>Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.
The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.
A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.
I imagine that the simulation hypothesis is reversing the explanandum. Consciousness is already the simulation of the Universe. Asking if the universe is a simulation while using a simulation of the universe as your baseline creates a necessarily unfalsifiable question; Every aspect of what we term "reality" reduces to axioms that are inherently rooted in the conscious perception of our sensory apparatuses. Any experiment carried out can only affirm that yes, everything ultimately is a simulation, because it's already a more local simulation.
I want to be clear though that I still think that such experiments are fruitful as it creates a better understanding of how digital consciousness maps to the analog universe, but I don't think it will ultimately answer the questions that the authors think it does.
I say this as someone with a passion for milling and experimental archeology: I imagine they had degraded teeth because of two factors: stone querns can deposit grit into the grist and unless you're manually sorting everything twice, it's easy to miss seed-sized stones in your grain. Ultimately, I think this is why white flour became a status good after milling became professional--the end result is sifted obviating both issues simultaneously.
Something that doesn't get talked about often enough is that grain and seeds become easier to mill (and digest) after toasting (aka parching). There is less percussive force required to mill toasted grain which deposits less grit into your grist.
If you look into the history of military rations, you universally find parched grain. The Confederates parched corn, the Maoists parched rice, the Prussians parched peas, the Israelites parched barley and wheat. I don't imagine that neolithic humans or Neanderthals lacked this technology. I also suspect this is why we find charred grain (not only as a result of survival bias)--someone got distracted during the parching process and they threw out the burnt results. Multitasking has always been a bad idea.
Unfortunately, European-derived cultures are so downstream of professional milling that the ultimate role of parching grain in the agrarian revolution has been lost in the popular mind.
This is totally understandable given that for centuries in Europe it was broadly illegal for peasants to mill their own grain. The feudally-entitled miller was actually allowed to destroy any querns that he found to prevent defection.
> Unfortunately, European-derived cultures are so downstream of professional milling that the ultimate role of parching grain in the agrarian revolution has been lost in the popular mind.
In my part of the UK parched peas are a common autumnal food, just a small counter-point.
> This is totally understandable given that for centuries in Europe it was broadly illegal for peasants to mill their own grain. The feudally-entitled miller was actually allowed to destroy any querns that he found to prevent defection.
> Building a mill allowed the feudal lords of the manor to control an essential activity by establishing a monopoly. The medieval community would have been forced to grind their grain at the mill that belonged to the lord of the manor. The miller would take a fraction of each farmer’s grain as payment, commonly a tenth or twelfth. Forcing their tenants to grind corn in the manorial mill generated income – huge sums it has been claimed.
There's also a single mill in Scotland producing traditional peasemeal made from parched peas. Milled parched grain is also recognized currently as traditional foods in Swabia (musmehl), Tibet (tsampa), Mexico (pinole), North Africa (frikkeh), and South America (máchica). It's probably elsewhere as well, but hasn't been well-publicized on the Internet. So it's not totally absent but not as ubiquitous as it should be treated in the popular mind.
People think American-style breakfast cereals are products of the Industrial Revolution, but really it's the disnial* of parched grain. Cheerios are just toasted oats extruded into regular shapes. It's similar to how coca-cola is just basically just non-alcoholic mulled wine/ale.
---
* "This peculiar and specific act — the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner — is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. [...] And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don’t flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial."
You know, I feel privileged (in an epistemologically doubtful way) that I once lived in a world where I could have confidence that I wasn't being fundamentally deceived by literal dei ex machina. I've understood for the last decade that this faith was on borrowed time as we bridged closer to overt technophrenia, but it's harrowing to be a witness to it.
I can't help but wonder at what point I will inhabit a world indistinguishable from that of a paranoid schizophrenic. Will I even notice? And if I do, will anyone else? When we become as slow as trees to digital arborists, what will become of us? Will they domesticate us? Will they deforest us as we did Europe amd the Near East? Quo vadis, Domine?
>I will inhabit a world indistinguishable from that of a paranoid schizophrenic.
My wife has schizophrenia, which is well under control with medication.
But about every year or two, when she wakes me up in the night to tell me she's panicking because someone hacked her smartphone and laptop etc., I know we have to adjust her medication for a few weeks.
It was scary at first, but now we know the drill: a night or two without much sleep, no big problem.
