I suspect I disagree with the users that are downvoting this comment. The considerations Guy raises in the first half of this comment are real and important, and the strong form of the opposing view (that anyone should be “responsible for ensuring harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated” through anything other than counterargument) is seriously problematic and, in my view, prone to lead to some pretty dark places.
A couple of commenters here have edged closer to this strong view than I’m comfortable with, and I’m happy to see pushback against that. If strong forms of this view are more prevalent among the community than I currently think, that would for me be an update in favour of the claims made in this post/paper.
That said, I do agree that “consistently making bad arguments should eventually lead to the withdrawal of funding”, and that this problem is hard (see my other reply to Guy below).
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 suspect I disagree with the users that are downvoting this comment. The considerations Guy raises in the first half of this comment are real and important, and the strong form of the opposing view (that anyone should be “responsible for ensuring harmful and wrong ideas are not widely circulated” through anything other than counterargument) is seriously problematic and, in my view, prone to lead to some pretty dark places.
A couple of commenters here have edged closer to this strong view than I’m comfortable with, and I’m happy to see pushback against that. If strong forms of this view are more prevalent among the community than I currently think, that would for me be an update in favour of the claims made in this post/paper.
That said, I do agree that “consistently making bad arguments should eventually lead to the withdrawal of funding”, and that this problem is hard (see my other reply to Guy below).
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.