Musk (but only a little), the nature of rights, institutions, deliberation and discovery, edges and centering, places of speech and thinking about what it means to mean something
"Overall, the focus on harm is a focus on how old institutions can cope with new patterns of behavior, and will discourage change and adaptation" <-- my favorite bit.
"[...] you could imagine a space designed as "The Record" where we publish only those things we really mean, and are happy to be held responsible for."
Isn't that begging the question to "how on earth would we know if someone meant something"? Willingness to be held responsible for a speech act is obviously (to me at least) not a sufficient condition to determine if a speaker meant something. But what makes this an even harder philosophical problem is that we can deceive ourselves about our own views. Language games are often cheap and skin deep. I might say "I really mean it!" to convey something about my conviction, but in reality I'd never act on the range of implications of holding that view. (Life being absurd is a fun example - see Nagel's paper "The Absurd")
For what it's worth, I'm still sympathetic to the optimist view that there's a game-theoretical space where more speech creates social value. We internet optimists focused a lot on the availability of speech but didn't really think deeply enough about the underlying psychology or incentives and motivations for speech acts.
"Overall, the focus on harm is a focus on how old institutions can cope with new patterns of behavior, and will discourage change and adaptation" <-- my favorite bit.
"[...] you could imagine a space designed as "The Record" where we publish only those things we really mean, and are happy to be held responsible for."
Isn't that begging the question to "how on earth would we know if someone meant something"? Willingness to be held responsible for a speech act is obviously (to me at least) not a sufficient condition to determine if a speaker meant something. But what makes this an even harder philosophical problem is that we can deceive ourselves about our own views. Language games are often cheap and skin deep. I might say "I really mean it!" to convey something about my conviction, but in reality I'd never act on the range of implications of holding that view. (Life being absurd is a fun example - see Nagel's paper "The Absurd")
For what it's worth, I'm still sympathetic to the optimist view that there's a game-theoretical space where more speech creates social value. We internet optimists focused a lot on the availability of speech but didn't really think deeply enough about the underlying psychology or incentives and motivations for speech acts.