1. Given that 95% of everything is crap, I doubt free speech is a good idea. We’re better off removing the crud. The “market place of ideas” isn’t really a market place bc there’s no pricing. Tweets would be improved if it cost 20p per tweet.
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2. A better alternative would be to re-introduce duelling. This would allow anyone to enter the “market place of ideas” but under a sufficient cost that they’d have to think carefully about what they say.
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Replying to @tomxhart
It is a rather silly metaphor. Even in liberal economic thought, markets are merely a tool meant to solve the problem of scarcity. Ideas, given that they are immaterial and can be brought into being at will, cannot be scarce the same way anything material can be.
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Replying to @Konstant_V
Are ideas immaterial? I don’t think I’d be having the ideas I’m having now without the doughnut I had this morning. Ideas may not be reducible to energy, but they’re not possible without it.
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Replying to @tomxhart
Matter is of course needed to sustain the life of the material part of the hylemorphic body-soul composite (we humans are weird that way). But ideas themselves aren’t bound by the properties of matter which make scarcity possible. (1/2)
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Replying to @Konstant_V @tomxhart
If I give you a coin, it remains the same coin and it has merely changed possession. If I ‘give’ you an idea (necessarily mediated by language etc.), both of us have one. If something is multiplied every time it’s exhanged, it’s not scarce. (2/2)
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Replying to @Konstant_V @tomxhart
It’s similar to how digital files can be copied indefinitely at no cost, with memory & power as the only hardware limits. Hence the need for DRM & copyright law to make artificial scarcity, to establish a market (and even that doesn’t always work).
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Technically it’s “next to no cost at the personal level”. Memory and power are definite limits!
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