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
I think ideas are more like sound waves that experience interference “noise” and so diminish in quality, as demonstrated by the informational entropy of Chinese whispers. Ideas degrade with repetition, as coins degrade with handling.
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Replying to @tomxhart
True, they vary in quality, but that doesn’t render them scarce in way to make the marketplace metaphor meaningful. e.g. if I value an idea highly, I don’t want to ‘sell’ it (exchange it for sth else), but to spread it to others so they can be convinced by it.
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Good ideas are a very, very scarce commodity. It takes years of study and thought to acquire one. Perhaps good ideas are merely a function of efficient energy use, and we could price them? (In fact, we do—look at an entrepreneur or inventor).
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