Episode 155 - Why Oppose Censorship
Max talks about his long-standing skepticism and opposition to censorship, dives into some history of Twitter, a 2007 supreme court dissent from John Paul Stevens, and how locking down the flow of ideas goes against both the science and startup mentality.
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PROMO CODE: Max
Links
Download Marsbot for Airpods and if you’re in Manhattan hear content from Rob Bernstein and Menuhin Hart!
EFF (2015): Incoming CEO Jack Dorsey could get Twitter Back to its free Expression Roots
Rep Ted Poe (2015): ISIS shouldn’t have access to Twitter
Twitter VP in the UK (2012): Free speech wing of the free speech party
NY Post: Twitter sued for Refusing to remove Child Porn
YouTube: Michael Malice and Will Chamberlain Debate whether Big Tech should be Regulated on Censorship
The sun: Twitter Suspends Antifa Accounts
Twitter Shadowbanned(?) Michael Levitt, Stanford Science Professor
Glenn Greenwald: Facebook Shuts Down Socialist Accounts in UK
USCourts: More on the Bong Hits for Jesus Case at the Supreme Court (2007)
Undark: Does Deplatforming Actually Quell Hate speech Online
Related Episodes
Episode 7 on my plan to fix Facebook (and by extension Twitter)
Episode 25 on a past Twitter Purge
Episode 28 with more on the fallout from the 2018 Twitter purge
Episode 132 with Rob Bernstein who produced content for Marsbot
Episode 153 on the Decentralization of the Internet
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 155.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. Today's episode is sponsored by Knowable, knowable.fyi. Get podcast style audio courses from experts using the promo code “Max” to get 20% off. You can learn about startups. You can learn about space exploration, building online communities, all sorts of things at knowable.fyi. Once again, that's promo code “Max” to get 20% off.
So recently, I was actually going through some old episodes of Max in the Wiz. And for those of you who are familiar with that, that was actually my radio show when I was an undergrad. That was on Yale Radio 1340. I had it from 2004 to 2006. And so I tried to fit—it's a very different show than this one. I have very different style back then. But—and the issues—I’ve talked about current events then too—but the issues were very different.
But one of the common themes on that show that I would talk about that still stay with me today, through The Local Maximum, is kind of my opposition to censorship. Or I would say maybe more of my skepticism of censorship because it seems like that some level of censorship and moderation is necessary. But it does seem like a lot of problems in the world are either caused by censorship—silencing people, or sometimes when you see mass censorship, it shows you that there's some kind of problem inherent in society or in the community that's being censored. So it's a very interesting topic.
And so nowadays, there's been a lot of chatter on the podaverse I know we've spoken about the last couple episodes. So in the last few weeks, the podaverse—the university of podcasts—these days, the talk is all about big tech censorship, and what it means, what to do about it. But today, I want to approach it from kind of a different angle. I'm not going to talk—well, I'll talk a little bit about the legal issues. I'll talk a little bit about the technological issues.
But I want to talk about something more basic too, which is like, what do we want in our information diet? Why do I have such an aversion to censorship overall? I want to tell you why I'm skeptical of it because a lot of people don't get it. I mean, some of this might be some disjointed thoughts of mine. It might not be the perfect treatise on, “Hey, the history of censorship, and silencing people and, what the common themes are, and what the common problems are.” But some things that I thought about off the top of my head and doing kind of a self brainstorm over the last couple of days.
So I want to talk about—obviously, it sucks if you're the one who's being censored. I could see why you're against it then. But what are we actually looking for? Because a free-for-all in any form doesn't seem to work at scale. And so there are all types of exceptions that need to be made. Sometimes I say, when we like it, it's called content moderation. But we don't like it, it's called censorship. So when we say, “I want a free discussion of ideas, free exchange of ideas,” what does that actually mean? It's something to think about.
And at the end of this, I basically want to make the case for kind of an open—yes, diverse society, and kind of open discussion and marketplace of ideas. Pluralistic. Don't roll your eyes. I know that's not something that's popular these days. But it has worked before, and it will work again. And that's exactly what I want to promote, and I'll tell you why. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about my expertise in kind of writing algorithms, working machine learning, and recommender systems, because a lot of what big tech is doing is just large scale examples of stuff that I did in my career.
