I also agree with you. I would find it very problematic if anyone was trying to “ensure harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated”. Ideas should be argued against, not suppressed.
All ideas? Instructions for how to make contact poisons that aren’t traceable? Methods for identifying vulnerabilities in nuclear weapons arsenals’ command and control systems? Or, concretely and relevantly, ideas about which ways to make omnicidal bioweapons are likely to succeed.
You can tell me that making information more available is good, and I agree in almost all cases. But only almost all.
It seems clear that none of the content in the paper comes anywhere close to your examples. These are also more like “instructions” than “arguments”, and Rubi was calling for suppressing arguments on the danger that they would be believed.
The claim was a general one—I certainly don’t think that the paper was an infohazard, but the idea that this implies that there is no reason for funders to be careful about what they fund seems obviously wrong.
The original question was: “If not the funders, do you believe anyone should be responsible for ensuring harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated?”
And I think we need to be far more nuanced about the question than a binary response about all responsibility for funding.
I also agree with you. I would find it very problematic if anyone was trying to “ensure harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated”. Ideas should be argued against, not suppressed.
All ideas? Instructions for how to make contact poisons that aren’t traceable? Methods for identifying vulnerabilities in nuclear weapons arsenals’ command and control systems? Or, concretely and relevantly, ideas about which ways to make omnicidal bioweapons are likely to succeed.
You can tell me that making information more available is good, and I agree in almost all cases. But only almost all.
It seems clear that none of the content in the paper comes anywhere close to your examples. These are also more like “instructions” than “arguments”, and Rubi was calling for suppressing arguments on the danger that they would be believed.
The claim was a general one—I certainly don’t think that the paper was an infohazard, but the idea that this implies that there is no reason for funders to be careful about what they fund seems obviously wrong.
The original question was: “If not the funders, do you believe anyone should be responsible for ensuring harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated?”
And I think we need to be far more nuanced about the question than a binary response about all responsibility for funding.