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Self in Society Roundup 57

Free speech and intellectual diversity, the limits of phonics, Argentina, progress conference, AI, collider bias, and more.

Salmieri on Free Speech

Gregory Salmieri, to my mind the best Objectivist philosopher now working, has out an important new 23,000-word essay on the right to freedom of speech and related matters. Here I summarize key points.

Salmieri's core thesis is that supporting the right to freedom of speech, which means freedom from government and private force when expressing one's views using one's own property and in voluntary association with others, is distinct from promoting intellectual diversity. One can perfectly consistently advocate free speech while favoring private restrictions of speech and dissociation from certain speakers. For example, although government properly cannot censor a book, a private bookstore is perfectly within its rights to choose not to sell a book it deems offensive or of poor quality. And the bookstore's decision not to carry the book is not a violation of the author's freedom of speech.

Salmieri sees huge problems with trying to equate freedom of speech in terms of freeing people from coercion with a positive obligation of private parties (including taxpayers) to provide a platform for people's speech. Although there are contexts in which it is appropriate for someone to support intellectual diversity, such support is not a prerequisite for endorsing freedom of speech, nor is the promotion of intellectual diversity an absolute or unqualified value.

Following are a few quotes from Salmieri's essay, intended here to suggest the tenor of the piece, not to serve as a substitution for a thorough reading.

[F]ree speech is an absolute—a principle that, when implemented in a society's laws, empowers individuals to build relationships and institutions in which they can encounter and contest one another's ideas. . . . This freedom necessarily includes the freedom to disassociate from those with whom one disagrees. . . . The freedom of speech is an individual's freedom to express the opinions he reaches. It is not a license to demand that those who consider these opinions evil continue to deal with one. . . .

[N]o one has a right to other people's assistance or resources to disseminate his opinions. Indeed, it is an exercise of one’s right to free speech to withhold cooperation or support for the dissemination of ideas with which one disagrees. . . .

A less well-recognized way in which governments violate individuals' freedom of speech is through laws that establish and promulgate certain opinions as orthodoxy. . . .

It is true that ideological diversity is valuable in many contexts, and there may be some specific organizations whose missions would be best served by a policy of ideological neutrality, but general presumptions in favor of such policies drop the context that gives rise to this value and amount to demands that organizations sacrifice their missions. Rather than being moral absolutes, intellectual diversity and welcoming heterodoxy are potential values to be traded off against others in crafting worthwhile associations. . . .

When free speech is lauded as a collective value, it is often because the exchange of ideas allows truth to be discovered and error abandoned. But it is the individualistic culture of free speech, rather than the Millian, collectivistic alternative, that in fact promotes the discovery of truth and the countering of error. . . . When one thinks that there is a falsehood or fallacy that has gone unanswered, one does well to answer it. But often falsehoods and fallacies continue to be repeated and spread, in their original forms or with trivial modifications, despite having been soundly answered. The rational course here is to marginalize them, rather than to devote one’s days to Sisyphean refutations of the same fallacies.

I think Salmieri is totally right about all of this. However, I also believe that the Ayn Rand Institute, the publisher of the piece, sometimes has erred in cutting off intellectual diversity. The history of ARI has been marked by a series of purges that, while in some cases justifiable, in other cases have been seriously damaging to the organization and its mission. I won't try to review that "insider baseball" here. But I do want to point to the potential danger of "marginalizing" people over reasonable ideological disagreements. That is the pathway to dogmatism.

At the same time, I very much appreciate Salmieri's point that "tolerating" the speech of fools and miscreants (in the context of a voluntary association) often is self-destructive. Such foolish "tolerance" enables bad actors such as Steve Bannon to, as he says, "flood the zone with shit." Turning public discourse into a sewer of bigotry and conspiracy mongering is not the answer.

Salmieri argues, "The entire public education system (including public financing of higher education) should be abolished, as should such agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation." That's all well and good (I'm pretty sure I agree with his extreme position, as shocking as it is to most people). But, in the here and now, government does control those institutions, so we have to talk about how, as government agents, they handle matters of speech.