So before I get into all of that, I just want to tell you about a project that I'm working on. It's called Marsbot for Airpods. For those of you who don't remember, that is the app that we put out at Foursquare a few months ago back,.I think it was October of last year. And basically you put your headphones in. You have to have an iPhone, but you could—you don't have to pick airpods. You could have any headphones you want. You put your headphones, you download this app. You put your headphones in, you walk around your city, and you hear all sorts of sounds and content. Well, I got a couple of comedians, couple of funny people to write, and just interesting people to build some content for Manhattan, for New York City.
So you might remember Rob Bernstein has been on the show a couple times. Let's see when he was last on the show, I will put that on the show notes page. That would be, I think it's Episode 132. So that's when he was last on the show. I had him do some things, build some content for it in Manhattan, and also comedian Menuhin Hart. He's a very funny guy and he did some funny stuff. But he also did some, just some sort of review-type stuff as you walk around the city.
So especially if you're in Manhattan, if you walk around in Greenwich Village, or West Village or kind of South Union Square, NoHo. They built a lot of content for that. They recorded a lot of content for that. And I won't tell you what's in it. But it's kind of fun to put this thing in and walk around. So once again, download Marsbot for Airpods, and check that out.
Okay, so what are we talking about today? Oh, yes. Censorship. Okay, open discussion. All that good stuff. Let's start with Twitter as an example. Twitter is always a very interesting one. I've covered that on the show quite a bit. They always purported to be for freedom of speech. That's how they marketed themselves. Now, I'm not arguing that they don't have a right to run the company the way they want. But it's really interesting what's going on. Now, I kind of made the analogy on our Locals forum, which you can get. We're having great discussions there at maximum.locals.com. It's still pretty small but I'm excited about all the people who are posting and kind of a few back and forth, so definitely sign up for that.
I made the analogy on the Locals forum. Like, what if a library, say a private bookstore, opens up in town and you saw advertisements saying, “This is a free speech bookstore. We're gonna allow everyone to have a say. We're gonna have books that maybe have been cancelled from other stores.” And then a few years later, you come back, and you see that they're furiously burning some of their books in the back, and kind of shooing certain people out of the store.
And so, if your only thought is, “Well, they're a private company. They can do what they want.” I don't know what to tell you. Even if I never once set foot in that bookstore, I'd be like, “Whoa. I have so many questions here. What's going on?” Did they ever say, “We're pivoting our business model, we're pivoting our philosophy, we're gonna do something very different now than we did before?” Or was it that like their original plan went horribly wrong? Either it was unworkable or horribly executed. So something really interesting obviously happened there. And that's kind of the analogy to Twitter.
So let's look at Twitter because they've had some of these problems at the beginning. A few facts that I dug up: in 2012, the UK Twitter General Manager declared Twitter the free speech wing of the free speech party. I'm not exactly sure. I guess that—I guess they are admitting their one party system, one party rule, the free speech party. But nobody can speak against the free speech party. But I think that just means, “Yes. Generally, we're open. We support free speech.” It's kind of strange, I think.
I want to say that phrase comes from someone who said, “I'm the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” at one point, in maybe years before that. It probably goes back really far even further than that. But anyway, so back then the CEO was Dick Costello. In 2015, they brought in Jack Dorsey who had been CEO, in the kind of early startup days. So he was the incoming CEO in 2015. And he said—he tweeted, “Twitter stands for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power, and we stand for empowering dialogue.”
So there was an article that came out in eff.org. Let me see if I could find what that is. That's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And it's entitled, “How Twitter Ceo’s Return Could Help The Company Get Back To Its Free Expression Roots.” So it's hard to remember now, but this was back in October 2015. And they were saying, “Great. Twitter's had some issues with empowering dialogue among its vast and diverse user base for many years. We're bringing about Jack Dorsey. And look at this, Jack Dorsey is going to fix the problem. He is going to get this company back to its free expense expression roots.” And they actually gave five suggestions at the time because they said, Twitter under Dick Costello was losing the free speech battle.
And so it was kind of interesting to see how many of those suggestions were actively taken. They suggested encrypting all direct messages in Twitter and I believe that that didn't happen. They said stop allowing authoritarian governments to censor messages. I believe Twitter still does that in China, and in—I want to say Turkey. Although, I know there are some cases, like in Uganda where they either don't—actually I shouldn't even speak because I'm not sure exactly what's going on in Uganda. I think Uganda blocked Twitter. But I think it was because Twitter refused to censor, or it was because Twitter was censoring that authoritarian government. I don't know, it’s one or the other. So let me just drop that because I'm not sure. Do they allow harassment? Yes, they still kind of do. But that's another thing like that. Also, if you build vast systems to allow people to stop harassment, then you're also giving them the same power to censor. So it's very difficult balance there.
