Thread by @RokoMijicUK

I've changed my mind about freedom of speech recently.

Clearly our infosphere is broken. Looking at "cancel culture", it's tempting to think that what we need is more freedom to speak.

Freedom of speech at least guarantees that people with correct ideas can speak. But the modern infosphere has found ways around that protection.

If there popular opinion is that the sky is green, I am fairly free on Twitter to say "the sky is blue".

But now, when someone says "The sky is blue" 500 other people who are emotionally invested in the verdant-celestial cult organise an online witch-hunt for the evil, colorphobic blue-sky heretic.

The offline world is not at all robust against 500 or 5000 cultists trying to cancel the heretic.

As long as the online world provides a fertile medium for cultish beliefs to form and grow, mere freedom will not be enough for the truth to win.

It goes further than just the online world, but looking at the nature of the problem it is becoming clear to me that more freedom will not fix the problem.

The most obvious solution that people have suggested is to have a censorship bureau that looks at particular ideas and censors some of them. This was effective in previous eras, for example during wartime & to some extent it works in China.

There are several problems with this, but the biggest one is that starting from where Western Society is right now, your censorship bureau will get captured by the Green Sky Cult and simply used to further the "Sky is Green!" agenda and persecute truth-tellers.

But on the other hand, if you add more freedom, you will get a self-organising cancel cult that gets anyone who tells the truth branded as a bigoted blue-supremacist colorphobe and fired.

I think we need to accept that "Self-Enforcing" memes are a thing and study them. Nobody studies this (as far as I know) yet it's fairly clearly the most important phenomenon in the world right now.

I also think that we need to let go of "freedom is the ultimate goal". This is a meme that's very influential on the political right, it's even a founding myth for America. It gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling. Uh-oh.

This is freedom: some midwit social justice woman using government resources (from @NPRCodeSwitch and @NPR) to promote and help the people who loot, riot and burn businesses and homes.

The correct way to think about freedom IMO is that you can make a system that's already secure and well-functioning better by adding some amount of freedom to it as the system initially becomes more robust via free speech; people pointing out genuine areas for improvement etc.

The West has gone light-years beyond this. We went into the territory where there was so much freedom -- so much "free energy" -- that various parasites developed and grew to start feeding on that free energy.

One of those parasites is a memeplex that takes government resources and uses them to promote the destruction of society. This is the "Sky is Green!" cult I have been talking about.

"No, actually looting and rioting is good, let me explain why on this government salary ... "

But "Sky is Green" can thrive on corporate largesse too, robbing just a little bit of money from each shareholder (concentrated vs diffuse interest, see: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic… ) and using corporate influence to attack people who disagree with the meme.

We in the #rationalist movement and in the scientific tradition in general have spent too much time thinking about how to believe what's true, and not enough time on how to make people believe what's false.

Forget about #Bayes for a moment and think about emotional manipulation, Russel Conjugation (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_c…), virtue signalling, #LuxuryBeliefs, etc.

Something like 20% of our effort needs to be spent on this stuff, and as far as I am aware it is currently ~0.

We can't really come up with a coherent plan for fighting the parasites in our current state of ignorance. We're confused and nobody has any good ideas. The parasites have been optimized by memetic selection so any obvious idea won't work because they already evolved resistance.

The only concrete suggestion I have for now is try to keep right-wing politicians in power -- they won't solve the problem but they will keep The Eye of Sauron away from the hobbits whilst we figure out how to throw the ring into Mount Doom.