The counter-theory is the free market of ideas. Basically, despicable beliefs will struggle to gain popularity when forced to compete for attention fairly against moderate beliefs. By suppressing people for their beliefs, you don't disprove them, you just show that you fear them. It is easy fo...
This market sometimes buys you Napoleon III, Hitler, Erdogan etc. I suppose that's part of the price when the market fails. (Or you could even say it doesn't fail, it's just the price people have to pay to test their [intolerant] ideas.)
@Fizz I don't know about Napoleon III, but Hitler and Erdogan could both be said to be examples of how drawing the line and picking judges can go wrong, not how the market can fail.
@Fizz Interesting read. I found the bit about obscenity particularly amusing. Times certainly have changed since 1997; they talk about judges limiting hardcore porn, and now anyone can go on any number of porn sites and see more porn than they could watch in a lifetime.
The problem with the "free market of ideas" is that the ability of an idea to compete has large factors that are totally unconnected to the merit of the idea. People acquire wealth and power through other means (business success, fame, inheritance, etc) and then use it to advance their totally unrelated ideas. Ideas don't "compete for attention" on their merits (however you attempt to define merit), so there's no reason to believe despicable ideas (however you attempt to define despicable) will automatically fail in the "market".
@Ben There's also the fact that the entire thing is predicated upon fair competition in the marketplace of ideas, and there's very little reason to suppose the intolerant group in a society of tolerance (and with the internet) is going to just play fair. There are lots of ways to simply disrupt the functioning of the "marketplace of ideas", such as by populating it with noise and claims it's not fair at all. And the modern ease of echo chamber creation simply fragments the entire marketplace.
@zibadawatimmy That's definitely a big issue. A marketplace of ideas requires that all ideas are presented equally and 'customers' are able to browse and make their 'purchasing' decisions in a balanced environment. Imagine a market where one stall is just selling some standard health food with regular advertising, while a second is selling cocaine-infused chocolate and has posted signs all around the market accusing the first of making their health food from baby-harvested adrenochrome as part of a satanic ritual. An uneducated consumer cannot make a fair choice in that situation.
@Kayndarr So the first stall will take the other to court for libel or slander and will easily win. We have the legal machinery for this already. The second stall will have to show their evidence in court, and will most likely lose. Stall 1 can then use this win in their own ads.
@Ryan_L Sure, but at least in the US currently, that's a several-months long process, during which Stall 2 will continue to pull in customers. They may even start to say that the legal process Stall 1 is using is 'illegal' or part of a conspiracy to violate the marketplace of free ideas, further pushing customers who don't know any better away from Stall 1. Then, several months later when Stall 2 is punished or shut down, their customers are not willing to consider Stall 1 anymore, and are further 'bought in' to Stall 2's product.
@Ben I think the marketplace of ideas is best understood as a "bootstrap" process: not that it works in every case, but it's a mechanism for leveraging broad agreement on some basic principles (freedom of speech, respect for facts, etc.) into broad agreement on other, more specific and substantive matters (societal decisions affecting material well-being). If enough people buy into the basic principles, society gets "herd immunity" to the most damaging ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny. Then leaders who don't permit criticism, or don't even allow their people to leave, raise big red flags.
@Kayndarr and the money stall 2 raises will just end up going to stall 1 in punitive damages. The proceedings of the case can be made public too. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. It will be plainly apparent that stall 2 has no case. If Stall 3 comes around and tries the same thing, this case will be quicker as Stall 1 can just point to the first case.
@Ryan_L That is sadly not how real world works. If the second stall is large enough to "stall" the proceedings indefinitely (or long enough for the first stall to dissappear) or the second stall is small enough to literally not have enough for punitive damages to "heal" the first stall. And in the meantime sixty new cocaine infused chocolate stands spring up (because hey, it is popular and people tend to do the "herd thinking" on a lot of things), they do not slander the stall 1, they are just pushing in on the bussiness model because the pople who bought from stall 2 cannot now.
In order for Darryl Davis's model to succeed, Darryl Davis has to first be allowed to exist, and second be allowed to communicate with other people. Had Davis existed 50 years earlier, he would not have been allowed to meet white people socially in much of the US, and he would be very much at risk of being casually murdered with impunity. This cannot be shown to be even theoretically possible, and there are no practical examples of this being successful.