Look, Twitter has very smart people working there, except for the direct messages being encrypted, which I don't think would be that hard. I don't know why they haven't done it. This is clearly a very difficult thing to do. So either they wanted to do it, and they weren't able to, or they couldn't get it on the roadmap, or maybe they just didn't want to do it. And the main problem, the main suggestion in that article was to give control of moderation to the individual users. Either, yes, as a user you could mute people. You could block people. But you can't choose if you want to—one at a time doesn't really work that well. If you're looking at random articles on Twitter, all of the comments are just going to be trash. You really want to outsource that to someone who's going to filter that for you. And they failed to give control of that to the user. They seem to be just want to control themselves.
So all of this tells you something about what they were trying to do, or what they thought they were trying to do. But it looks like if you have hundreds of millions of people tweeting all day, something happens. You can't just do and everything goes. You can't just say allow everything. I mean, it becomes a bad experience. First, you get into libel and defamation and copyright infringement. Maybe these things are illegal. Maybe they're against the law. And so there are things that, even under the well established free speech law in the United States, they aren't covered. So that's clearly out.
And then you have to deal with things like pornography. And maybe you could say, “Hey, you have the right to talk about these things all you want. But certain materials, like photos and videos, are just too much for this informational channel.” And that could be a subjective thing. But I think you could get that under control. But you know what if Twitter existed, it's still subjective. It's still based on time and place. So it's very difficult for Twitter to enforce local regulations around the world. Like what if Twitter existed in the 1900s or 1950s? There'd be very different standards on what should be allowed in their system in terms of that. And then you can get into some really bad stuff like child pornography, which you want to catch fast, remove, and then alert the authorities.
You think that Twitter would be on top of that. But recently, there's evidence that they're actually not because there was an article in The New York Post. And I know that the New York Post has kind of a beef with Twitter right now. But I mean, they don't make stuff up. So they're not making up about this lawsuit. So maybe we'll look into this more.
But there's been a lawsuit against Twitter saying that they refused to take down child porn even when the victim identified themselves as underage, and said they didn't want it up. So not that it matters whether they want it up or not. But it wasn't a situation where like some high schoolers thought it would be a good idea to share nudes on Twitter. It was really someone actually even younger than that, who was manipulated into sending someone these photos and then they were blackmailed, and then they had them go up against their will. So that is pretty horrendous, and it's amazing to me that Twitter couldn't be bothered to make a policy against that, or to do anything about that. Especially when they're deleting thousands and tens of thousands of accounts no problem, without having to explain themselves very much. So all right, so that's pretty crazy.
Maybe you get into—so what other problems do you have when you have unmoderated forums like this? Maybe get into the problem of foreign political actors that are committing crimes against humanity. Is North Korea on Twitter? Well, individual North Koreans, not so much. Maybe a few. But the government is. In 2015, Republican Congressman from Texas, called for Twitter to remove some accounts. They wanted Twitter to remove all the accounts from people affiliated with the Islamic State. This was Ted Poe from Texas. And he said, “Why are American companies and the US government allowing social media platforms to be hijacked by terrorists?” Well, that doesn't sound good. So now all of a sudden, you have to ask here, “What about state actors?” And then you have to ask like, I mean nowadays—you really have to ask, “What is inciting violence? Are we going to have objective standards to that?” So you kind of see a lot of political propaganda on all sides on Twitter, and all sorts of message boards like mudslinging, and opponents, and adversaries. You see this all over the world, every political group.
And if any one of those disses can be taken as potential harm, like, you called someone a bad name so it could incite someone else to harm them, like physically. Then pretty much no one can say anything anymore. No one can criticize because any criticism can be just said, “Oh, that will encourage other people to not like the person, and then they could do something horrendous.”
So yes, so in terms of just taking down state actors, maybe Twitter was doing it to some extent in 2015. Not to the extent that they do it now. Then came the bots. Well, there was always bots, lots and lots of bots. Some of the Twitter bots are actually fun. @swarmingnow is my Twitter bot, which shows places that are popular on Foursquare all over the world. I like my bot. It's fun to follow, but some of them are incredibly annoying.
