Mill on Freedom of Speech

[@RyanNightTalks]

I just wanna say a lot of the philosophy I learned early on I learned from watching your lecture videos from UTA way back when. One of my favorite philosophy professors.

[@qwertyuiopqwerqwererty]

this channel is an absolute goldmine. thank you for your videos, i've learned a lot

[@littlebigheroman]

Timely, relevant, and engaging 😊

[@rhoharane]

Any serious discussion of this topic in our time needs to tackle the fact that not everyone who uses our channels of communication are there for genuine discussion. There is industrial-scale, commercially-incentivized dumping of convoluted fallacies and outrage-elevating sentiments (in numbers that overwhelm our ability to make coherent sense of them) in the same media we ideally use to surface our ideas up to society for scrutiny. In effect, the noise drowns out the honest, earnest-experience, allow-real-disagreements and carefully-gathered-information attempts to arrive at real ideas that make the world better for everyone that we strive for. The modern strategy is, instead of literally penalizing detractors, they just make discussion impossibly difficult by wasting people's time, attention and other resources. And the modern resulting sentiment is "why discuss at all when everything turns into a shouting match and a multi-hour-long refutation of false statements that took a few seconds to make up and spread to a million people? And even when the truth peeks through, big decisions are made according to much different criteria of money and power." People just want to live a life. If we want to preserve our ability to discuss and consider all sides of a controversial topic, we need to creatively counteract all the equally-creatively malicious things that erode our ability to do so. Inevitably, this process itself of coming up with a solution involves disagreements. Your speech is not just under attack by the people who would exclude your words, but could easily pay content farms to drown them out, by how much easier and financially-incentivized it is to generate huge volumes of debilitating nonsense. If that remains unsolved, things like having the humility and open-mindedness to consider other ideas has very little effect on society's freedom.

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

@@rhoharane True, but often the people who would censor ARE the people producing the garbage.

[@Google_Censored_Commenter]

I'd like to add 4 additional reasons to support free speech: 1. Falsehoods can teach us about the world. The progression of science has numerous examples of this. The geocentric model is wholly and totally false, and yet it still motivated astronomers on the path to discovering true patterns about planetary orbits. 2. Falsehoods can teach us about our own flawed reasoning. When someone is allowed to speak falsehoods, that also means their justification can be questioned. We can learn what made them believe the falsehood in the first place. From biases to logical fallacies, human reason is subject to all kinds of errors. And identifying their errors helps us avoid making the same mistake. 3. Falsehoods allow for unique, original expressions of thought. To stiffle them would limit human creativity. All the most wonderous works of fiction are only interesting because they don't mirror the real work exactly. It is their 'falsehoods' that make them interesting. Originality requires new elements by definition, and what better source than the endless sea of falsehoods? 4. The threat of censorship for uttering a falsehood, may ironically prevent truths from being spoken, out of fear they may be deemed false. Any idea which appears false on the surface, but true post investigation, would either never be uttered, or never investigated before it is censored.

[@nicholasfevelo3041]

Eloquent and timely in our post-liberal West. Thank you.

[@Google_Censored_Commenter]

it's not entirely post liberal yet, we can still save it.

[@nicholasfevelo3041]

@@Google_Censored_Commenter maybe so

[@0rangecray0n]

What makes you assume we are post liberal?

[@nicholasfevelo3041]

@@0rangecray0n the fundamental beliefs intrinsic to Liberalism in the Anglo-American tradition are no longer believed by those in charge.

[@Rspknlikeab0ssxd]

I questioned what infinity actually is to someone in the r/physics (Reddit) forums recently. I didn't receive a definition of infinity, which was neither circular, nor uninformative. I also said I was suspicious that infinity is something that could actually exist, and would certainly be something beyond our faculties- us being merely finite, we could never know infinity, nor reach it. Any number we consider is that much closer to zero, and incomparably farther from infinity. I was muted from r/askphysics for poor comment quality. I asked for clarification, suggested that I gave great justification for my argument/question, and do hold 3 degrees, 2 of which were relevant to the discussion at hand (in case it was assumed I was a troll-- though I thought the character of my comments were sincere and well-written. Apparently, they disagreed). I said a few other things, and was prompty banned from r/physics, for "poor comment quality". I received no clarification and was silenced. I had a similar experience on a different account in the r/philosophy forums. For reference, that was my third physics comment, and first philosophy comment. I take it that I have controversial views, but none which I do not defend to the best of my ability, nor that I have received reason that is in anyway compelling to make me believe the contrary. It's like Mill said. If I see no reason to profess the contrary, continue professing I will, and that's a shame and a loss for me if indeed I am wrong. For, then I'm given no chance to correct myself and profess better. If I'm right, then all the more reason not to be silenced. I do think misinformation is a shame, and hateful comments have no place in most rational discourse. But I detest the refusal to allow people to speak, and find it insulting and demeaning to refuse to clarify the nature of the offense in making such comments that get one banned. Thank you for this video, it's well-made and informative. I have a copy of Mill's On Liberty, and should probably give it a thorough read!

[@Kinging76]

Regardless of the true sex of Imane Khalif. If her sex is confirmed by all doctors around the world still people will have issues on both sides. These philosophers have tried to make a great point on a focused issue. Freedom of speech has created layers of arguments on any issue, and this density of arguments has slowed the process of decision-making.

[@11jonkled82]

This level of lucidness within articulation is profound.

[@srh1957]

You mentioned (I think) that things are worse in the UK. I'm a UK resident - what kind of things did you have in mind?

[@ddyatlov]

I had an idea for a Philosophy dissertation where we'd compare what "History" says about 911 to some of the conspiracy theories and try to figure out which Hold more water... I think that would be grounds for throwing the entire discipline of History out the window... because after all if we can't agree on something from 2001, then what does that say about all the things that came before. Although probably Voltaire beat me to it... (some lie agreed upon = History) but I dont think any "serious" institutions really have an interest in funding this research. Look at this. we found this KSM person, apparently, and he confessed. hehe. after 20 years in Gitmo..... I think people are still trying to figure out how someone knocked down 3 buildings with 2 planes.. something about History just doesn't add up.