The Limits of Phonics

My wife and I taught our child to read by reading to him from infancy and, eventually, having him read to us. At a certain point I could tell that our child needed more help with phonics, so I got The Reading Lesson by Michael Levin and Charan Langton, and my child and I spent around twenty minutes per day for a year going through it. Through practice, our child became a proficient reader.

Phonics is a good idea; a basic knowledge of it is necessary to learn how to read English and numerous other languages. But there's no good idea that public schools cannot screw up. Natalie Wexler writes:

Some educators, and some curricula, appear to be trying to teach kids everything there is to know about phonics–for example, according to cognitive scientist and reading expert Mark Seidenberg, all 44 phonemes in the English language and all 137 phonics rules, plus other rules about spelling, syllable types, and morpheme types.

Seidenberg and some other experts say that's unrealistic and unnecessary. Children do need some explicit instruction in the correspondences between letters and sounds (in other words, phonics), they say, but they’ll pick up most of the knowledge they need about those correspondences implicitly, through reading.

This completely squares with my own experience. The basics of phonics are necessary but hardly sufficient. I learned how to read by my mom informally teaching me phonics. We do need to recognize that some children have dyslexia or other neurodiversities and need specialized help with reading.

In related commentary, Wexler worries we're "becoming a nation of non-readers."

Quick Takes

Cowen on Milei: BBC interviewed Tyler Cowen about Javier Milei. Monica de Bolle explains that Argentina long has been crushed economically by a spending-debt-inflation cycle. Cowen describes Milei as a libertarian ideologically who is nevertheless "pragmatic" and "adaptive" in his approach to governing. Cowen, pointing out what should be obvious, summarizes, "They [Argentines] need to cut government spending and limit the hyperinflation they've been having." Cowen says Milei has been relatively successful.

Progress Conference Videos: Videos are live! I've watched "The Path to Energy Superabundance," which covers the pros and cons of nuclear and solar electricity. Listen to the one with Tyler Cowen for a discussion about AI and economic growth.

AI Future: Will Bryk has thoughts on our AI future. He predicts very-rapid change across the board, leading to profound changes in our way of life. Via Cowen. I'm guessing that Cowen's more-measured take is probably more accurate. "Big change is coming fast" seems like a good prediction either way; it's just a matter of how big and how fast.

Collider Bias: Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers discuss "collider bias." Here's an example of the paradox at hand (all drawn from the podcast episode): During Covid, researchers found that people hospitalized with Covid were less likely to be smokers. That seems weird, because smoking obviously hurts your lungs. Could it be that smoking actually was protective against Covid? Another example: Being obese is associated with better outcomes among people with certain diseases, including cardiovascular disease. Again, weird. So what's going on? Basically the issue is that by selecting a subgroup you can end up with phantom correlations that don't actually indicate any causal link, or miss correlations where there is a causal link. Example: If you select NBA players, there's no correlation between height and athletic contribution. But that hardly means that height does not contribute to basketball ability. The issue is that the NBA excludes everyone who is short and not highly skilled, and shorter NBA players tend to be especially highly skilled. What about smoking and Covid? People hospitalized for Covid tend to have some background health problem, so if you're only looking at people hospitalized for Covid, the smokers may not be the least-healthy of the group. It's not that smoking protects you from Covid; it's that someone hospitalized for Covid as a smoker might be in a relatively better position than someone hospitalized for Covid for other reasons. To get good results, you can't just look at people hospitalized with Covid; you have to see if, among the general population, and adjusting for age and whatnot, smokers tend to do better.

YIMBY Now: NPR: "More than 770,000 people were living in shelters or outside in January . . . the largest number since HUD started doing this report in 2007." Legalize housing!

Bird Flu: STAT: "CDC says H5N1 bird flu sample shows mutations that may help the virus bind to cells in the upper airways of people."