And so Twitter tried to do a purge of these bots in 2018. And I spoke about these in Episode 25 of The Local Maximum. And that's also around the time that they started getting overly-political in the United States. Presumably, putting their finger on the scales of the political message that they themselves agreed with. So it's very easy to convince yourself that you're being neutral while you're doing this, which is exactly what they were doing.
And now in 2021, they've ratcheted up even further in 2020, specifically. And the big one is actually banning COVID speech. So people who say—what about people who say, “Don't wear a mask”, or people who oppose government policy, or what the CDC has to say. They're like, “Well, that clearly makes people unsafe. It’s a danger to public health. So we gotta get rid of those people.”
And it's kind of troubling to me because I get it if people make stuff up about the virus, and then they tell people, “Oh, you should congregate. You should…” I don't know. But not that I think even then they should be removed. But I'm just saying, I could see if people are giving advice that it's against public health. But then again, that's not really Twitter's job. But that's one thing. But then it's a whole other thing if you're opposing government policy on the coronavirus pandemic.
Because opposing government policy, it seems to me just has to be allowed if you're gonna have a space for democratic debate, if that's what you're trying to do. And so if you say, “No, some government policies just absolutely can't be opposed, and we’re gonna have to take that down.” That gives up the whole game. That just kind of rats you out as, “No, you're not doing anything like what you said you were doing.”
So, some examples of some accounts that were removed, one account that was removed for COVID stuff: El Gato Malo. I don't remember what. I'll post it on localmaxradio.com/155. But so, he kind of argued with the narrative of COVID-19 and about the data that was coming out. Another one is Michael Levitt. He is a science professor at Stanford University. He has all of the check—marks checked. He underestimated the COVID when it first came out. But you shouldn't be banned for having wrong predictions, especially since people who overestimated what COVID was going to do were not banned. But he wasn't banned from Twitter. But it looks like he's being shadow banned. He’s being shadowbanned, specifically for opposing the lockdowns because they don't want that message to get out.
So remember in March, the CDC was wrong. CDC said don't wear a mask. And I was like—I've kind of said on this show, “Maybe I should wear a mask.” And I remember Naomi Brockwell came on the show and she told me, “Maybe I should consider wearing a mask.” I don't know. If that wouldn't have been allowed then because the CDC was saying the opposite thing. And Dr. Fauci was saying the opposite thing then. So it's pretty crazy. It's pretty unreal that all this stuff is happening. All of this, remember in terms of government policy versus incitement.
An interesting court case—and again, I don't—I'm not a lawyer. I didn't go to law school so I don't understand this. But one of the court cases that came to mind was one from 2007. And it's called Morse vs Frederick. And it's an easy case to remember because it was basically a high school kid at an event, outdoors event in Alaska. And he had a poster that said, “Bong hits for Jesus,” and he got suspended from school. So they said, “Well, you're promoting drug use so that can get you suspended.”And so the Supreme Court upheld the suspension, ultimately. But they were very specific about, “Well. Okay. First of all, is it like—is interrupting the event itself. You don't have complete free speech at school events.”
But also they said it wasn't just a political message. If it was a political message, it would have been covered under free speech. But it was encouragement of illegal drug use. And so encouragement of illegal drug use can't be allowed. But it would have been 100% protected speech maybe if he had just said legalize marijuana.
Now, it's interesting that some of the liberals on the court, and now I'll call them actual liberals, they dissented.This is John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent because they wanted speech to be freer than that. And so he said this is a dangerous path to go down. He said, I'll quote, “Admittedly, some high school students”, he said, “including those who use drugs are dumb. Most students, however, do not shut their brains at the schoolhouse gate. And most students know dumb advocacy when they see it. The notion that the message on this banner would actually persuade either the average person, or even the dumbest one to change his or her behavior is most implausible.” And he also said, it's profoundly unwise to create special rules for speech about drug and alcohol use.
And I think they also pointed out that it's in that fuzzy area that it's actually encouraging people towards illegal drug use. All it said was “Bong hits for Jesus.” It kept it very vague, probably for a reason. But that basically said, if you're in that gray area, you don't want to be able to be punished for being in that gray area. So he said that's profoundly unwise. Justice Ginsburg agreed with him. But they're both not around anymore. They both—I think, John Paul Stevens, he retired soon after that decision. And I think he passed away a couple years ago. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year, of course. So yes, those—that way of thinking is no longer around.
