Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area
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The original purpose (on the Internet) was to create a space where complex ethical and moral questions could be explored and discussed in depth without risk of someone taking a hypothetical statement out of context to slander you, as people are wont to do. It would be orders of magnitude worse in this current age of people obsessed with generating click-bait for engagement, which wasn’t a thing back then. I personally found that environment to be intellectually stimulating and rigorous, I miss the standard of discourse of those days.
Chatham House Rule is going back to the old Internet, which valued novel insight and reasoned discourse highly, before the masses took over the Internet. The purpose was not to enable edgelords. Rational defense of ideas, statements, and hypotheses was expected and table stakes. Related rules of that era, such as Crocker’s Rule[0], placed responsibility on the reader to address uncomfortable or offensive feedback in the most dispassionate way possible.
>This is not new. Many of the mailing lists that dominated the discourse of the early Internet in the 1990s operated under a similar rule. The novelty is that it disappeared almost entirely for decades.
Anecdotally, I believe this rule was followed implicitly and often subconsciously and probably through some of the peak blogosphere era, despite blogs being accessible by the general public at the time. People were still looking for their tribe to escape the intellectual, creative, or censored dullness of their local surroundings.
The concept of ratting out people who were looking for the same thing would not occur to most people. They prized the discussion they couldn't have elsewhere more than the specific points being made. It'd be like the pilgrims going back to England and complaining to the English about all the other crazy heretics in the new world.
The whole thing started disapearing when going "viral" on social media started becoming a thing.
FYI gag as in "gag order" not gag as in a joke.
In case anyone else was confused about this as I was :)
It seems that already back then, during the early radio era, it was recognized that people dwell on "shocking sound bites" too much, at the cost of thinking things through.
What lists are you referring to? I don't remember this ever coming up.
This doesn’t even seem unique. Newspaper editorial boards don’t assign individual names to editorials or sentences thereof. Individual members of Congressional commissions aren’t cited for the sentences they (or their staff) committed to reports.
Chatham House Rule, meet Chesterton’s Fence.
I live in a one party consent state for the recording of conversations [1,2], whether on the phone or in person. I don't know how y'all get away without it in California. It pairs really well with free speech, and it feels wrong to not have this legal feature available.
[1] https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...
Rules like this are an agreement among friends or attendants at an even. If you go in to such an event with an awareness of the rules but an intent to go against them, that’s bad faith. If you go in to such an event with an intent to secretly record people and release recordings of them that’s just terrible behavior, regardless of what the law says.
Inviting the public and then putting them under a gag order isn't something we should be excited about. It feels like a slide into censorship.
If you want to publish ideas with anonymity, there are forums for that: social media, journalists with anonymous sources, anonymous editorial pieces, to name just a few. Some of these channels even let you lean on titles or authority, eg. "editorial by an anonymous tech CEO".
Chatham House Rule doesn't really work in practice, and it's a bizarre new social construct that stands in the way of fostering an open society.
We shouldn't be ashamed of free speech. Rather than bending over backwards to create artificial safe spaces where we can say controversial things, we should normalize speaking plainly and openly with one another. This is a weird retreat and it makes society more reclusive and less open. It handicaps us and makes us less authentic.
"We will have conversations and share information and we agree we can act on the information but would all prefer not to be directly quoted or have the information we shared be shared with others outside the meeting."
It's not legal, it's social.
Break trust with a wiretap (really?) and you'll just find yourself no longer invited to the fun places.
My understanding is that the Chatham House rule specifically permits sharing the information shared in the meeting as long as it is not attributed to any specific attendee.
And since you agreed to the chatham rules not to (i.e. you entered into a contract) you can still be liable for breach of contract in a civil court, with potential penalties and damages if those were part of the contract.
Of course anything you record can still be used in criminal or civil proceedings (e.g. if your interlocutor admits to a crime or utters illegal or tortuous speech, such as fraud, harassment, or verbal abuse).
How does it pair well with free speech? If I think that you might be recording me without telling me, I'll stop talking.
