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Ali Afroz's avatar

Although it’s generally framed as an argument against freedom of speech, I actually think the fact that truth does not generally win in the marketplace of ideas is a reason to protect free speech. If the truth was super persuasive, we could reasonably assume that an ideas popularity in the marketplace of ideas provides strong evidence of its truth, and therefore unpopular ideas are likely false. In reality, the correlation is much much weaker and lots of obviously true ideas are super unpopular, so it’s reasonable to be very cautious about restricting speech. Since in practice, the government will generally only ban unpopular speech and that’s not a very strong signal of truth.

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Jessie Ewesmont's avatar

The scary/sad thing about trying to censor speech at universities is that they don’t seem to care if they hit people who aren’t doing controversial research at all as collateral damage. It would be problematic enough if they went after “DEI” academics - but they’re also, inexplicably, attacking people trying to cure cancer because the mice they were using as test subjects have the string “trans” in the name. And, with the Gaza protest stuff, they recently deported a girl who was cleared of taking part in the protests, but just happened to be walking home near the crowd. It makes zero sense, and I have to hope this carnage stops at some point.

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