So okay, so Twitter is involved. So basically, now fast forward to 2021, you could censor whatever you want in the name of public health. And that's what Twitter has done. Then, of course, they banned the President. They banned the New York Post for writing an article that turned out to be true. So that is interesting. And now they're banning left-wing groups as well. It's not just conservatives or right-wing groups. They banned a lot of antifa accounts the other day after the inauguration riots. They banned some group in the UK. I don't know. No, this was Facebook. Interestingly enough, they didn't ban antifa groups when they rioted previously, just now.
But, Facebook also censors left-wing views as well. They shut down the Socialist Workers Party website in the UK. So it's not like Facebook is right-wing, Twitter's left-wing though. They're all kind of the same people. So they all kind of do this. It's just whatever fits their interest, or their narratives at the time, or whoever they need to be listening to, or wherever they need to keep happening.
So as I've said, for us—so this is all happening now. All right. So I mean, eventually want to get to like, what do we want? Because why is this wrong and what do we want? Because I feel like a lot of people don't even get the basics of that these days. But as I've said for a while, I think this is kind of the inevitable outcome of Facebook and Twitter. The state of affairs, unless they change their philosophy and business model. I said that way back in Episode 7, back in 2018, and they failed to do that. They did not change their philosophy. They did not change their business model. They just kind of doubled down on what they were doing and they showed no signs of stopping.
So sometimes a bad idea that kind of works for some people, it sort of has to reach its logical conclusion before people start to move to somewhere else. And then maybe these huge tech monopolies where everybody is a part of it, they're not federated. They're just one company controlling it at all. Maybe people are starting to realize that doesn't work. So in other words, you really need to hit the local maximum of the tech stack, and then you have to wait for these companies to milk it for all it's worth, and to go down the darkest path until you finally get something better.
And so that's why I think there was a diaspora, which was a decentralized Facebook. They created that in 2010. It didn't reach mass market because Facebook was still small enough. Facebook was revolutionary technology at the time. It was growing to satisfy its customers. And it really hadn't had the everyone on one news feed issue, kind of tested to its logical conclusion, which takes time and scale, which they've reached over the last 10 years. In other words, in 2010, was there really a reason to switch off of Facebook when all of your friends were just joining Facebook? Maybe your parents just joined Facebook and people like that? And then it's just like, “Okay, no. This is the time everyone's getting on Facebook. And Facebook is new, and Facebook is exciting.” That's not really the time to jump over. The time to jump over is, or maybe it was the time to jump over if you wanted a better outcome.
But I think what has to happen is the decentralized model of Facebook, since it can move. You can actually move faster in terms of development. And it's kind of simpler at the beginning. People have to feel the pain before they're going to start moving to something else. And people had not felt the pain enough in 2010. And so Facebook is basically going to be forced to inflict more and more pain on people because it is—because that's just how its business model works, or how their way of thinking works. And it's just gonna continue and that's gonna push development of alternative. So now we're getting closer to alternatives.
And that's why, as I said in Episode 153, again, it's putting market pressure on things like, I don't know—MeWe and Mastodon, and all that, and then Locals. So in short, they need a federated system where local users have control. That's sort of what Mastodon is trying to do. What Diaspora’s trying to do, and some of these smaller ones like Locals, which I'm on, which is not really the same sort of thing. But it's got very small local groups that are all moderated differently. But overall, you have the right to say what you want on your group.
So again, I spoke a little bit about an episode system and how kind of a federated system within Facebook or within Twitter might work. They never implemented it, obviously. And then Episode 153, more recently, when I talked about Mastodon as having the system, and it'll be much more robust because it is decentralized and federated. So the governance is split up among many different groups, and the users have control. Although, I still think the users can use a bit more control than that.
So all right, so back to the main topic. I sometimes talk about alternative systems and business models as a way to get more open discussions where users have the most control. But why is this desirable? Why would we want to do this? Or in other words, why is this bad? I want to talk to someone, suppose that you're the one that Twitter likes. You're gonna be the last person censored by any of these companies. So what's in it for you? Why should you still want the most open discussion possible?
