Can’t vs Mustn’t
When it comes to speech, there is:
Shouldn’t (Bad)
Mustn’t (Unthinkable)
Can’t (Illegal)
If broadly celebrating political murder of national figures is merely “Shouldn’t”, we will end up with “Can’t”.
Free speech is **all** about “Mustn’t”.
We bet all of society on “Mustn’t”.
It’s hard to remember how many times I’ve had to say this. It’s like we don’t understand and teach our own culture’s particularly American genius.
Mark this prediction: the First Amendment alone *cannot* save free speech. If you lose the nebulous concept of the unthinkable in common culture you will end up with laws against “Hate Speech” because directed murder and mayhem will normalize and spread like wildfire. You either load the prohibition against the unthinkable, on culture or you will be forced to load it upon the law.
And, as a proud American Patriot, I want there to be no such thing legally as Hate Speech. At all.
In a culture of free speech, we should be able to count the number of public celebrations of Kirk’s murder on one hand. And they should all be from the most obviously backwards pitiable members of our society.
Saying the dumbest, meanest, nastiest, edgiest, most outrageous thing you can think of for thrills is not bravely exercising free speech. It’s eroding it’s culture, frivolously.
Ghoulishness will either need to be prohibited by culture (shunning and made unthinkable) or by law (codification of hate speech).
The point of modern “Cancel Culture” in revolutionary terms was to broadly cheapen traditional shunning. The rarest of punishments for the rarest of unthinkable abuses of free speech.
And our institutional organs fell for the revolutionary trap.
The judicious and rare practice of social shunning of those who truly transgress the unthinkable is a load bearing wall in a society of free speech. You can’t afford to lose it in a free society to those clever revolutionaries who would cheapen it so as to overturn your society.
Long live American Free Speech.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: "There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society...We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."
Contrarian opinion lightly held:
The so-called “Naturalistic Fallacy” may be just that. But we should probably rapidly reconsider the wisdom of trying to get rid of it. Or even pointing it out at scale.
Said differently, assume that society may have previously used religion and/or nature to create a coordinated sense of “ought”, “must” and “mustn’t”.
In the absence of both, there is no coordinating source. And we may need one or the other to coordinate a needed sense of obligation.
Quotes
When people will not defend the universities, they will not defend our public schools, there's no moment where some somebody in a position of authority says "enough"—The New York Times is not meant to be a propaganda instrument. The universities are not meant to be indoctrination camps. Science is not meant to be a post modernists free from all—There is a concept of mustn't. There are things you mustn't do. You're permitted to do them. They're not necessarily illegal. And it's not a question that you shouldn't do it, like, "all things being equal, I wouldn't do that if I were you". They're just things that you mustn't do. So the most frequent example I give is, you should be allowed to burn the flag and you must not burn the flag. It's not really "well, aren't I free to burn it?" Yep. "If I call it self expression, are you telling me I can't?" You can, but you mustn't. Well, where does this mustn't come from? It's kind of a first principles thing. It's part of our culture. It's part of the Oral Torah. If we don't start exercising adulthood, in terms of a culture, in terms of getting rid of these problems, people are taking away a very different message, which is that every institution is over. That everyone who—All there is, is money. There is no concept of a compact, or an agreement, or an understanding that isn't enforceable. A lot of what's going on with the blockchain is, blockchain is people talking about, how do you deal with zero trust? So, right now, what we keep wanting to show is that everyone is bankrupt. Praying, you just love money, you went into physics for the money. It's like, I don't even know what to make of these things.
- Eric Weinstein on Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Portal Podcast Reboot, & 2022 Predictions (YouTube Content)
0:11:03
Peter McCormack
And what about with regards to technology censorship, we've obviously seen a lot this week with Spotify. Historically, Twitter over the last couple of years has certainly increased the amount of people that remove him from this platform. Facebook is similar. I listened to a show recently about surveillance and censorship within Google and how they manipulate people by manipulating search results. Do you think much about how we deal with that whole area? Yeah. What do you think? Is it something that needs to be solved with regulation? Or education?0:11:39
Eric Weinstein
It's very confusing. The key thing is that there's something that has to retard bad people doing bad things for bad reasons. And I would prefer that that not be law. I prefer that that be culture. I prefer that that have to do with the consequence of being a bastard on on media. And what we've lost is any sense of the word mustn't. So I think mustn't tends to come from religion, there's something that you it's not that you shouldn't do it. Like I really shouldn't have another drink. I kind of well,Mustn't is like, yeah, you can do that. There's no law against it. But it's, it's not on. So for example, flag burning. You mustn't burn the flag. You can. It's a free society. But you mustn't. Well, there's no law saying I can't Yeah, because you're an idiot. There's a culture saying you can't do it. And if you if you absolutely believe that your your country is the worst country on Earth—I can imagine somebody burning a Nazi flag. But that should be an enormous statement, that when a proud German family burned a Nazi flag, everyone would take notice. You don't casually burn an American flag or a British flag, even though both of our countries have done really dumb, horrible evil things. Mustn't has to have a form on the internet. We don't know what it is yet. It's like, it's like asking for it. The Internet needs its own version of a religion. It doesn't have to be a god. But it has to be some thing that has the word mustn't in its vocabulary, because right now what we have, if the API permits it, you know, it's like somebody saying, "Well, if you didn't want me to take all your stuff, I presume that you would have had a laser system to detect any kind of intrusion or motion and you would lock the door with, you know, triple police locks or something. But you left the door open, so you must have wanted me to steal all your stuff." That kind of thinking is is rampant on the internet, as well, if you didn't want to be abused, and stalked, you know, then you shouldn't put your house in your own name and you shouldn't use your own name on the internet. It's like, eff off you stupid gamer morons. I don't know how to speak about this. It's like, if you're gonna—if you're in a gaming environment, it's an exploit. "Hey, I noticed that your door was unlocked, so I walked through it." Really? There's no part of your brain saying, "maybe I shouldn't be doing this"?