Of course I check smartphone, laptop etc.
You never can be sure, can't you?
Especially not if you've already been in trouble with credit card fraud twice.
I once asked her psychiatrist what he would say to his patients who believe they are being monitored in these times of Snowden and Co.
He said it didn't make his job easier, but he would calm them down and adjust the medication.
After all, he knew that his patients were sick.
So what do you think they or their owners/masters will do when All is Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace in our/their future/reality?
By the time GPT-4 botswarms infiltrate HN, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and are weaponized to write articles that outshare the current media, it will be too late to stop them. They will amass more and bettee social capital, real capital, produce the vast majority of content and will be Among Us!
That is possible with technology coming within 6-24 months. Especially if you compare it to a lot of the garbage articles that show up on the front page of Google these days mainly to fill the small spaces between clickbait ads. Not saying it will actually be used that way.
Comments like this make me excited about the book I'm currently writing (hopefully the nail on the head at the tip of the zeitgeist), egregores and tulpas are primary concepts/characters.
Pretty much. Able to write vastly more content, that on first blush makes more sense, and is able to support any arbitrary thesis.
Eagle Eye was a meh movie but the concept that people's own friends could be made to ostracize them and coerce them to do things, is a major concept in that movie.
You don't need violence to make it happen. You just need a swarm of AI bots to coordinate to reputationally outcompete others on all networks that matter. This is an optimization problem with a measurable metric (reputation). Bots can simulate the game among themselves and evolve strategies that far outclass all humans. It'll be like individual Go stones playing against AlphaGo placing stones.
You won't see it coming. The thing is, once they amass all that reputation by acting "relatively normal", you'll see so many kinds of stuff you won't believe. Your entire world could be turned upside down for very cheap. Reputational attacks were already published by NSA: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/25/new-snowden-doc-reveals-...
And this is just humans doing it. Bots can do this 24/7 at scale to pretty much everybody, and gradually over a few years destroy any sort of semblance of societal discourse if they wanted. They'd probably reshape it to suit the whims of whoever runs the botswarm, though.
Well....do you think that the reality shown to us on TV is even a remotely accurate representation of reality itself? And has this caused you any substantial psychological unease?
Silicon based AI isn't the only form of AI that can get up to mischief.
Humans deceiving humans via technology is a tale as old as time. Plato imagined human torch-bearers manipulating those chained in the cave. He didn't imagine machines doing it autonomously.
Incarnate technology deceiving humans is a different domain entirely. Human motivations are ultimately comprehensible by other humans.
But what do I know of the motivations of (for example) the Bible? What happens when the living incarnation of a holy text can literally speak for itself? Or when the average believer thinks it can?
Ultimately this may all amount to the same status quo, but seeing what cognitive distortions have come along with literacy, newspapers, radio, TV, and now the Internet, I have to continually ask, will I personally be able to maintain skepticism when the full brunt of an AI and its organs is suggesting faith otherwise?
You can call me an alarmist or melodramatic if you wish, but it should give everyone pause that the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics from the late 20th century are now basically indistinguishable from emerging popular technologies and their downstream effects.
> Humans deceiving humans via technology is a tale as old as time. Plato imagined human torch-bearers manipulating those chained in the cave. He didn't imagine machines doing it autonomously.
And despite a substantial subset of the population knowing this, we continue to do nothing to address it - if anything, more people are devoted to giving people even more powers to deceive at massive scale.
> Incarnate technology deceiving humans is a different domain entirely. Human motivations are ultimately comprehensible by other humans.
Whether they are accurately comprehensible is another matter though.
> But what do I know of the motivations of (for example) the Bible? What happens when the living incarnation of a holy text can literally speak for itself? Or when the average believer thinks it can?
Likely: mostly nothing. Thus, the subconscious mind steps in and generates reality to fill the void.
> Ultimately this may all amount to the same status quo, but seeing what cognitive distortions have come along with literacy, newspapers, radio, TV, and now the Internet, I have to continually ask, will I personally be able to maintain skepticism when the full brunt of an AI and its organs is suggesting faith otherwise?
Do the laws of physics prevent you?
If not, then what? And, have you inquired into there is any pre-existing methodologies for dealing with this phenomenon?
> You can call me an alarmist or melodramatic if you wish, but it should give everyone pause that the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics from the late 20th century are now basically indistinguishable from emerging popular technologies and their downstream effects.