Well, I mean, just a few thoughts off the top of my head. I mean, first, we can look at a little field of study called science. Yesh, all of science. And as most of you know, my preferred formulation of the scientific method is Bayesian inference. And one of the things that you want to do that's going to make it more likely that you're going to get to the truth is to have a wide range of hypotheses to consider. So where do these hypotheses come from? It comes from ideas. It comes from talking to people. It comes from open discussion. It comes from challenging the status quo. And guess what? Some people with horrendous or nonsensical views elsewhere might actually come up with a good hypothesis, or someone who doesn't have the right credentials come up with a good hypothesis that actually turns out to be a testable scientific theory that might actually lead to a breakthrough.
So oftentimes, if the field experts, the people who are establishment approved, only have a narrow set of hypotheses, you need someone from the outside to kind of bring in new ideas. And I mean, I shouldn't have to point this out. But most scientific theories were once on the outs. I mean, I could point to Galileo looking at the solar system, and I believe he was put in jail. He was persecuted for that. Einstein, there was a list of 100 scientists who came out with a book that said Einstein is wrong. And both actually had critics. And both Einstein, Galileo had people who wanted to censor them. That's off the top of my head. But this is true in a lot of cases in history. There are probably dozens of them. I could probably do research and find dozens of them every century, maybe not as dramatic, but still, that's the case.
So, and let's talk about a more practical side to this that's not necessarily science. But it's still hypothesis testing. And that's in business, that's in startups. In fact, I would argue, every startup idea is actually a rebellion against the establishment. And yes, even Facebook. Even Facebook when it started was a startup. When Zuckerberg started it. Peter Thiell funded it. Thiel and Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg could not be different in their political views, but they both found the same hypothesis. That a good way to start a global social network is to start linking together the universities, and require that people use their real names, and that they get checked. And it worked.
And it worked because a few people were willing to think differently than what the industry experts were willing to say. It's true. Foursquare as well. An obvious one is Tesla. I mean, I can think of tons of companies, but I think any company as something—any company that started and was successful has some kind of rebellion against the establishment narrative to it. And so that's kind of one thing that I consider.
The theme here is progress. You need open discussion for progress in society to improve information, to improve understanding, to improve the economy, and to improve your life. So, one thing that I studied is learning systems and recommender systems. And one of the idea is that in order to learn, you have to get a little bit outside your comfort zone. So you need kind of a wide range of places to go, which means local.
Localism is great. Local moderation is okay. You pick an area that you want to learn, and you maybe—you have a teacher who decides this is the scope of what you're going to learn. We're not going to go outside scope because sometimes if you go outside scope too quickly, you're going to get confused, and you're not going to learn the core concepts. And then you kind of branch out from there. And so that that would be the equivalent of moderation. But then there could be other courses that you could go to, other books that you could read, other things that you can learn, other websites, that are a little different, and you kind of connect them together. You might find something interesting, say, “Hey, this person is telling me something new. It either directly contradicts something that I learned before. But maybe what I learned before isn’t making quite a lot of sense to me. So I'm going to read it.” Or sometimes you might find something, you're like, “Well, this is boring, or this is just completely nonsensical to me.” And maybe that's something that you won't read.
So, I think, the difference between moderation and censorship. Moderation is when you have a well defined community, and you determine what the scope is. And censorship is when you say, “I want all communities to not be saying this.” And so there's an actual phase shift when you say, “Well, this is a global forum with global rules. And we're going to moderate what seems to be political speech ideas. Maybe things that are in the gray area.” That's when it kind of has to be broken out localism style because that is the kind of stuff that I think allows abuse by the moderators, by the people who are in charge.
So, what are some of the concerns among people who are going really hard on the idea of censorship now? Of being against freedom of speech basically? I know that allowing Twitter to moderate stuff is not the same as legal freedom of speech. But I feel like there's a backlash against freedom of speech in this country as well.
Some people have used the analogy that ideas can be mind viruses. I don't know if this is the best analogy, but let's go with it. And I guess if you're calling it a virus, you're probably assuming that it's a bad idea that's spreading. It's a harmful idea that's spreading, and it's going to cause people to do horrible things, and it's gonna cause all these bad things to happen. “No. No. We have to stop the spread of information.” So I guess one way of looking at it is that mass censorship is kind of like the hard lockdown. If you support the hard lockdowns for Coronavirus or for the COVID pandemic, why not support hard lockdowns for the dissemination of ideas I don't like because they're viruses too? And it will probably work equally well. I mean, the virus still spreads onto the lockdown and the ideas still spread under the lockdowns?
