There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.
You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.
But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want https://t.co/Ud5kKDQRV7
@ReneeD If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.
@ReneeD Online, the most expensive kind of "reach" is to run your own server at home (or redundant set of mirroring servers) where your only reliance on contracts with others is with ISPs. You can run your own installs of open-source sw like Wordpress or write your own.
@ReneeD EVERY single thing you do to lower the cost of this setup -- using a cloud vendor, a third-party hosted application layer, a privately owned social network for distribution... these are expansions of reach achieved by trading off control for cost.
@ReneeD Your reach is not YOUR reach. It's a set of agreements binding you to the speech politics of a bunch of other private parties. What you say is what they endorse by renting you servers, pipes or software installs or whatever. You want minimal constraints, run your own server
@ReneeD Beyond a certain scale, you'll need things like CDNs to serve your audience. This means you either have to get into the Internet infrastructure business yourself to keep your reach insured, or agree with their policies to stay in business.
Level up yet again and you basically need your own country to insure your reach.

This is reasonable. You should not expect no-strings-attached access to the attention of potentially billions of people under the same terms as ranting from a soapbox in a 19th century town square.
Here's the thing free speech fundamentalists don't get about "free" reach technology capable of reaching billions: given what is possible, what it costs, and how many thousands of people have to be voluntarily involved to keep the system running, it is nothing like "public air"
When you ask for conditions of use of this infrastructure to be the same as the conditions governing Q&A time at a physical townhall in a village in a room with 100 people, you're basically asking "give me a free dictatorship to rule over".
You're a wannabe tinpot dictator who wants the privileges of being ruler of a country-scale entity without all that fussy trouble of actually running a country and maintaining an army who can make internet infrastructure people do what you want at gunpoint.

More from Venkatesh Rao

Both this thread and the outraged response threads are... something.


This is why I never wanted kids. Way too much responsibility for another human’s development. Depending on the child, this might either be the day they discovered who they were or the day that traumatized them into a lifelong fuckup. Either way I don’t want to direct the show.

As far as the can opener goes, it wouldn’t even occur to me to try and turn it into a teachable moment. That sounds vaguely quixotic. I’d just show them how immediately. I think my default is to try and instruct clearly but not demonstrate unless the person is truly disoriented.

I think there’s basically a right answer here: show the kid. If the kid has the aptitude they’ll enjoy the mechanism so much they’ll develop the figure-it-out skill with other devices. If not, it’s a training data point that will build remedial levels of intuition more slowly.

I think perseverance is both misframed and over-rated as a virtue. Misframed as in: everybody has potential for it in some areas and lacks it in others. Aptitude is those areas where perseverance comes easily to you. Meta-skill of knowing where/why you persist is more important.
Heh, one thing the nyt piece managed was to do a Cunningham's law nerdsnipe-wmd at newspaper scale... now a bunch of people are energetically trying to post the right answer.


IMO trying to correct whatever the NYT writer thought he knew/understood is futile. "Willing to be misunderstood by the NYT" should be the default stance unless you want to waste a lot of time correcting an obsolete 2013 map for people who don't care.

The thing is, the NYT still has enough normative cultural power, even as it has fallen from newspaper-of-record, that it takes a particular sort of heretical self-confidence to sort of ignore whatever they happen to be wrong about on any given week, whether or not it concerns you

A subtle shift has occurred in the workings of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It used to be an individual private amnesia re: media ("I'll believe myself when I am certain they got it wrong because I'm an expert, but still believe them when I am not"). Now it's a collective effect

A sort of common-knowledge threshold has been crossed lately. "Everybody knows that everybody knows the NYT is wrong on X across largish subcultures." It's no longer mutual beliefs being validated occasionally 1:1.
I’m guessing these responses really reflect people’s weighted averages (age*current average effort fraction) though I kept it simple and asked for just averages.


I suspect a healthy weighted average should be ~ (age-20)/2. So a 30 year old should be at 5, a 40 year old at 10, a 50 year old at 15 etc.

Standard deviation should be ~average/3 maybe, so distribution spreads as you age and accumulate projects and get better at them.

Other things being equal, people get good at starting in their 20s, at follow through in 30s, at finishing in 40s.

No point learning food follow through until you’ve found a few good starts to bet on. No point getting good at finishing until a few projects have aged gracefully.

I’m in the 7+ range myself. Probably 8-9. Slightly less than healthy for my age.

I suspect most self-judgments on being good starters/follow-through-ers/finishers are really flawed because of the non-ergodicity of project management skill learning. You can’t learn good practices for the 3 phases in an arbitrary order. On,y one order actually works.

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