EpistemologicalLiberalismAndConservatism

You can be liberal or conservative when thinking about the value of FreedomOfSpeech with respect to discovering information.

• The liberal position is that generating ideas is hard. And the more voices that speak up, the more chance that someone has the right answer.

• The conservative says that finding ideas in the cacophony is hard. And unless some voices are excluded, the right will be drowned out by the wrong.

I support freedom-of-speech as a virtue, but I've become more sceptical / nuanced about the extreme versions.

My argument is that if you hold the same position in 2020 as you held in 2000, then you haven't been paying attention to what happened in the last 20 years.

And one way to think of that relevant in this page is that I've become more "conservative" in that over the last 20 years and the rise of SocialMedia / the mainstreaming on the internet, seen how easy it is to generate a lot of noise, of bad / fake / wrong / misleading ideas, and yes, sifting through them to find the signal in the noise is an increasingly hard problem relative to the generating of them.

(see also MemeticEcosystem, CreatingCommunities)

See also, the pages linked from FreedomOfSpeech

CategoryEpistemology