You can be recorded in public.
In most of the US states you can be recorded in private so long as the one recording is a party to the conversation.
Why does California do this separate weird thing? It doesn't feel like my rights should go away when I cross into your state. It feels like a glitch.
And for the record, California is not the only two-party consent state. There are twelve others.
Legally you can go to an event and act in bad faith without breaking the law. That’s not cool, but you’re not getting arrested for it.
If (or when) word gets out that you’re breaking the rules, or worse, secretly recording people against their wishes then you’d find yourself excluded from those groups and private events.
Regardless of how well meaning people are in their desire to hold people to account for bad views, it does have a chilling effect, and you can't learn if you don't have a safe place to make mistakes.
It makes sense that you want to have candid and open discussions, and those discussions will have to leak back to the respective companies for any concerted action to be taken, but you don't want your company's security specifics to be identifiable.
There are a number of different situations where I can see this being useful, but:
> “In corporate culture, there’s a liberating and freeing quality to the idea that this is a safe space for me to say unpopular things and not get labeled as a conservative or racist”
is really not one of them. I fully agree with Ocean's take that "maybe it’s just a bad solution to a worse problem," and I think there we can tease out two separate social problems:
1. People looking for safe spaces to say racist or other discriminatory things (generally identified as a politically-right problem)
2. The 0-strikes political climate we now (believe we) live in (generally identified as a politically-left problem)
(Both feel like symptoms of High Conflict: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55711592-high-conflic...)
I think these are actually the same problem: they are both about convincing yourself that "others" are "bad" and "we" are good, and looking for every conceivable way to do so. Not just in the specific instance, but permanently and unchangeably.
Somewhere along the way (my belief is that it was around the time social media took off, but I don't have proof for that), we forgot that we're more alike than we are different, and that people can grow and learn and change, and that both of those things are good, actually. It's not like there's some fictional past where we all agreed more than we do now, but it's how we relate to or exclude others that has changed.
The difference between The Before Times and now is that it was historically hard to curate and communicate with a group of people who exclusively agreed with you. This had two primary consequences:
(1) You were constantly exposed to nice people who nonetheless disagreed with you about something / everything.
(2) It made you realize that you're the asshole, if you couldn't at least be polite to someone with different views than you.
Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.
Indeed. IMO, social media should have very limited facilities for blocking/muting (e.g., maximum number of accounts to block, no blocking accounts that have never previously interacted with you, and no import functionality), so that it could only be used to stop true harassment, and not to intentionally live in such a bubble. That's one of my biggest criticisms of Bluesky: the whole design of their blocklist system seems to be to intentionally encourage this sort of thing.
The ability to block obnoxious and hateful people is fundamentally far, far less of causative factor of information bubbles than the pervasive engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are.
What you suggests is setup designed so that large scale harassment is easy. Alex Jones will love it, psychopaths will love it.
I can't not use social media because it is the only way to get local info and it is a terrible way when you consider that for every post from someone i subscribe to, there are 6 ads and 6 channel suggestions specially chosen to entice me to join in a flame war of comments. I'd just give up if i didn't have the hope of at least from time to time catching a break because i blocked all the things the platform thought to suggest for a few weeks. My hope is to one day achieve a whitelist of local posts which is driven by geography, not agreement/alignment on politics or ideaology. since that's not an option, i'll blacklist the entire world if i must...
Like you, I believe that we're more alike than we are different, but that mindset focuses on the small differences over the many similarities.
That's my cynical take.
Any given senate hearing or political speech would lead to dozens of expulsions in a standard censored software company.
It is the small people who need protection.
To claim otherwise is just a lie designed to make it so it stays that way.
Speech that can get one elected to presidency with a comfortable margin in the Electoral College can get another fired.
We truly live in a polarized world.
