"Freedom of opinion does not exist in America." -ADT

Some people feel that Eben's style of classroom critique suppresses free speech, scares it away. Personally, I disagree. The opportunity cost of free speech in a classroom is that everyone in the room—including the speaker—can't listen to anyone else. A teacher with scarce time ought to judge which of his students' ideas fall below his intellectual standard, and redirect those to a forum where they can be developed, at less cost, to meet that standard.

If Eben believes in open information, and this class is about challenging authority, why is the classroom so much more friendly to authority than to challenges? I might ask Eben, but I have a guess: the professor wants us to absorb his opinions ("listen"), so that we can only critique them later—i.e., after thinking—i.e., intelligently. He reserves the TWiki as our forum for that critique. Here I oblige.

The TWiki removes the externality of speaking on listening. Ideas interact here more like J.S. Mill expected them to, more like particles in an ideal gas (i.e. here, when we don't listen, it's because we don't WANT to). It's the best forum for us to hear each other, the safest forum for us to learn from each other, and the LAST asylum for free speech. TWiki has the potential to be our town-hall democracy.

How should we use that potential?

MichaelBrown reminds me [which I deleted because it was responding to an older draft] that Eben gave us a guiding principle: that the TWiki helps him "evaluate contributions/participation to a degree." I suppose we might infer from this a second principle, that it is supposed to be some kind of learning tool. That's all we've got. Default to anarchy and the rule of the strongest, unless we all agree to be a democracy. We're reenacting Dr. Zimbardo's prison experiment, and now we get to decide what sort of prisoners we'll be.

I say the prisoners should take over this prison. First of all, we all believe in free speech. It makes sense to deny it in class, but not here. Second, it's what Eben would do in our position. He didn't include the rules in the box, but neither does a Ouija Board. Both are remedies for denial; and you win at Ouija by making up the rules; the analogy extends to grades. And even if I'm wrong, and my made-up rules break the HIDDEN rules, we won't hang separately if we all agree to hang together: we're graded on a curve.

So, join my revolution! We already have a Constitution.

We must protect free speech.

Not by way of a rule, though. Free Speech is a social function.

AdamCarlis suggested some values. Fortunately, I don't think anyone's violated them yet. But I'd like to add: No Prior Restraint. That includes critiques that deter people from speaking freely. If suppressing those critiques advances free speech, then we should sacrifice a piece for the sake of the whole.

In particular, our First Amendment should bar speech by Authority Figures that discourages posts by Inferiority Figures. The opinions of Authority Figures can deter us as much as the edicts of Public Authorities. Authority Figures can mobilize laughter, which is a kind of public force. And many of us confuse their descriptive statements for prescriptive ones, since that is what humans do. And many of us can't learn to think like lawyers by learning to argue like lawyers, because we who can't yet argue like lawyers will look stupid when we argue with those who can.

I am thinking of yesterday's class. Eben—God I'm playing with fire, but I'd be a coward to use the third person—Eben, I am thinking particularly of Barb's post yesterday. I would have liked

Shall we defend free speech on our TWiki, from enemies foreign and domestic? Answer here, or don't answer at all: either will answer my question.
-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008

Eben, please don't deactivate my account.

-- AndrewGradman - 25 Jan 2008

Your ideas of "free speech" and prior restraint are almost completely at odds with mine. Prohibiting "critiques that deter people from speaking freely," if you could do it, would be a prior restraint. The critiques are not restraint--they're speech. Prior restraint would be Eben's deactivating your account or running your posts through a moderation queue.

Eben's critiques probably /chill/ speech to some degree, but they aren't some distinct sort of "anti-speech"--even if our brains occasionally explode at the collision.

-- DanielHarris - 25 Jan 2008