Speech standards should be determined by public opinion, science has never had a seat at the table in the West. 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.
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.
> science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
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?
1. There was an entire sentence, taking the second part without the first ("Speech standards should be determined by public opinion") removes essential context.
2. The fascists were Westerners (and leaders in science/technology, for that matter, the US didn't beat them with more technology).
I still disagree, science has had a seat at the table in the West especially around speech. Speech was either locked down using control of technologies or speech was empowered using proliferation of technologies.
For the Japanese. The war was shortened. But by the time of the bomb they were doomed. They could not replace their losses like the Americans could
The Germans were beaten mostly by the Soviets. They (the Germans) were overwhelmed. And they too could not replace their losses like the Soviets could. Especially humans
> Speech standards should be determined by public opinion
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.
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.