Personally, I’ve also found that stating your opinion, and having it recorded and known to everyone, makes it very hard for you to change your mind. We’re very harsh to people who do change their mind in such circumstances because the first thing we see is a record of them saying the opposite, and then we ask them to explain themselves and judge them like it’s some kind of fault in their character. There are opinions I had when I was 18 years old that I think abhorrent. I don’t want to be associated with them. I’m very happy there’s no record of me having these opinions. I don’t want to have to explain my past like that just to hold the opinions I have in the present. I have found that process never really ends — i’m regularly changing my opinions on beliefs overtime . I wonder what opinions I have now I will look back on with shame. so I try to make sure that I don’t have anything recorded for the end of times under my name just in case I want to distance myself.
But, for today, I always wonder when someone says they are going to be harassed for their opinions. Just what opinions are we talking about, here? That's what these discussions always seem to lack: Specific examples of what opinions you want to share that you are afraid to share.
I've always liked Stephen Fry's retort to the old "You can't say anything anymore!" line. If a friend tells you that, pull them aside in private and ask them "What exactly are these things you'd like to say but can't? We're in private now, and I'll give you a judgment-free chance to say what you think you're being prevented from saying. Go ahead!" Nine times out of ten, they still won't say it, because they know it's terrible. They just want to complain that they're somehow the victim of censorship.
This would be an entirely warranted "punishment for opinions" because of your failure to adequately safeguard young female athletes.
It just so happens that controversial views on one era frequently end up being seen as 'right and proper' in another, and vice versa.
Here's a 'safe one' unless you actually think about the implications of what it means I'm saying - forcing people, against their will, to kill (or be killed) is a fundamentally unacceptable violation of human dignity and human rights, that should never be tolerated under any circumstance.
That's probably safe to say, yet now apply it to certain situations and suddenly it becomes tabboo. Of course in the future it will probably be as plainly obviously correct as the notion that slavery is wrong.
The right to choose an abortion also extends to the prospective father.
30 years is a long time. Even the most vanilla of opinions can become entirely taboo in less time than that. Take gay marriage as an example. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act became law. Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer were among the Congressmen who voted in favor of it, and Bill Clinton signed it. In 2008, Barack Obama said "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." Even Obama's statement would be taboo today, let alone passing such a bill.
People who literally believe and say that sort of thing are in government and literally running Republican party.
You should expect verbal pushback on your shitty ideas. You should expect physical safety nonetheless.
There is also shitty pushback to decent, or inchoate, ideas. I strongly push back against the notion that there shouldn’t be spaces where one can say something dumb and not be crucified for it.
1. put (someone) to death by nailing or binding them to a cross, especially as an ancient punishment. "two thieves were crucified with Jesus"
2. INFORMAL criticize (someone) severely and unrelentingly. "our fans would crucify us if we lost"
https://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-crucifies-11-christi...
Sure. Not every discussion involves something I really believe in.
Also, I think it’s reasonable to believe that not all of one’s deeply-held beliefs are the public’s to know.
Whether something “looks bad” is a basis for whether to discuss it, where to discuss it, and with whom, but not a basis for determining truth.
And then wait for the lynch mob to come round because they disagree that {people shouldn't be property / women should be allowed to own property / etc }.
Anonymity should be lauded and protected, BUT if you're expecting to benefit from the use of your subject matter authority or credentials, then it needs to have your name attached.
Without an identity, there is no authority.
Now, say that in 2020 in a woke software organization.
Saying that any relevant technical setting as a newcomer would likely be received politely although many would then point out the ground truth behind that simplification:
Nature has many examples of physical gender not being straightforward; egg tempreture determining development in crocadiles and other reptiles for one.
Even in humans it's less that straightforward for a little over 1% of births and decidedly undecided even by experts with all the machines that beep for about a fiftieth of 1%.
Banging on about it in online forums using throwaway accounts is simply being a sad wannabe edge lord type.
> Nature has many examples of physical gender not being straightforward; egg tempreture determining development in crocadiles and other reptiles for one.
Temperature-dependent sex determination results in offspring of one sex or the other, so how does this refute the observation across species that there are two sexes? Please explain your reasoning.
