kaolti

Most non-religious people are "passionately committed to some ideology or other," explains Patrick McNamara, a neurology professor at Boston University School of Medicine. - so swapping one ideology for another.

Funnily enough a synonym for ideology is belief. I wonder if getting rid of ALL beliefs (not just the unfashionable ones) is becoming more interesting to people.

You know it.

I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.

The author has a point.

Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it.

Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green.

BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?

In terms of space, yea. I mean there's a cycle of expansion and contraction that happens in time.

Agree. I would argue context makes all the difference in real intelligence and we can never define context because it's multi level, slightly different for everyone and constantly changing.

On top of all that forcing a certain context across the board can have countless unintended consequences.

Not even the universe goes on indefinitely.

Google has grown into a cancerous middleman.

We gotta realize HN isn't exactly representative of the population.

Isn't this sort of similar to the motorcycle helmet thing? Is it okay to make helmets mandatory by law or are we okay with people being free to do as they wish and so some percentage of us dying because of it.

There's always personal responsibility no doubt - and I'm very big on it -, but at the same time, should we allow corporations to exploit most of the population through addiction?

I don't think anyone can predict consequences of either choice in the short / long term.

As long as it's either / or we're not gonna get anywhere with this conversation.

Agree. We're well on our way to be honest. Might be no way of stopping it. It'll just swing around on it's own in a few hundred years.

Exactly. Censoring has the opposite effect.

I'm happy you expanded your opinion. I'm with you in that I think absolute free speech is very hard to defend.

At the same time I definitely think slippery slope is the right analogy. The definition of what is acceptable speech is constantly changing and IMO there is no telling what the effect of banning unacceptable speech is - over a long enough time frame.

My view is things might seem stable at the moment, but who's to say what the relevant timeframe is?

China is exactly where we end up if we start banning speech. If you think that's a good direction I rest my case.

Haha good point. Sometimes it feels so ironic I wonder if there's actually a handful of us talking to mostly bots who are indistinguishable from actual people.

You've made a case for how radicalisation happens, you've not proved that banning words is effective against it.

You think the platform from which hate is banned is a wide enough context to judge success?

I guess if you ban hate speech on reddit you will be successful on reddit. Do we think people who are banned take up religion and become good samaritans?

We're constantly denying our responsibility to manage our emotions and giving it away to others, so that they can protect us from ever seeing anything that might upset us.

Some people seem to think that there are authorities we can trust to enforce the lines we draw in the sand on what is acceptable speech and what isn't.

There is no such authority. People abuse authority because they can and guess what. When you'll try to say "Hey, you can't do that!" they'll just ban you too.

It is hard and unpleasant and disturbing to deal with reality. It's still real though.

True, I'm just saying you can't stop people talking. Nature always balances out one way or another.

Yea. I find it quite ironic that HN of all places is generally speaking supportive of this.

I do think though that the internet is kind of a different game though. I don't think anything can be banned altogether. People will always find a way.

Ultimately we'll just end up creating new anonymous and distributed services where we can talk freely and corporations (lol) and governments can't dictate what is acceptable.

I've been waiting for answers to these question:

What do we think happens to hate when when we ban it in discussions? Evaporates into thin air?

Also, is there ANY proof at all that banning hate speech is effective in stopping hateful actions in the short and long term?

Answering these questions should be the BASIS for any decisions we make right?

Is there any data to support that this has a net positive effect, other than imaginary feel good points?

Hey! You're not allowed to say those magic words! - Brilliant, I completely changed my mind now.

Quick question for everyone who's on board with this.

Do we actually KNOW that banning "hate speech" results in less hateful actions in the short and long term as well?

I'll wait.

I think it's worth pointing out that even the most successful medicine can be dangerous for some people and so it's absolutely meaningless to bring it up.

Because every other "study" is biased / false / not statistically significant / misleading / funded by someone with an agenda.

Not to mention that fearmongering is the basis of politics and so we're constantly being bombarded with "studies" showing a million different things to be fearful of, very often contradicting each other or at the very least not including the full story.

Are we saying people should go out on the streets in a mass hysteria? That's worse than climate change itself.

Are we saying we need to have in depth nuanced discussion about it. Sure, please do.

it's what we expected though right?

I agree. Extracting meaning is NOT a math problem, meaning comes from the human context and context is infinite. Hence different humans extract different meanings.

I think AI and ML are great for processing large amounts of data and looking for patterns. Patterns on their own don't mean anything though, it's always up to us to interpret them.

How come all Google related news end up on the front page, not this one though?