Your idea of freedom of speech means I'm not free to criticize you.

Constructively criticise, yes please.

But bullying, eg doxxing, petitioning to get fired, calling mob to intimidate etc, that's not exactly freedom of speech.

>Yes it is. It's the best way to fight back against speech you disagree with.

While nearly 100 years old, I think Justice Brandeis had it nailed[0]: "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

I only hope you are in the small, small, small minority. Intimidating people not to speak is not freedom of speech. You may think intimidation is good when it is attacking something you disagree with, but given enough time you will be on the receiving side.

Well, I must admit I respect you for your consistent views, although I radically disagree with you.

I only wish you not to get into the place and time where you are in the opposition to the aggressive majority. It's quite uncomfortable.

It's quite uncomfortable to watch people be radicalized by disinformation.

So you wish to suppress speech you don’t like in the absence of government power to do so. Imagine doing this to a religious persuasion and calling that support for freedom of religion.

Guys, your are perfect example of trigger happy mob. This is the cause of cooling effect. Why would anyone reasonable touch hot topic if you can't even read it without blazing emotions?

I think I've been quite polite and civil here but if you want to provide feedback without being subject to voting here, my email is in my profile.

How am I driving? Let [email protected] know!

It's easy because you picked an "easy" starting point that B et al are reasonably justified in wanting to "punish". Replace "hates people whose name starts with R" with "thinks illegal immigrants are breaking the law and need to be deported" as an example.

Now you get into a can of worms because it's a reasonable and rationally-defendable point of view that we're dealing with that probably has a 50-50 split in terms of public support. It's an opinion that needs to be discussed rationally without the conversation and people's lives devolving into ugliness.

Right now, people are censoring themselves for fear of repercussions that are very real because we've allowed a very vocal minority (on both sides?) to dominate and force consequences without a demonstrable majority in public-support. As long as there is an "aura" of majority-agreement on a touchy topic, dissent becomes dangerous. And it's self-reinforcing because you don't see any dissenting opinions on it so everyone thinks there is majority-support and dissents even less, causing a landslide.

My position does not change when we make the change you recommend. I still think every one of those things is permissible and must be permissible. I weigh liberty very highly indeed.

If it helps, let's even say Person A says "I like gay people and minorities. They should be treated just as well as heterosexual people and majorities." and then retain the rest mutatis mutandis. My position does not change.

You seem to be advocating mob justice - letting the larger and more aggressive mob win.

Would you still support this model of justice if your mob was the smaller one and you got "cancelled" for expressing your "progressive" ideas? Or would you start calling for things like "proportional response", "due process", "free speech that leads to unemployment is not free" and such?

Ah no, I advocate the rights of any group of free people to speak - not for any group of free people to rule. Ten thousand of you can speak that you hate me. You have the right. But not one of you may lay a finger on a hair on my head. You do not have that right.

Read my post history. I am consistent on this matter.

* On the matter of W.H.Auden refusing to publish with a publisher who refused to publish Ezra Pound. Here I believed this was perfect reactions on every side. The publisher did not like Ezra Pound because Pound is a fascist sympathizer. Auden felt that this deplatforming and so told the publisher he would no longer be publishing with them. The publisher changed his mind because he wanted Auden to publish with him. All civil, all consistent with free association.

* The NYT insisted on publishing Scott Alexander's real name. He didn't like this and pulled Slate Star Codex. My reaction was that this is bad on the NYT's part and I would prefer not to subscribe to them. Not that they should be legally censured. Simply that we as free people should exercise this and free ourselves from them.

* When David Shor was fired from Civis, I thought that was a mistake. So 'cancel culture' ate itself there. But that's fine. I will simply choose not to associate myself with Civis.

I think we both agree that physical violence is off the table. "Due process" is important not because of physical violence per se, but because the impact of the violence is significant. And so is cancelling someone out - depending on a person's position losing their job could be a disaster. Well-off software engineers may not feel it, but most people do. The mob justice does not follow any sort of due process - accusations fly and Emmanuel Cafferty gets fired. The cancel culture did not eat itself, it ate an utility worker.

My point is that mob justice is not justice. Taking (in)action yourself is well and good, but the farther you want to spread it around the more rigorous your processes and standards should be.

It is not justice. But it is free expression and I'll preserve that easily because I'm not going to stop someone from saying "I will uninstall Firefox unless Brendan Eich is fired". They have that right. And they have the right to say "And you should too". I'll probably say "No thanks, man. I like Firefox" and then they can say "You're a bigot, too" and they have a right to all of these because freedom is more important than protecting your job.

Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it and remake freedom of expression in a stilted image if I give them the chance.

If freedom is used to unjust ends, then the problem lies with the path there not the freedom itself.

> Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it

I suggest self-restraint and holding yourself to a higher standard before passing around harmful judgements. The farther you cast your accusations, the higher the standard. Who are "they" here?