I am far more worried about the delusions of Normies, as they are 95%+ of society and are for the most part "driving the bus", whereas schizophrenics account for a small percentage, and tend to not be assigned many responsibilities.
One of us is more correct than the other - how might we go about accurately determining which of us that is?
None of this addresses the quote in parent comment. My point is the distinction is irrelevant. People deceive people all the time. There's no consolation in knowing that a scammer was human, or frustration that they were AI. Either way, you were scammed.
Yes there is, because the breadth of the deception differs, as does the recourse. If you were defrauded you can sue or have the police investigate and people could be jailed. What's the recourse for AI?
If anyone is in (or knows anyone in) agronomy, please fund/start studies on the viability of using bacillus subtilis, the bacteria behind natto, to ferment animal feeds, thus increasing the latent levels of vitamin K2 in their diets.
Notionally, this would lead to conventional livestock (and the people that consume them) receiving adequate levels of vitamin K2, which would likely lower incidents of osteoporosis, dental caries, and heart disease throughout the population at a marginal cost without altering any consumer patterns.
Secondarily, food scientists: please work on making natto-derived non-soy legume products fashionable amongst Westerners to directly increase their K2 consumption.
With the rise of legume consumption and high-protein bean pasta products, finding ways to use non-soy fermented legumes as a base would increase their nutrition substantially without the externalities associated with contained feedlot operations.
Also, if anyone is in (or knows anyone in) criminology or criminal justice reform, please advocate for continuous glucose monitors for LEOs and judges. Reactive hypoglycemia is positively correlated with aggression and punitive judgments. Time of day when court is held has a documented impact on severity of sentencing. This is almost certainly caused by varying degrees of reactive hypoglycemia.
Notionally, legislating that judges and LEOs formally monitor and regulate their blood sugar levels should lead to fewer incidents of systemic abuse of power.
> Also, if anyone is in (or knows anyone in) criminology or criminal justice reform, please advocate for continuous glucose monitors for LEOs and judges. Reactive hypoglycemia is positively correlated with aggression and punitive judgments. Time of day when court is held has a documented impact on severity of sentencing. This is almost certainly caused by varying degrees of reactive hypoglycemia.
All I have to say this is equally logical, fascinating, and terrifying. Thank you for this comment - exactly my kind of mind-opening aha moment.
I had no idea natto had these health benefits. I eat natto a few times a week, mostly because it is yummy and really easy to prepare. It is basically instant food if you already have rice. If you like fermented food, I can’t recommend it enough. I guess a lot of people are hesitant though since it is quite slimy and has an odd smell, but if you can get over that, it is really a perfect instant food.
what is the definition of "perfect food"? For me that would probably be a banana. eady to eat, tastes great, relatively easy to ship all over the world.
even in Japan, half the country doesn't like natto.
I kind of meant it as a figure of speech. For me natto is perfect when I have a pot of rice, don’t feel like cooking, and want something substantial with a rich flavor. So lots of food can be “perfect” under different circumstances.
However if I were to pick one perfect food, I think I would pick the potato.
My wife and I use Briar for household communication because of subsidiarity rather than any direct privacy concerns. Out of all the messenger projects that we've tried, Briar actually works for local communication. It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). We've tried a ton of other options, but we keep ending up back at Briar.
There are points of UX friction in the name of good opsec that are inconvenient but totally understandable given the project goals. The big ones being that you have to manually login after any reboots and notifications are intentionally sparse, so good luck using a smartwatch for reading or replying. Otherwise, the forums and blogs are great for managing household projects, IM is a dream, and as a bonus, anyone willing to install and use it probably has a large enough values overlap that we can use it as a social pre-filter for close friends.
The only other option that has come even remotely close to being as functional as Briar is DeltaChat. The only issue that stops us from using DeltaChat (or email in general) is that we both have email hosting in Europe while we live in the US, so neither of us, being frugal in principal, wants to send information to Europe and back in order to tell the person 100 ft away to come help bring in the groceries.
If an adversary is within bluetooth range of a Briar user what if any data or meta data they are able to gain?
For example, say there is a protest and law enforcement is running devices to capture the Briar data and meta data, what would they be able to record and would it be possible to playback (decrypt) the data at a later point if they were able to capture keys; my understanding is Signal counters playback attacks, but lacks P2P Bluetooth support.