For humans specifically we not only have xx and xy, but also xxx, xyy, xxxx, xxyy, xxxxx, xxxxy, 46xy dsd. There is a de la Chapelle syndrome, persistent Müllerian duct syndrome and more. These are just the most obvious things that muddy the waters, and I don't really know much about that topic, but confidently saying "there are two genders and you can tell by watching birds and bees" is anti intellectual
Example: "I believe there are two kinds of people in the world, the righteous and the despicable. You belong with the despicable, I decided. If you disagree, you are woke".
They would consequently treat it exactly the way people in this thread do - with assumption that you have ideological and political goals against that group of people.
It is a group of people deciding unilaterally what other people are without room for any alternatives. Say what you want against trans people, but at least they only identify themselves and ask to be allowed to exist.
Do you want to make an argument about bathrooms or sports whatever? Fine. But don't start it by de facto invalidating their existence, because that eliminates any room for a productive conversation.
Public debates are swamped with characters who want to make a name for themselves by holding views, having a particular style, or catering to certain demographics. At this point, the debate ceases to ne a way of discussing ideas and opinions. It’s just a way to sell the participants. Likewise, there are many people who want the opposite. They hold opinions but really don’t want to be part of the wider social debate . They don’t want to be public figures defending a particular point. They just want to contribute in some way.
There's no top secret lore handed out, it's not a secret society taking over the world. It addresses the issue that any public statement will be cut up into sound bites, and the public discussion will only focus on one or two sentences, drowning out any nuance. And, if you misspoke, the public discussion will portray you as "not being aligned with your organizations values".
This allows people to set aside speechifying and talk about the actual problems. With lots of nuance. Acknowledging shared ground. Hashing out what the _actual_ disagreements are. We need more opportunities like that, not less.
And the rule only works if you're running the iterated version, and it's a high-value meeting. Because losing access to that forum is the penalty for violating the social compact.
Tantalizing, now I really wonder what he said.
This statement is proof for the need of this rule. Everyone who disagrees with the "one truth" is obviously a racist who is aligned with the worst of the other side. There can be no deviation or nuance. No debate, or benefit of doubt.
That is a deeply toxic view that in the past I only saw in the right. Maybe it was my own blindness. But now I see it all over the left as well.
Turns out, people who say these things are the ones who actually listen with comprehension to what is being said in those circles.
There are fair cases of dog-whistle racism. But that is the person who is indeed racist and not necessarily everyone who falls to the whistle or happens to be next to that person. The problem is that this approach creates divisive politics.
Typically division would make sense if you're cutting off the terrible people. Unfortunately, current western politics is cutting off half of the population with a blunt instrument.
A lot of these snap judgements block our ability to self reflect. How can you tell if you're in a cult or an echo chamber?
How do you know your confirmation bias isn't lying to you?
No, this approach is making the existing division visible. The other approach is to politely ignore it and not talk about it, if you are anti racist be silent about what you see. Allow them to promote its politics and representants, do not object, do not point out to the obvious.
And that is pretty much how abortion protections got removed - "reasonable mainstream" was mocked for telling the truth and supposed to pretend republicans do not plan to destroy them until it was inevitable.
This is the only effective way to end racism and hate. The problem is that you pool too many people together as "racist" which eliminates the power of the word and sends them into a position of "I'll be hated by the left no matter what I do so I'll go full on".
This strategy has objectively not worked. More Latinos voted for Trump in this election even though his rhetoric got MUCH worse. He wants to deport 18M people and revoke citizenship. Yet, they still voted for him in much larger numbers. Women whose rights were denied voted for him. Why?
You can say they're all stupid and indeed there are quite a lot of those. But the fact is that saying to a person that he, all his friends, family and community are evil and racist doesn't bring that person to your side. It pushes them further down that bad path. It might be satisfying to confront a person in a "good vs. evil" scenario, but that doesn't fix the problem and makes everything worse.
Latinos who voted for Trump did it because they are very conservative, have a thing against blacks/arabs and like Trumps personality. Effectively very similar reasons to why non latinos vote for Trump.
