[aantthony]

> What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects

And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:

- flat earth (before Galileo)

- pro-slavery views

- human sacrifice

- caning children

- hanging

- smoking is good for you

- communism

- laws against gay marriage

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this

It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.

[quazeekotl]

Most of those ideas didn't die out because one day people found out about them, and then we put an end to them.

Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, why didn't this "sunlight" disinfect them?

[tomhoward]

> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

This is false.

For most of the past several thousand years of history, "knowledge" has been imposed and speech has been restricted by religious and/or political decree.

Freedom of speech, along with the value of the individual, are enlightenment values - i.e., they have only been around for a couple of hundred years, and even then only in a few parts of the world, and even then they have continued to be suppressed and assaulted at every opportunity.

But those of us who have been lucky enough to grow up in societies that have relatively high levels of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual can easily take these freedoms for granted.

But if you look at all the positive societal changes that are espoused by people who believe in liberal values: workers' rights, women's rights (to vote, work, refuse or leave marriage, own property, drive), equality and rights for racial/religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, gay people, etc; these changes have happened first where there has been the greatest freedom of speech.

Yes I know it's unpleasant to hear speech that feels uncomfortable or dangerous, but be assured it is immeasurably better than the alternative.

Edit:

For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to the David Icke story since he first appeared on London Real a few weeks ago, and I'm a financial supporter of an investigative reporter who has gone deep researching and revealing the possibility that this whole thing looks like a financial scam by London Real.

It looks every bit like The Streisand Effect is at work here, and that YouTube's ban of Icke is only serving to amplify his signal, increase his following and generate huge amounts of money for London Real (and possibly Icke too).

So it's the Hydra myth playing out yet again. Be careful what you wish for.

[zozbot234]

Because "sunlight" includes the norms of a free and intellectually-open society, which didn't develop until well after those thousands of years. Censorship itself is not even that bad merely due to how it might deal with the YouTube fruitcake du jour; it's really, really bad because it's openly destructive of these hard-gained shared norms, in so many ways.

[quazeekotl]

Maybe, but the argument is that mere public existence of an idea effectively promotes correct ideas and demotes incorrect ideas.

That is absolutely not in evidence.

[WalterBright]

Sure it is. All kinds of ideas died when information became readily available, even when the authorities tried to suppress them.

For example, the idea of a nobility class.

[james-mcelwain]

Past results do not guarantee future performance.

[tomhoward]

This is a pretty low effort comment, but more importantly is conceding the several upthread assertions that freedom of speech has historically been effective at correcting bad ideas.

If your claim is that we shouldn't expect this to continue in the future, that's a whole new claim that you need to support.

[zimpenfish]

> All kinds of ideas died when information became readily available > For example, the idea of a nobility class.

America literally has a nobility class right now. The UK isn't far off.

[WalterBright]

> America literally has a nobility class right now.

Literally nope. For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court than another group. There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors. There is no law enshrining divine right.

[aantthony]

My comment wasn't about whether people knew these practices were occurring. People knew they were occurring.

The mere public existence of an idea (like in some dusty old book that nobody reads) is not sufficient to change majority option, no.

[aantthony]

Why has the goalpost moved from an idea dying out, to dying out within one day? And who is "we"?

> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.

[quazeekotl]

Do you really think people at large didn't know about hanging, slavery, human sacrifice, and ideas about a flat earth in societies where these ideas were applicable?

[aantthony]

I meant they didn't know the truth about them. They obviously knew that slavery was occurring.

[AnthonyMouse]

Not only that, the truth as it's taught in history books was relatively short-lived. Prior to mercantilism and the industrial revolution, slavery and serfdom were basically equivalent. There was a lord and you worked for them in exchange for room and board and protection. You might not love it, but there wasn't really anywhere else to go for anybody who couldn't raise a military force and become a lord themselves.

Then suddenly there were factories who would hire anybody who showed up and pay them real money and plantation workers started running off to work in the factories left and right. It was no longer that people stayed because they had no better option, they were then being forced to stay against their will. The dynamic changed. Chains and beatings entered the scene to keep slaves from running off. They did anyway, so their replacements had to be forcefully kidnapped because there were no longer any volunteers.

The whole thing collapsed and was dismantled in a relatively short period of time after that.

[james-mcelwain]

I mean, like many things, this just comes down to axioms that ground your meta-ethics. I don't find moral Platonism very convincing.

There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.

We should reject this kind of naive idealism.

[aantthony]

I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.

[knzhou]

So you're arguing that once the public knows the truth... then the public will know the truth? Does sound like a rather weak claim, doesn't it?

[aantthony]

No.

stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"

So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.

[zimpenfish]

> - flat earth (before Galileo)

I believe this isn't true - the sphericity of the Earth was widely believed well before Galileo.

> - human sacrifice > - laws against gay marriage > - caning children Were these ever views held by the majority? As opposed to, say, a minority of religious zealots in power?

[aantthony]

Yep you are right. I should have said geocentricity.

[yongjik]

> flat earth (before Galileo)

That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

> pro-slavery views

In 1776, America is born with its Freedom(TM). In 1829, Mexico abolishes slavery. In 1835, Texas revolts, resulting in Republic of Texas (1836), which then merges with the US (1846), which triggers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which leads to, among other things, recognition that Texas is a part of a slave-holding nation. Slavery won't be abolished until the Civil War (1861-1865).

In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

> communism

Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in London while writing articles for New-York Daily Tribune. Whatever its merits are, his ideas were widely known throughout Europe, and still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union.

[vkou]

> That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

And no number of people saying this seems to make this meme go away.

[aantthony]

> That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

> In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.

> (communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union

Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)

[lonelappde]

Have you not noticed that the most populous country in the world is run by a self-identifying Communist Party?

And the USSR, #4 was Communist until it collapsed economically, not intellectually?

[kortilla]

China is not communist, at least not in any way related to the western definition. There is no common ownership of the means of production and there is still very much an independent state, money, and social classification.

[aantthony]

Communism collapsed intellectually in the West after the economic collapse of the USSR and the relevant death tolls. I know China is communist, but in democratic countries, for the most part, communism is an idea that died off.

[monocasa]

It's on the rise again. https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article237089274.h...

I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.

[Frondo]

Facts don't generally change people's minds.

Google "do facts convince people" and you'll see lots of stuff about this. Here's one, from scientificamerican.com...

> In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...

[aantthony]

Yes that is a good point. The link I gave mentions that study, and says it has failed replication attempts. I think the truth is more nuanced - there are ways it can be more effective and yes sometimes counter-effective. But that doesn't mean we should just give up fact-checking entirely. I think there are several ways we can make corrective fact checking more convincing to people and am working on building a collaborative fact-checker https://verifact.io to try to do that