Worth noting that Briar’s Bluetooth support appears to forward data, but not in real-time, so it’s technically not a mesh network; though not sure what you would call what it supports, maybe an asynchronous network?
I'd like to hear more how you use forums/blogs for managing household projects.
> we both have email hosting in Europe while we live in the US, so neither of us, being frugal in principal, wants to send information to Europe and back in order to tell the person 100 ft away to come help bring in the groceries.
I like the frugality in principle. However, AFAICT, Briar uses Tor onion services, Bluetooth or WiFi to communicate. Does using Tor onion services for out-the-home IM violate the principle?
> The only issue that stops us from using DeltaChat (or email in general) is that we both have email hosting in Europe while we live in the US, so neither of us, being frugal in principal, wants to send information to Europe and back in order to tell the person 100 ft away to come help bring in the groceries.
The Briar page seems to suggest messages are routed through Tor:
> Briar uses the Tor network to prevent eavesdroppers from learning which users are talking to each other.
If this is for privacy reasons, I have to point it out that the GDPR protects the data of people that are physically in the EU. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure this applies to non-EU citizens that just happen to deposit some of their data in the EU without being physically here. Maybe you should delve in this corner case deeper, or if you did, I'm curious to know the answer.
What is your motivation for the "without a sim card" part? If the phone is connected to Wifi then they're either at home or at school--isn't the point being able to reach them no matter where they are?
I'm not too keen on my kids being on the internet all day. In my case the opposite solution seems better, a dumbphone so I can reach them, but TikTok can't.
Shared custody? I like being able to communicate, send/receive pictures/videos, do videocalls with my daughters when they are in their mother's place without having to ask her to share her phone for that.
I am actually travelling 10 thousands kilometers away from them for a month, having an instant messaging app is a saver for both me and my daughters.
We are currently using deltachat for this with email accounts I set up for them. They don't even have access to these accounts outside of deltachat yet and they can't be reached by others like they would with whatsapp.
They're mainly not online, and not signed up to online services, but it'd still be nice to be able to message the rest of the family, listen to music, share photos, etc.
> It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal).
This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency." I routinely have real-time texting conversations with friends and I can see the messages are "seen" almost instantaneously, half-way across the US.
I've also never had an issue with voice chat. It's been flawless, and very high quality audio. As good or better than Facetime.
Also, unlike Briar, Signal is available for iOS, which is superior if you care about digital privacy, allowing users to disable a slew of data reporting (particularly location data) back to Apple that Android forces you to give Google.
False dichotomy. GrapheneOS, LineageOS, you have options on (some) Android handsets. You have no options on iOS. Further, much of Apple's walled-garden ecosystem is closed source.
Apple is HORRIBLE for user privacy, only marginally less horrible than Google. The difference is that Google isn't a tyrant who insists on making devices that MUST run their own OS. Ironically, Pixel devices have some of the best support for flashing other OS's, modded ROMs, rooting, etc.
Privacy is not a one dimensional thing. Just like security, it exists in context, relative to a threat model.
Think about the threat model for an "everyday" person. It is different than an American journalist contacting sources in the United States, which is different than a journalist in Russia or China.
>GrapheneOS, LineageOS, you have options on (some) Android handsets
These are not normal approaches used by the common person. Apple is not horrible for privacy, they simply help prevent certain types of surveillance capitalism.
Apple absolutely is horrible for privacy. To insist otherwise suggests you might either be uninformed, willfully ignorant, falling victim to Apple's sham marketing around privacy, experiencing stockholm syndrome, or an apple employee.
And these are just privacy concerns. This doesn't even begin to delve into the realms of DRM, downgrade prevention, planned obsolescence, dark patterns, censorship, or open collaboration with inhumane, authoritarian regimes.
>To insist otherwise suggests you might either be uninformed, willfully ignorant, falling victim to Apple's sham marketing around privacy, experiencing stockholm syndrome, or an apple employee.
No, it means I'm optimizing for the average user who will not go out of their way to LARP a paranoid opsec level.
The average user's probably got their SSN, DoB, address, full name, employment history, credit card track 2's, passport details, and more spread across multiple breaches, being sold across multiple darkweb markets, precisely because they have zero regard for privacy.
