the short answer is 'yes'. Because it is a slippery slope. I'm not in the EU and I can still reach rt.com. Presumably archive.org isn't banned in the EU, they can likely access such content if they wished to do so.

rt.com absolutely is a propaganda outlet for the Russian government, thinly disguised as a new site. But, IMHO, blocking them sets a terrible precedent as it's always the most reprehensible/unpopular/awful stuff that comes under fire first by the censors.

And if you allow that, what happens when those with power deem your expression to be unacceptable?

What's more, freedom of expression doesn't mean bad people can spew evil lies and we just have to suck it up. Rather, it means that we should have a robust debate and discussion, not because the liars/hate peddlers/etc. are right, but because defeating such garbage requires actually putting in the effort to rebuke and debunk it.

As Justice Brandeis put it[0], much more eloquently than I did, nearly 100 years ago:

   If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to 
   avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more 
   speech, not enforced silence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes

The trouble is that at scale, in a world where people's attention spans are already stretched to the breaking point and any kind of bullshit can be amplified to tens or hundreds of millions of eyeballs in minutes, the bullshit asymmetry principle comes into play.

I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain.

> I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain.

I don’t know either, but I know it shouldn’t be censorship

> bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?

I don't know about the right to be awful; but there is something deeply unsettling about governments not trusting their people to decide for themselves what kind of information they want to access. Centuries ago, people weren't trusted to read Wycliffe's translation of the Bible. In the Soviet Union, people weren't allowed to read The Gulag Archipelago. Now it's RT. It's preposterous.

If democratically elected governments don't trust the judgement of their constituents, then neither can they believe in the legitimacy of democratically elected governments.

I am reading my news by going to CNN, then RT and getting a sense of what the real news are in the empty space between them. Understanding the mentality, argumentation and dynamics of a bad actor are important. And I would assume decision makers in read their opponents propaganda. Blocking it gives the impression that whoever is blocking is not trusting our own maturity to filter and understand and make value and ethical judgements for ourselves. In that sense they are not punishing the blocked party but “protecting “ their people and I am not sure I need that protection.

Who define bad?

And why can you not envision a scenario where someone else finds you, or a known good actor to be bad?

The most juvenile view from censorship discussions, is that you will never be the one that’s being censored.

I don't know what the first guy thinks, but yes. You shouldn't have your fundamental rights restricted because the government doesn't like what you're doing. The right to be awful should very much be protected, because one person's awful is another person's virtue and perspectives change in government all the time. Unambiguously bad now, doesn't guarantee the same in the future.

No I think he’s saying the government should not get to decide which speech should and shouldn’t be allowed. For example in the US the government attempted and was somewhat successful in banning speech that favored communism which was in no way justified.

I think it’s a reasonable criticism of these types of policies given how governments of the past have misused their power of censorship.

It's a limitation on the non-bad actors though. It only hurts the bad actor insofar that it's a little harder to willingly get access to them for innocent people.

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