> Women whose rights were denied voted for him. Why?
Trump is a lot more popular among men then among women. That is the first thing. Second, yes there are women who deny some rights like abortion for women, that is not shocking new development or something.
> But the fact is that saying to a person that he, all his friends, family and community are evil and racist doesn't bring that person to your side. It pushes them further down that bad path.
Pretending racism is not racism and enabling racism and enabling it does not make these people less racist either. It makes you more like them and it makes middle more like them.
Indeed, what happens and happened is that their opinions are the ones primary being heard, those who oppose are mocked by those who want to be seen as enlightened. What happens is that their real goals are ignored untill they achieve them.
Again. Not what I said.
I think what you heard me say is appeasement. Which is VERY MUCH not what I said. I said you should avoid instant judgement which goes against the basic process of persuasion.
I said talking to people and not judging them immediately. Asking instead of confronting. If you start by calling someone a racist his shields go up and he won't listen to you. What did you accomplish by the attack?
Nothing. You didn't change his mind. You preached to the quire. People who hear you either agree with you and people who disagree with you think you're an ahole. Everyone digs deeper into what they already believe and become more entrenched/hostile.
If your goal is to keep people in their positions and prevent change then sure, that would work. You can virtue signal and position yourself as the "good guy".
My goal is to understand people and communicate with them. Even people who might be "bad" or uninterested in communicating/changing their mind. To do that I try to interact without being too judgemental. That's hard sometimes when I read some pretty horrible stuff from some people. E.g. I had a recent debate where a guy implied that me and all of my family should be dead or homeless (I'm an Israeli) so that's hard to reconcile and indeed we didn't reach a reasonable understanding because I feel he wasn't open to another point of view. He was just looking to prove his point (which is pretty insane if his point is I should die).
But it's still a conversation worth having. Understanding what drives a person to a racist position and asking the right questions can sometimes help them along the path of better understanding.
Around 2014 a friend of mine was running from Gazan missiles every night with his kids. His son started bedwetting again and his kids were very scared. They lived in the south very close to Gaza and it is indeed a dangerous area. Back then iron dome wasn't as good and the alarm times are very short. He exclaimed that as far as he cares the IDF should bomb the hell out of Gaza. Fck them for coming after his kids.
If you would have confronted him as a racist he would have become more enraged and probably would have moved to the right.
I asked him how a Palestinian father in Gaza would feel about that. He initially gave some kickback on that so I stressed the difference between Hamas and the civilian population which made him see that his statement was of rage that doesn't represent who he is.
I'm not saying you should tolerate racism. I'm saying you should understand people, listen to their motivations and logic. Talk to them individually and understand where they are coming from. Snap judgements are very problematic and overly simplistic.
Trump winning is the ultimate proof that what you suggest is a loosing strategy.
With Chatham House Rules you don't have to worry about a gotcha quote getting pulled out of context or used as a statement against interest.
All of these people seem a little bit too high on their own supply
ELI10 please.
(To be fair, liberals can too, but IMHO conservatives are more adept at it.)
> Jenny Lederer, a linguistics professor at San Francisco State University, argued that the Chatham House Rule has intrinsic flaws.
Makes note to self: calling people boomers is totally a-ok!
"Note to self: It's okay to call people millennials now?!"
Uh yes, it is.
"Real world" is umm... okay. Thanks for the contribution.
The first one is confusing. The US is a very conservative country. It just elected a very conservative president. Statistically like 40% of voters call themselves conservative.
There are plenty of elected leftists in America. We don’t have a major leftist party because we don’t have a major leftist voting bloc.
As far as I'm aware, Democrats are still rather strong proponents of liberalism. Even most Republicans are proponents, though generally more for classical liberalism than modern liberalism.
Liberalism, arguably, isn't really on the left-right axis at all.
If this was true, Republican policies and representation would look much differently.
The idea is that you can sound off ideas and your understanding of legal issues without people from other companies turning around and blabbing about publically how you are wrong.
