[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.

[james-mcelwain]

I think that framing ("necessary but not sufficient") is a much more productive way that I wish free speech advocates would use more.

My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).

However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.

While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.

[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.