What do we do when hundreds or thousands of those voices are actually bots controlled by one or two people, but they pose as real people online.

One could argue this is one or two people expressing their freedom of speech, and using technology to do so, but another might argue that since it's not a genuine sentiment of real people in each instance, it might not be called free speech.

I think introducing the fact that online, you can't punch someone in the face and face the consequences is meaningful. I don't advocate violence, but I mean there is no way to know you are engaging with genuine people who are willing to participate in the speech.

I don't have as solution either, a bunch of ideas, and no reason to execute them, and it's also a nightmarish hellscape that I don't really want to wade into :)

Haha, a good point. I think we enable everyone to amplify their speech. When a single person can only talk 1x, tech to make it 100x makes you very powerful. But if everyone has tech to make it 100x, your tech needs to go to 10000x to have the same relative impact it did originally. i.e. tech growth doesn't scale well enough. The early gainers are very powerful.

Maybe when we all have GPT-3 with hecka more params, no one can propaganda-war us because we will be immune because of constant ongoing prop-war.

I don't really know, but I think I bias towards making everyone so powerful that it's hard to get more powerful.

That’s an idealized view - but since there’s not much any individual can do, it’s a decent one :) Though I think it’s fair to say technology has widened the gap between the rich and poor, not shrunk it. Yes, the poor are better off on paper in a lot of ways, but it’s lead to a massive consolidation of wealth that could be much better distributed.

I think my real point is: stop trying to make online discourse like in-person discourse, or, double down and expect the same “proof of work” that being physically present requires.

On top of that, there are limits to the extent and volume of any in-person communication that simply isn’t reproducible online without massive artificial constraints.

I think we need to revisit things we consider valid in person and not try to conflate them to be the same once we are online at a massive scale as a literal species. People forget that there were only millions of people online in the 90s, and there are billions now, this is a new era, and it requires new thinking and new unified action, but that’s really not possible when large swaths of humanity are tribal, nationalistic, scared, hungry, poor, angry, and manipulated.

I almost feel like arguing about free speech online is putting the cart before the horse.

This is a good example, and indeed a problem. I don't have a great plan to solve, except to use free speech to educate and convince people that this sequence of events is illogical and immoral. Combats these ideas with better ideas. Maybe what our schools read need are logic and ethics classes.

> Tell me which of these things you will proscribe and which of these things you will permit

It depends on definition of "permit".

From legal point of view, all of these things should be legal (except maybe A).

But some items from that list I consider immoral. Like gathering a mob to attack someone with the opposite point of view, is immoral.

By the way, there's a big difference between

> I don't like people whose name starts with R. They are disgusting and ugly

and

> I will vote for Trump.

Barely anyone in SV says they consider some group of people ugly. You have invented this unrealistic example.

And, I always will support those who are bullied regardless of their beliefs. Like when mob attacks a nazi, I'll try to protect that nazi. Of course when mob attacks radical lefts like antifa, my support goes to antifa.

Mob is always wrong regardless of its declared intentions.

I made up an example, and I requested that you make up examples that make the point clearer. If you feel that the example is unrealistic, you can simply provide another one.

In this case, if you have, in my example, Person A change his view to be "I will vote for Trump" and retain the rest mutatis mutandis then I'll gladly retain my view that I want all of that to be allowed.

In fact, I think we might be on precisely opposite sides in the fight for liberty if you want to stop people from having opinions just because they are not the only people to have that opinion. One person is free to state an opinion. Any n people are free to associate. Any n people are free to state the opinion together.

And you're going to have to clarify what a 'mob' is and what an 'attack' is. If five thousand people say "I won't buy this product unless you fire that guy", I think that's an okay 'mob' and an okay 'attack' because those five thousand people have the freedom to associate with each other and the freedom to choose not to associate with 'that guy'. It is morally wrong (repugnant, even) to force them to buy the product when they don't want to. If a single person hurts you for saying anything then that's a non-okay 'mob' and a non-okay 'attack'.

Yeah, I think we are on opposite sides here, friend. You have a view that slave labour is something that permits boycotts but there are things that do not. Now, I agree on that myself. But I don't presume to claim that there is a universal list of acceptable things and a universal list of unacceptable things. So to permit the places where I am wrong I have to let other people choose different lists. And that's why I need to let you ask my employer to fire me because I don't like spaghetti. My employer will say no and we will lose you. But that is freedom.

> Something which leads to big loss for those who is attacked (ruined career, ruined personal life, loss of money, loss of business).

Yeah, definitely on opposite sides. It's not my responsibility to keep your business alive. If I tell people things and they decide they don't want your product, then that's life. Information wants to be free. I'm not going to go ask anyone to suppress that Facebook targets ads because that causes loss of business to Facebook. That is totally insufficient.