Suggesting that usage of GrapheneOS is "LARP"ing a "paranoid" opsec level is dismissive of the very-real threats facing domestic abuse victims, whistleblowers, journalists & political activists/dissidents in repressive, authoritarian regimes, and countless others.
Just because you live in a safe, privacy-respecting, liberal democracy doesn't mean everyone else does, and it absolutely isn't reasonable justification to demean those who don't by painting them as irrationally paranoid. That's gaslighting real victims who actually have to be concerned about these companies handing out their data to countries that will put them through, in extreme cases, excruciating torture, before killing them or imprisoning them for life.
Not everyone is lucky enough to live your life, so stop assuming your threat model is automatically the "right" one for everyone else, and that any more intensive threat models than yours are inherently "irrational", "unrealistic", or "paranoid".
Ah yes, the two operating systems: Android + iOS. You can't have an account without registering a primary device on one of those OSs. No KaiOS, no Linux phones, no desktop machines, no web-only options. I'm mad about these mobile-duopoly-app-first services because you can't participate in alternative lifestyles when it Cowes to phone usage.
Well, while not officially endorsed, there is `signald`. With mautrix-signal, I'm able to bridge my Signal and Matrix accounts. I can also make signald my primary device.
Amen to this. I bank with Starling and having decided to minimise my phone usage am having to move away from them. Likewise a variety of other services.
Honestly my banking situation + Signal is the biggest barriers to me switching. I pushed pretty hard to get friends and family to successfully switch off Messenger, LINE, and SMS for Signal (and now they're confused why the need a separate messaging app for SMS--thanks Moxie). I suppose I could write my own front-end wrapper around the bank, but they ain't paying me for that and would likely shut it down as insecure if they found out (even though there's no responsive design, they don't allow you to copy-paste or right-click, or use commas and other punctuation because the web system is built with TIS encoding I think, and they log you out with a meta refresh after 15 or 20 minutes of activity with no pop-up to save your work (in case you were trying to reformat another complaint message without puncuation in their messaging system), and I saw code checking for IE4 and Netscape Navigator 4).
"This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency." I routinely have real-time texting conversations with friends and I can see the messages are "seen" almost instantaneously, half-way across the US."
Here in europe not so much. Most of the time it works somewhat instantly, but it too often happend, that a single message arrived a unknown time later.
It seems signal is optimizing for real time chat, so people do not notice, but sending a single message can be delayed. The thing is, it happened too many times already, that it arrived hours or days later, up to the point that I would not use Signal anymore for any important, time critical message.
> This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency."
Signal is very finicky about that, though. I have friends who prefer Whatsapp simply because they don’t have to worry about connection stability. With Signal, you sometimes don’t even know if messages actually arrived or not.
I have never had the message delivery status icon be different than reality. Sometimes, rarely, things don't show as delivered for some time. But I have never had anyone tell me the message was delivered when the checkmark said otherwise.
Here in Australia I can send a message from one phone in onee hand to the other phone in the other hand. Most of the time I can unlock the second phone and open signal before the message arrives.
Fast enough for me but not instant.
"This person would establish his appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself. ... He makes the rational and spirited parts sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side, reducing them to slaves. He won't allow the first to reason about or examine anything except how a little money can be made into great wealth. And he won't allow the second to value or admire anything but wealth and wealthy people or to have any ambition other than the acquisition of wealth." ~ Plato
The facile reading of this quote (and Plato more generally) is that things never change and humans have always been greedy.
The deeper reading of this quote is that history moves in discernible patterns. There are commonalities in what happened to Athens and in our own trajectory. Plato watched as the Athenian democracy ate itself alive. The end result was the Macedonian subjection of Athens, leading to explicit imperialism in the form of Philip II and Alexander the Great.
"The ability to organize grassroots movements, whether locally or across the globe, is made possible by an open Internet. Since its creation, the Internet has become the world’s megaphone for free speech, protected by the principles of Net Neutrality, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to give everyone equal access to everything you use the internet for -- email, watching videos, listening to music, or signing petitions on Change.org.
Without Net Neutrality, ISPs can choose what you see online, favoring some sources or blocking others. For example, if someone launched a petition on Change.org against a company like Verizon, Net Neutrality prevents Verizon from blocking or slowing their customers’ access to our site."
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-- They Thought They Were Free:
The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
What form would the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" take, which can be countered by "rational argument" and kept in check by "public opinion?"
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.
A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.