It's a capitulation to the idea that speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. The point is FB is still very much on the former highly centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system side while only making small moves in the other direction with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that direction but what they say vs do is an important distinction.
> a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one.
You mean to say: "a top-down technocratic worldview vs majoritarian one."
Majoritarian != Democracy
I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se. I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards just because large parts of the public have morally rotten views.
Objective standards would be best, but subjective standards that you pretend are objective are far worse than subjective standards that are honest about it.
The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
Other than science being the entire reason the US were able to corner the fascists in WW2. Let a lone all the scientific break throughs in the last few decades coming from the West. Heck before WWII, the automobile?
Perhaps you meant it wasn’t primarily embraced.
To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement?
> science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified.
> If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering.
What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications.
> The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from.
> The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.
