Comment by keiferski
5 years ago
This is a good site, but it leaves out the fact that the traditional mass media itself has enforced certain opinions, which subsequently leads to a chilling effect.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle (paraphrased)
That's a lofty idea, but how do you deal with hate speech ?
Complex topic, but I think a tagging and filtering approach is probably the best one. You can’t censor bad ideas without inviting total censorship, so instead just let people choose which things they want to hide.
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
You start by understanding hate speech isn't the issue. GPT-3 will happily barf out pages of hate speech for you, but that doesn't mean we're trying to ban/silence/cancel GPT-3, does it?
You could start with realizing that the problem is not the speech part.
Sensible and jovial debate in the commons died when mankind died. We are pulling fairly hard into colouring people's reputation however we want via the internet with a humanistic culture.