[robrenaud]

Americans tend to believe that the counter to bad speech is good speech. But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.

Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable.

America is not nearly there. Empirically, free speech has failed, as an insane fraction of American citizens are vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

[hellojesus]

Have you considered that the number of vaccine hesitant people has increased specifically as a result of the ever-increasing suppression of dissent? To me it seems like that's exactly what's happening.

The US should have handled this exactly like a sane country: - No lockdowns. You determine your individual risk level. Businesses are free to require masks if they want to. (I really would only be okay with a compelled wfh order, if possible.) The gov owes a lot of people a lot of money for compelling them not to work. The gov wouldn't owe money if consumers just stopped shopping places because they didn't feel comfortable not wearing a mask in a business that didn't require them. - Vaccines rollout is: take it if you want. We recommend it. It appears to be safe. Here is the data. If you don't want it, fine, but we are business as usual so you're accepting a higher risk.

[arcatech]

What you're proposing is really not an effective way to handle an outbreak of an airborne respiratory virus.

[gfodor]

Well, apparently, neither is what we have done. But at least in the scenario mentioned above, we don't find ourselves slipping into totalitarianism.

Perhaps there is no way, in a liberal society, to have a silver bullet? It turns out principles matter in such situations.

[tastyfreeze]

What they are proposing is how our nation is supposed to work. Everybody is responsible for assessing the risks for their self. If everybody does this then it is an effective way to handle an outbreak.

[Mountain_Skies]

>vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

This is a smear. Communities of Color are vaccine hesitant and for the most part do not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It's gross of you to ignore the legitimate concerns of Communities of Color and to declare them election conspiracy theorist. You're attempting to lump together diverse groups into a single "not like me" group for your own ideological convivence. This is disgusting.

[gfodor]

You don't even need to think the election was stolen to argue that opt-out mass mail in voting is a transparently hilariously stupid idea if you care at all about a secure chain of custody secret ballot. You know, the thing we explicitly designed elections around after realizing how important it was given widespread abuse and fraud.

Lumping all these groups of people together as was done here is a great example of the mindless zombie tribalism going on, which in large part is a result of propaganda.

There is a pretty large closure of ideas that now get you pegged as "one of the Bad People" for even stating them publicly, without strongly held support. For example, even suggesting that our election systems in the US are horribly broken or just merely flawed, a widely accepted bi-partisan position just a few short years ago, puts you into the bucket of being a "horse-paste consuming, anti-vax, insurrectionist, conspiracy monger." I wish this was a strawman, but it ain't.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable. ... Empirically, free speech has failed ..."

The problem being that democracy, even representative democracy, also only works if almost everyone is reasonable and (tying back to speech) informed. Once you give up on the population being reasonable, it's a short step to saying that someone "reasonable" ought to control what they see and rule over what they do "for their own good, of course". Even if that happens to be true, down that road lies madness.

[burnafter182]

Free speech is used as a dialectic medium to exchange information without having considerations of direct action taken against you (at least by the government). It is, effectively a deductive process. "Spreading" misinformation is not the same as discussing the obverse of the populist topic. Were you to fabricate tables, charts, and number which are used to conclude you're misinforming. This misinformation only extends in its ability to convince to the unscrupulous. Were you to, with due skepticism, promote the discussion of this data and provide an analytic outlook you're not misinforming, you're discussing, you're empirical. As an aside: if you're empirical and your opponent makes attempts to shut you up, what do you conclude? Make a tree, discuss the probabilities you assign to it.

Hilariously it seems to be that empiricism has failed. One does not generate a meaningful framework of human morality from non-transcendent scientific conclusion other than utilitarianism which in itself is conceptually flawed because each human presents hundreds or thousands of immeasurable and constantly moving targets. This is intractable. It is also why, despite the leaps and bounds in technological advancement, people still have to put in their 40 hours. It is why a CEO can rake in ~300x that of the company's average employee. It is why a large swath of the population must undergo the risks of debt peonage. It's why people feel that populist ideology should be inflicted on everyone, despite various circumstances - by the very definition a slave master relationship, the same sort of relationship virtually everyone rails against. Which brings me to the final point, I am not your property, and I suspect neither of us wants to be the property of the government or of corporations. I will assume they neither you nor they have property rights over me and thus I will consume and defer as I so please, but do go and inflict your blind ideology on to me.

[SuoDuanDao]

The other half of the population probably believes you are evidence that free speech has failed. Would you give up your own free speech to show the strength of your convictions?

More seriously, what would be your solution to a country where two major power blocs both believe that free speech is acceptable so long as it stays inside their respective overton windows?

[machiaweliczny]

It's not free speach that failed it's engagement algorithms that don't allow for negative signal to extremists.

Why there are only likes and not option of "I think this is stupid" or "I don't think it's true".

[CivBase]

When the "good speech" has devolved into dunking on people with social media posts using fax and logic, I can see why it no longer works as a counter to bad speech.

Confirmation bias is a helluva drug. It encourages people to agree with those they like and disagree with those they don't. Sometimes those biases can be overcome with time and patient reasoning but in the hyper-connected, engagement-driven world of social media that rarely happens. In-group/out-group preference kicks in and people start defending those in their group against attacks of character, lending a false sense of legitimacy to their ideas - the ideas born of confirmation bias instead of logic. At a large enough scale, this results in a social divide perpetuated by echo chambers.

[naasking]

> But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.

The problem isn't the evidence, the details of which many people wouldn't understand or care to know, it's the credibility of the people making recommendations based on that evidence, and the way they have conveyed those recommendations.

The public-facing people championing public health have long since lost credibility but they aren't being replaced in an effort to restore public trust. That's the problem.