Immigration Fight: Some Trump backers realize that keeping out talented immigrants is self-destructive. On December 27, on Twitter/X, Elon Musk urged people who fail to support the H1B work visa program for select immigrants to "step back and fuck yourself in the face." I remarked, "Just remember that most American voters selected the 'fuck yourself in the face' approach. No one can reasonably claim to be surprised by this sort of thing. Nor can Musk claim to be surprised that MAGA is xenophobic white nationalist." Cowen urges Musk and his allies to "keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes."

Zwolinski on Rothbard: Independent Institute: " The arguments that Rothbard provides for his particular version of libertarianism are radically incomplete and, in some cases, patently fallacious."

Factory Farming: Michael Grunwald has out an article, based on his forthcoming book, basically arguing that factory farming is less land-intensive and therefore more ecologically sound. But he misses a lot, most importantly the horrifically inhumane conditions for many animals in factory farms. He seems to think it's worthless to talk about people reducing their meat consumption, but obviously over time that's one variable that could shift (relevant in the most meat-consumptive countries). If we're talking about factory farms for plants, that's no problem. Putting farms in lighted buildings, where pesticides and herbicides can be minimized, is promising, especially if we are able to boost our electricity output. Bi-valves don't have brains, so growing them in a "factory" poses no especial ethical problem. The same goes for "lab-grown meat."

Fileva on Meaning: What Iskra Fileva writes about meaning is basically compatible with what I write about it in my book on religion. "Since conscious life is the source of all mattering, unless there are intelligent aliens somewhere, or else we learn, in the meantime, how to terraform other planets, no other place in the universe matters now or ever will—not to the universe, not objectively speaking, and not in any other way." My mild corrective: The rest of the universe can matter to us insofar as it sets the context for our existence, we can learn about it, and we can explore it. I am not comforted, as Fileva seems to be, by the idea that eventually all "pain will cease as well" as all good things. We don't have to let eventual annihilation get in the way of things mattering to us, but the mere lack of anything mattering someday is not a source of comfort now.

Russia's Nativism: Russian vigilantes are helping government round up immigrants. Ugly. This sort of ultra-nationalism, in Russia, in the United States, elsewhere, ultimately could bring the world to catastrophe.

Davis at DOGE: Alex Tabarrok seems enthusiastic about Steve Davis working with DOGE.

On Stepping Down: Twice now Democrats have ceded serious power to Republicans just by not stepping down when they should. RGB refused to step down and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett. Had Biden announced much earlier he wasn't running, the Dem candidate (Harris or someone else) would have been in a much stronger position.

Christian Charity: Jonathan Kennedy reviews that, when a plague came to the Roman world in 249, Christians caring for the sick probably acted as a powerful recruitment tool for the young religion. But the only alternatives are not Pagan callousness and Christian charity! I'd much rather have modern medicine and the other comforts made possible by the scientific revolution.

Archaeology Scandal: A German archaeologist allegedly "deliberately manipulated many of his findings, including at least 21 human skulls or skull fragments that were dated incorrectly." The archaeologist allegedly declared (among other things) that the skull of a nearly-modern human to be that of a Neanderthal person. This is via Stuart Ritchie.

Alternatives to Prison: Michael Huemer argues that prisons are terrible and we should turn more to things like compensation and home monitoring. He writes, "We should keep prisons for serious, violent criminals. We should greatly reduce the use of prison for lesser crimes, including property crimes and drug crimes." The point I would add is that I do think it's possible and desirable, although difficult, to reform prisons such that they are not horrible and actually help some people improve themselves.

Plea Bargain Reform: Clark Neily has a really interesting idea to address abuse of plea bargains (threatening people with very-long sentences if they go to trail). For all cases where a plea is reached, randomly assign a subset of those (I'd suggest ten percent) to go to trial. If the person is found guilty, the maximum penalty is the one reached through the plea agreement. Neily points out that this would provide valuable information about the use of plea agreements. Another reform I've thought about is to say that anyone who gets a plea bargain then can go to trial, with the maximum available penalty something like fifty percent greater than that offered through the plea.

AI Dreams: The New York Times has out an article to the effect that AI "hallucinations" are good for science. But this fails to distinguish speculation from bullshitting. It would be great if the AI system could tell the difference between conveying known facts, speculating, and Making Stuff Up.

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