> Instead, his groups have moved to signing NDAs or explicitly stating that conversations are not to be shared externally.
This seems a bit better, albeit with more work.
Are the NDAs signed between attendees and the host? That puts the host in the awkward position of having to enforce the NDAs, even if the injured party is one of the guests.
Suing is time-consuming and expensive.
Legally enforcing every social norm is dystopian.
But I didn't say that? I was genuinely unsure of whether this was something that could be taken to court if someone violated it. If it's socially bound, and the purpose is to increase free speech, I find that less compelling in today's culture.
Persecuting people for their beliefs by exploiting loopholes (e.g. blast on social media, bully their employer, etc) is also pretty dystopian, don't you think?
And it's not like the persecutors ever give you the full story. For example, the reporting on Meta ending DEI didn't want you to know their rather logical view of the situation (discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics is wrong). What fraction of people actually believe in giving a boost to certain candidates purely on the basis of race? Certainly not enough for the persecutors to allow that argument to be broadcast widely.
Sometimes it can be. More than one thing can be dystopian.
Such a ridiculously overloaded use of the word “persecution.”
anonymous sources to media is pretty common way to share information.
Anonymous source in the meeting leaking to news media that person X said something controversial in this summit .
Since nobody would know the anonymous source itself , social norms like being shamed or not being invited in the future will not work is the point
In addition, both the subject of a secret conversation and the participants of that conversation could sue someone for disclosing the discussion on the basis of libel. My understanding of USA law is that libel has a very high threshold and is therefore rarely litigated, but in other jurisdictions, such as the UK, libel can be as simple as saying something true with the intent to hurt the subject's reputation.
Many people try to put as much as possible into bespoke, written contracts, but usually a mixture of common law and implicit contracts is adequate to litigate almost anything considered harmful by society. I doubt the NDA is actually needed as long as the Chatham House rule is made clear.
Maybe overused today but there are some times when you hold back on things if you know they may appear in print. Certainly, over the years, I've been quite careful about what I say to journalists--even those I generally trust.
Won't that enable harassment - enable people to do it without consequence?
Do the people who think this it is sensible to live like this even have a name for the toxic brew in which they're swimming?
What a strange comment.
If after attending a dinner party people are repeating everything they heard, in public, with attribution - then that dinner party absolutely was not intimate.
It's still helpful if you're bringing together groups of people who don't know (and thus may surprise) each other to lay the ground rules. I'd be quite upset if I held a birthday party, which may go to 30 or 40 people, and learned that something (possibly quite inappropriate) that had been said was being tweeted or whatever.
Different definitions of intimate [1]. Webster's gives an intimate club as an example. I'd also suggest an intimate dinner over which e.g. in-laws meet.
It's the same reason Kissinger still got invites to Manhattan social events (and, bizarrely, Clinton campaign events) long after it was known that he was a traitor and a war criminal.
It’s not simply for privacy or nondisclosure. You are free to disclose, the discussions are not private.
"khazhoux said yesterday: 'Megalopolis is the greatest film of the 21st century'"?
I thought the point was you can't attribute -- no names. And without a name, it's not actually a public quoting...
Yes, the Chatham House Rule is practically designed to exclude people who have an immutable black-and-white worldview.
Based on what? If anything, baseless grandstanding is incentivised by an audience.
> baseless grandstanding is incentivised by an audience
... the dynamic you cite has been far more influential in humanity's new social medium, social media.
Arguably, though, that is due to a lack of consequence for their actions. Zuckerberg says these things and there are no serious conequences (possibly; we'll see). When there are conequences, it does stop people - look at the effectiveness of the anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ mobs in silencing people and organizations.
a. "lead" and hide attribution of a nefarious or unpopular thoughtspace or particular idea.
b. control other people through coercion with arbitrary rules like a literal cult.
Usually it doesn't get spelled out quite this prominently, but it happens any time you visit any meetup. Try shitting in the sink at the next birthday party and you'll find out real fast that the host has set rules.
