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.
You know, I think even just segmenting speech arenas could be helpful - that is where I agree with Weil. If nothing else it would remind us that freedom of speech does not imply that all speech is equally valuable. A lot of opinions are worthless, but that does not mean they should be suppressed. I agree with your point about intentionality - there is something there about asocial and social speech - but again, as you note it is hard to really determine intention. It is also interesting to think about what it means to take something seriously; why is it that we don’t just dismiss some speech? Maybe what we need is new ways to be serious or sincere? There is a question about honesty here somewhere that just worsens things. All of this goes to the observation that a right exists only in a form of life - and maybe that speech works differently in different forms of life?
I think the the important segmentation is text vs. in person. The latter is much higher bandwidth since we're hard wired for empathy via all sorts of signals. Effective salespeople and lobbyists aren't usually the good writers, they're expert performers!
Not sure about the 'rights' layer. Certainly some things said in person (instead of text) are more likely to get me punched in the face, which I suppose could be a form of, or analogous to, regulation.
"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.
You know, I think even just segmenting speech arenas could be helpful - that is where I agree with Weil. If nothing else it would remind us that freedom of speech does not imply that all speech is equally valuable. A lot of opinions are worthless, but that does not mean they should be suppressed. I agree with your point about intentionality - there is something there about asocial and social speech - but again, as you note it is hard to really determine intention. It is also interesting to think about what it means to take something seriously; why is it that we don’t just dismiss some speech? Maybe what we need is new ways to be serious or sincere? There is a question about honesty here somewhere that just worsens things. All of this goes to the observation that a right exists only in a form of life - and maybe that speech works differently in different forms of life?
I think the the important segmentation is text vs. in person. The latter is much higher bandwidth since we're hard wired for empathy via all sorts of signals. Effective salespeople and lobbyists aren't usually the good writers, they're expert performers!
Not sure about the 'rights' layer. Certainly some things said in person (instead of text) are more likely to get me punched in the face, which I suppose could be a form of, or analogous to, regulation.