What are some alternative ideas in terms of this? I mean, one is herd immunity. And again—I don't know if this virus thing is the best analogy but let's run with it for a second. Herd immunity is that either through the vaccine, or finding out that these ideas are bad. People in the long run will come to their senses. And they'll learn things that contradict these harmful ideas. So in other words, let these ideas spread. And a lot of these ideas that spread quickly through a population don't last very long these days. They spread, and then they burn out, and they spread, they burn out. People's attention spans are very low.
So, or there's the vaccine, which is, educate the public. Fight speech you don't like with other speech, and make sure that people are learning. Make sure that people have good critical thinking skills, which is one of the things that I like to develop. And I like to develop it here on The Local Maximum. And so, those would be much better solutions than lockdowns of ideas that you don't like. And then of course, if we say you can lockdown ideas you don't like, we're basically giving someone power to decide who listens to what, who sees what, who learns what. And so that's not really compatible with a free society, which it's hard to feel like we live in a free society right now when you can't really go out and do anything. But hopefully we'll get that back at some point.
So again, I think my point there is I wonder if people who support censorship also support the most draconian lockdowns during the pandemic. I don't know if that's true. I would have to look that up. So those are some just disjointed ideas.
Let's see. Let me try to conclude this. Let me try to come to an ending here. What happens when you censor? What happens when all the biggest companies collude to prevent ideas from getting forth? As a society, you preclude progress. You freeze the current best ideas are what the establishment thinks are the best ideas. Okay, maybe they kind of work. And then, as certain ideas and mindsets aren't challenged, those ideas kind of become worse and worse to the extreme. So if you look at something like the Soviet Union, there were blocks on information that can go back and forth. And my understanding was that, yes, they kind of froze in place all of the kind of racist ideas that existed in one decade. And then rather than those kind of falling out of favor due to free speech, they were kind of frozen in place. So it's like communism. Everyone equal whatever. But then it ends up being way worse.
So I think, just because you support freedom of speech doesn't mean that you have to not take care of your own information diet, and just take everything in. You should take very good care of your own information diet. What am I reading? What am I listening to? What do I believe? What do I don't believe? Think very hard about that. Because if we have a group of people who think very hard about that, then it's going to be very unlikely you're going to get calls for mass censorship. But I think it's important to be in control, for the individual to be in control of what they see, or you can't control every little thing, but who you outsource it to. And then periodically check in on them to see how they're doing. What are some criticisms, etcetera, etcetera.
So that stands in contrast to just kind of leaving it up to the government, or to the majority to control your information diet or just believing whatever's popular, or just letting everything in and every crazy idea in. There are people who kind of just believe everything they're supposed to believe. And there are people who believe everything someone tells them, and they can go off the rails as well. So that's a problem.
So take care of your own information diet, support free speech, constantly check the boundaries of what you believe look like. Read something that's interesting to you. I mean, that's if something's interesting to you, they're telling you something that you don't know, or that seems a little bit different than what you've heard before. But maybe you think there's something that makes sense in there. So that kind of—is sometimes that's a good intuition for what to look at. Sometimes it's not depending on your, your personality, but that goes into underfitting, you're overfitting. You want to be very balanced there. You don't want to believe everything you're told. You want to be critical, etcetera, etcetera.
So, I know I was a few disjointed thoughts on mass censorship and why? You know, I certainly don't like it. I think it leads to very bad outcomes. I think when you try to squash ideas, it doesn't even work those—if it's an idea whose time has come, that it always ends up coming to the forefront. It's just kind of leads to maybe some temporary victories in the fog of war, so to speak. And yes, I hope that podcasting remains as free as possible. I hope that the internet remains as free as possible. And I'm looking to get involved with projects or investments that do that.
So anyway, I am glad that you chose to make The Local Maximum part of your information diet. Next week, we're going to take a little turn from all this stuff. And we're going to talk about machine vision. We're going to learn about machine vision. So I am really excited about that. Getting back to kind of my machine learning stuff. First of all, how does machine vision work? And what does it mean? What does it mean that our computers can see, can recognize objects, and recognize people? Is it just self driving cars? Is it—what else? I have so many questions about that. So don't miss that. Have a great week, everyone.
Max Sklar: That's the show. To support The Local Maximum. Sign up for exclusive content at our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week!