It is of course your right to disagree with the rules in turn, however the mature thing to then do is to not attend. Not to shit in the sink and complain about oppression.
A bod there whose situation in life made him one of the most likely people in the world to know if anyone in the Lloyds markets was engaging (except anyone actually doing it), and has a long reputation of saying truthful things under the Chatham House rules in such conferences, said he'd not seen any of that and not heard of anyone doing it. It's not the same as fact, but with his long-term reputation and his position in life, it signficantly changed my working calculus on the subject. He didn't want to be professionally quoted on it, hence the CH rule.
Nothing at all to do with having the freedom to be a dickhead or anything like that. Nothing to do with wanting to lie to people without consequence.
The one fine piece of good journalism in there is that SFSU professor: humans have a hard time separating the ideas from the speaker. Done.
Now, I might be wrong, but it sure does sound like tech folks in the Bay are getting ready to take advantage of MAGA madness, and paranoid about AI / surveillance.
If anything, it’s this orange website that’s closer to untangling identity from the content, but that’s nothing new and Web 1.0 news.
Congress is the one that regulates most of commerce and they are always slow and inept. I don’t expect much meaningful stuff to change. If anything it will be some sort of AI regulation that will benefit the top companies under the guise of ‘safety’ and probably get bipartisan support.
Zuckerberg also said he was planning his moves for a long time and waited until the elections were over so it didn’t seem like he was trying to influence it and any time he announced it he’d have been be accused of doing it under political pressure. That’s also how fact checking started in the first place, with extreme pressure during COVID and federal gov employees calling meta employees, yelling at them when they declined to delete things. So technically it’s a reversion of a system created under political pressure.
You want liquidity and lots of exposure in any marketplace, including the one of ideas. Ideas without sunshine tend to rot and fester. That might be why there are so many obviously stupid ones these days.
This was the thesis behind e.g. Twitter. I’m not sure it’s panned out. Ideas need sunshine, but a seedling also does better in a nursery.
Certainly ideas from positions of power need openeness and sunshine, speaking very generally. The problem on social media is the flood of crap that buries everything else, and nobody can keep up - the sunshine effect is overwhelmed.
Very generally. Transparency also incentivises grandstanding; you're always speaking to the audience, never to your counterpart.
At least to some significant degree, the grandstanding has nothing to do with the actual ideas and plans; it's part of the coverup; it's a distraction while the real plans are made. Grandstanders like Trump and Musk often say things they have no intention of following through on.
To the grandstanders, who are really propagandists, words are weapons and not information. And of course, everyone's words are some of each, but the grandstanders are far over toward one endpoint or axis on that graph.
I'm on a social tech Slack that uses the CHR. It means if someone asks a question about, I don't know, how my company does something, I can say "ah, yeah, we used to use vendor X, that didn't work because of Y, and now we're with Z instead" without worrying about a blog post showing up that says "wlonkly from company Foo says that Foo used to use X but dropped them because..." but they can definitely use the information I gave them to help solve their problem.
Odds are they're not talking about saving the world in these spaces.
I’m not a free speech absolutist, so that’s not a negative for me, but it’s extremely annoying to see a lot of people pretend to be pro free speech by policing what others might say about them.
\0 in the context of a specific meeting or gathering ..
\1 the freedom to speak one's mind and say whatever it is you wish to say,
\2 the constraint that no third party shall repeat your words without your permission, quote you out of context, report what you said and the company in which you said it, etc.
There's no legal binding or specific prosecution in the original context, simply a literal "Gentleman's Agreement" and the general social implication that should you make and then violate such an agreement then you will likely be excluded from similar events and such company in future.
It arose from diplomatic ranks and is a polite form of the parallel convention Snitches get Stitches.
In the UK Foreign Affairs sphere the rule is often exercised to advance a piece of policy via rumour and backtalk, nobody officially directly states that (for example) the military may be bought into play in some region, none the less word gets out that such a thing is being considered by those that can make it happen, subsequently someone folds their position and trade resumes (maybe).
