I see lots of disagreements here, but I must say I also soured on free speech. I used to think that free speech was necessary and overall a positive for society. Then I saw the Capitol attack in US. The disinformation spread in England about kids stabbed that led to riots. I see disinformation every day, especially from USA, saying Europe has no freedom, that it's overrun with criminals, and people not only believe it, but vote accordingly. This has to stop. Humans weren't trained to use rationality and reasoning every second of their life. Reason costs a lot of cognitive power so the brain implements a hundred shortcuts. For example: if you see something appear frequently, you assume it to be true. This is good for avoiding poisonous plants, but it's terrible when you go in Twitter and you're spammed with the same lies day and night. It's messing with us. Enough is enough. Free speech with guardrails.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
I agree that people clearly don't use critical thinking 100% of the time and are easily influenced.
But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.
Many social improvements have been attained by "attacking the foundations of society". How would you like living under some absolute monarchy? How do you think gay people would like to live in a church-run society like 500 years ago?
"But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.", but that wasn't what was argued ("You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister."), but more your interpretation of what was said. You're making a strawman argument.
Well, the PM isn't exactly the status quo, I wasn't replying to that. Rather, I was responding to this specific bit, emphasis mine:
> You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society.
Not sure when the strawman is. "The foundations of society", for me, means "the way things are". Which can be vaccines, sure, or any kind of general policy which has been showed to have a positive effect on society, but it can also be all kinds of things taken for granted which aren't necessarily rooted in reason.
To be really honest, I share a similar stance to you overall but I would still admit that there is some partial truth to it
I would like to expand this not only to foreign state actors that people mention but also companies inside which are actively trying to do nefarious stuff
As an example, Tobacco industry knew that the damages were there but they still tried to spur up medical confusion around it all so that people would still think that medical discussion is going on when it was 100% clear that tobacco harms. Who knows how many people died
The man who discovered that washing hands saved lives was so ridiculed and I think met with hostility because doctors couldn't comprehend the idea that it was they would could spread diseases. This is decades before germ theory was invented
His name is Ignaz Semmelweis and the world was unjust to him. Doctors ridiculed and threatend him and he was labelled obsessive and doctors called it mere coincidence. His career crumbled as he was forced out of vienna/his hospital and his mental health deteriorated as his warnings were ignored
in 1865 Semmelwise was commited to an asylum where he died just two weeks later at age 47
Only after pasteur developed germ theory and lester pioneered antisceptic surgery, semmelwise was finally vindicated.
This simple practise of handwashing is now considered the most basic medical standard worldwide saving countless millions of lives in the process.
(I had to write it by hand here basically transcribing this really amazing video that I watched about such a topic, I would highly suggest watching it)
Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.
But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”
1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.
2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
Unfortunately, the rich and billionaire class are convinced they got where they did just because of sheer personal effort. This of course is delusional. Effort is important, but luck is essential.
We here are all guilty of this. Nobody is really aware of or grateful for all the things that enabled us to make a living.
Even if you are unloved, digging for gold with your bare hands, you were spared by people stronger, had people grow your food, teach you, build the streets,
make your meds, literally deal with your shit all your life. And let's not forget the people who endured cruelty, suffered and died for your jeans and coffee...
(There are some great scenes in Pluribus, which illustrate this ignorance very well.)
I learned my lesson when Microsoft OneNote, upon having my notebooks full and my storage cap hit, did not even allow me to delete anything, because I could not save due to "storage full". However, it was also impossible to export OneNote locally because the newer apps only work with the cloud. I had to download an older version to download my files, delete some notebooks, and go back under the storage cap.
Or I could have paid Microsoft. But I did not feel like it.
Because (this is not my personal opinion, but my observations on LLM discourse):
1. As it is usually the case, it is more or less accepted that AI and LLMs make mistakes. There have been cases of teenagers committing suicide at the request and/or suggestion of chatbots. So this is just another of these "mistakes"
2. Going against Elon Musk means you go against free speech. This also means you will become a target of US government meddling, similar to how Donald Trump railed against EU applying EU law to a company offering EU services (Twitter)
3. Elon Musk is also one of the most powerful men in the world, and it's likely getting banned from Twitter for reporting / sharing this is the best that can happen. The worst is harassment, like happened to journalists that post stuff unfavourable to Musk in the past.
4. Grok issued an apology (as if AIs and LLMs had a conscience)
5. Grok and other AI chatbots are already being used for sexual purposes. Although they are intended to be used by adults, and to share content depicting adults, this is still (in my opinion) outrageous. I think legislation should prohibit AI chatbots from emulating intimate relationships with other humans, but this hasn't happened, so this is a side effect of that.
6. It is already possible to generate CSAM through AI models. Cloud-hosted models tend to have guardrails, but people can modify, tune, and train open source models.
The biggest, loudest, most powerful proponents of free speech don't actually believe in it. Musk bans and fires anyone who disagrees with him. Donald Trump rails against news articles and media companies who publish information he personally doesn't like, all while both of them blame the EU for violating a supposed free speech standard that they themselves hate, and also one the EU never really adhered to.
That's not what I imply. I'm saying that it eases the creation of new taxes, which are ever-increasing in the EU due to the social welfare costs that increase with immigration and aging populations.
Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".
You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.
SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.
>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.
The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.
Those services you mentioned along with some others (like German Giropay) have been connected under one umbrela of Wero in 2024.
That's whats so confusing about this Digital euro. Why not just push Wero? It already is cooperation of many banks that have presence all around europe. I guess difference is that Digital euro will be going through european central bank? That could be huge fail because by 2029 (when digital euro should start) SEPA instant payments with QR codes and initiatives like Wero will be super established.
It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.
Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
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