@Ryan_L You forgot the part where stall 1 closes down right before the judgement and a "completely independant" stall 3 opens with the exact same products as stall 1.
@mishan Well we already don't ban "cocaine infused chocolate", which I assume you mean is analogous to mindless entertainment. Dancing videos on Tiktok get way more views in their first day after upload than the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek has garnered to date.
marketplace of ideas is basically another way of talking about the 'wisdom of the crowds'. the extremes average out. the problem is WotC works in situations where there is independence of opinion (people don't influence one another), diversity of opinion, and equality of vote. which is why it works so well for things like guessing the weight of a cow. The problem is social media is the antithesis to these assumptions, there is a high correlation of opinions based on and driven by group membership and highly unequal influence based on popularity and algo effects.
the advent of radio/tv also caused massive disruption, which allowed authoritarians to flourish around the world. unfortunately i think history shows us that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really work as advertised, particularly during times of great disruption in how we communicate
This is confusing... You propose a free marketplace but then object to retailers discontinuing certain goods, which is exactly the mechanism by which bad/unpopular goods are meant to go away.
@user3067860 This is a problem with market share. There is a very small number of retailers who control the whole market who can control what gets sold based on their own personal tastes. Private companies can be just as anti-competitive as the government.
@Ryan_L Shouldn't your free market of ideas be resolving that problem, too? Like you said, Alex Jones isn't out of the marketplace. He's just out of certain retailers. If that was purely based on the personal taste of the retailers rather than public taste, then surely you would see a shift in market share to new retailers that do offer the goods that the public wants. (Case in point, the number of people who have a Disney+ subscription purely to watch The Mandalorian.) How come people aren't allowed to not want certain things in your "free" market?
@user3067860 The same reasons the physical free market couldn't stop Standard Oil. The market is dominated by first movers, and large barriers of entry prevent competition. One big problem Parler had before it was shut down by AWS was that all it could really offer was access to deplatformed people. That wasn't enough to overcome Twitter's market share. And even if it was, it doesn't solve the problem, you still end up with echo chambers. Everyone needs access to the same space if echo chambers are to be prevented.
@Ryan_L So what you're saying is that a pure free market of ideas doesn't prevent some ideas coming in and taking over, so instead we need some kind of regulation? Because otherwise this still seems consistent with a free market. Some companies fail, if Parler couldn't manage to convince people that it was better and capture market share from Twitter...too bad? It's not like it couldn't happen, Facebook captured the market from MySpace. And echo chambers are equally fine in a free market, if XYZ is better for some reason and everyone uses it then that's the free market doing what it does....
@user3067860 It's not a free market if one giant company can stifle competition. As I said, I'm not a laissez faire absolutist. Big companies can screw you over just as much as the government.
I see a lot of comments about whether the "market of ideas" works better than "tolerance paradox", but that was not the question the OP asked. This answer provides a competing point of view and explains it quite well.
@Ryan_L It isn't a free market if you prevent private companies from doing things (including stifling competition). If you want to start regulating that then you're just arguing over how the market should be not-free.
@Fizz "The marketplace of ideas" didn't give the world Hitler; quite the opposite in fact. Weimar Germany had some very modern hate speech laws, and no one broke them quite so badly as Adolf Hitler. He ended up bringing some pretty heavy censorship upon himself, and the Nazis played the "what is it they're afraid of him saying?" card for all it was worth. And it worked! Had a robust marketplace of ideas been in effect, Hitler and the Nazis would most likely never have risen to power.
@Rad80 This answer says that you need a free marketplace of speech with some regulation to keep certain groups from forcing out other groups...Which brings us directly back to the paradox of tolerance. By starting with a free marketplace and saying it fails because some people take it over--that's exactly what the paradox of tolerance says! This answer isn't an alternative to the paradox of tolerance, it's an argument about how to implement it.
I'm gonna have to object to Parler being described as even related to free speech. Their moderation rules (the few they had anyway) have been laid bare, and the goal was to promote far right related ideologies while preventing more centrist or leftist ideologies from even being on the site https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/parler-financial-backers-oust-founder-and-ceo-matze-from-company/
Discussion on answer by Ryan_L: What …
Discussion on answer by Ryan_L: What …