For example, at a funeral, the norm is not to speak ill of the dead (or any other time, for that matter), and if you break that rule, you might find yourself socially excluded. But that has nothing to do with the concept of "free speech".
The same goes for some kind of proceeding where you are not permitted to speak, or some situation where you are given information in confidence, or your signing of an NDA.
No, this is the First Amendment. Free speech as a value is much broader [1].
E.g. if someone beats you up due to a view you expressed, i consider that a free speech issue.
If the police beat you up, then that's a freedom of speech issue (as well as police abuse, etc), since one might argue that the government is suppressing your speech.
If a private citizen beats you up, then I disagree; it's merely a matter of assault. That's illegal anyway and your speech had little to do with it. If someone beats me up for looking at them the wrong way, I'd hardly argue that it's a "looking the wrong way" issue.
I appreciate that you consider otherwise, and of course it's subjective so your view is as valid as mine. I'm just identifying that I think your concept is "creep" that has occurred over time for some subset of people, spawned by a principle that never originally included what you now include in the concept.
> I think your concept is "creep" that has occurred over time for some subset of people, spawned by a principle that never originally included what you now include in the concept
You've got it backwards. The Athenians believed in both "isēgoriā, or equality of public speech, which was associated with formal political institutions and democratic deliberation; and parrhēsiā, the license to say anything, even (or especially) if it went against the current" [1].
The First Amendment is based on the freedom of speech in the English Parliament [2]. Millenia older. It isn't until the Warren Court, after WWII, that the modern interpretation that the First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring speech comes into focus [3].
[1] https://antigonejournal.com/2021/04/two-concepts-of-free-spe...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Right,_1689#The...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
To what extent are you able to abridge someone's freedom, though? The only legally permitted thing you can do is to compel that person to leave. If you are hosting that person commercially, say by running a lodging house, even that option may be restricted by other laws.
Legal restrictions on speech are a little different, because of the unlimited sovereign power of the law (what Max Weber called the state's monopoly on violence). The USA has a special limitation on its own sovereignty by means of a written constitution, but I do believe that only applies to government restrictions as parent said.
Also, it is worth noting that the freedom of speech in Britain that you link to applies only to Members of Parliament. Nobody else is afforded freedom of speech by the Bill of Rights; other people have to look to different laws to defend themselves.
I could ask them to leave, I could threaten to not invite them back, I could withhold something they want or might want in the future. Social sanctions are vast.
> it is worth noting that the freedom of speech in Britain that you link to applies only to Members of Parliament
Yes. That is the first time a First Amendment-style protection was passed into law. The modern view of freedom of speech being constrained to what the state can and cannot do starts from around then.
Fair, but I think the creep is in the other direction. I think that this notion that only the government counts is extremely new (and somewhat limited to the cultural context of the USA) and the broader version is the traditional definition of what freedom of speech means.
While I don’t condone violence that is not the only possible consequence. If you call me an asshole that is your right, but if I disinvite you from the party I was planning as a result that is not a ‘free speech issue’.
People say this a lot but i doubt anyone actually literally believes this.
If the state executes you as a consequence of your speech, it is an unambigious free speech violation no matter how you interpret that term.
What people really mean is its not a blanket protection against every consequence, but they hide that part because then you have to explain which consequences are reasonable and which are not which is complicated and requires nuance.
Honestly, I find this to be very manipulative rhetoric. Effectively, it makes the notion of free speech mean absolutely nothing. The problem here is that people want to pretend they are for absolute free speech, because saying something else is socially punished. But they are not in reality, sometimes for good reasons, so they resort to this sort of sophistry.
You can say what you want in North Korea, freely. It is just that you wont have freedom from consequence int he form of torture and death.
I'd agree with you about the NDA bit. Using courts to enforce seems anti-free speech
However the milder version of it, where if someone violates the rule they aren't invited back, hardly seems like a free speech issue. Free speech doesn't mean you have to stay friends with someone who told your secrets to a third party. Free speech means you can say whatever you want, but it also means you can not talk to whomever you want.