- Eric Weinstein and Peter McCormack on Bitcoin and the Culture Wars with Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)
00:30:30
Eric Weinstein
We used to have a game called Tag War in my neighborhood. A new kid would come. We'd say, let's play tag war, and they would try to figure out the rules of tag. And more or less, it was hazing and abuse. And after about two and a half, three weeks, where we changed the rules over and over again so the person is, "I don't understand the rules. It feels like there are no rules." That's when they became part of the neighborhood, because it stood for the game without any rules.That was what tag war meant. And my feeling about this is, we have a Tag War problem coming out of Quantum Gravity that is stalling the core field that has to get addressed in the lifetime of the people who are still there, who created the problem, because good science requires that they go back to the statements where there are a lot of people who are no longer here, people who began their careers in the 1980s....
The fact of the matter is, it was an absolutely brutal thing. And, you know, Brian Greene and I have been having a back and forth about this. He got asked on Curt Jaimungal's program about "what are these issues that people keep talking about?"
He said, "Oh, well, you know, we were very enthusiastic" and I heard you say this thing about, you know, "particle theorists are like bosons, they all line up and they sort of find the same things interesting". No. North Koreans line up and find the same things interesting. Iraqis under Saddam Hussein all voted the same way. You have a problem, which is, why they're behaving like bosons rather than fermions, and why the fermions are being—you know, evolutionary theory has a concept called Interference Competition, where if you have one animal that tries to keep another animal from being able to get to the salt lick, or the water, or the food, and then other animal that's being kept from that dies off. And that's how we've lost these people. There are so many theories and interesting people who are no longer with us because of this mad grab for resources, quoting something like "White Man's Burden", you know, "Manifest Destiny". It is our manifest destiny to change the problem. We used to have a concept called Unified Field Theory, or unification, that went away and it got supplanted by something called quantum gravity.
And that became the thing that got rolled out through Dennis Overby in the New York Times, repeated in Science magazine, ad nauseum, until everyone was brainwashed, thinking, you know, "the problem of our time is Quantum Gravity", and it's not!
...It's not a question of "punish". Maybe Edward Witten has something to say about this behavior. And I would love to hear Cumrun, and Brian Greene, and Lenny Susskind, as well as, you know, Natty Seiberg and Eva Silverstein. It would be great to have these people in a dialog. You know, Natty Seiberg said something. He said, "String theorists are very arrogant. If somebody comes up with something that makes progress, that isn't string, we'll just say it's string theory." I'm like, "No, there's a concept called mustn't. You don't get to do that stuff. You're in the wrong field if that's how you feel. And I know Natty, we have a cordial relationship.
You don't get to play that way, and you don't get to call people stupid unless you're going to back it up, or it can it can come back at you. I mean, I would be happy to talk to Lenny Susskind and talk to him about all the people he's insulted over the years because he's a very open about he's not hiding it. You just say, you're an old man, you're at the end of your career. How'd it go? What happened? Did did did you make the progress that your friend Feynman made or Murray Gell-Mann or any of the people that you knew from a previous—? And my feeling about this—pardon me?
00:35:01
Brian Keating
That's a very high standard.00:35:02
Eric Weinstein
Let's talk about, you know, the A-Team. The Institute for Advanced Study at some point recently had Robert de Graaf of String Theorist as its director, Natty Seiberg, a string theorist, Edward Witten, Juan Maldecena, and then Nima was the sort of off a little bit in not necessarily quantum gravity. That's an enormous investment in quantum gravity. And the problem that I'm having with this is, you know, Dan Friedman, a prominent Quantum Gravity researcher, talked about this openly. He said, "science only works when we actually go back and look at how we've behaved and confront our own failures". This is the same thing with the bootstrap method, I feel like what we're doing is we're living the Jeffrey Chu nightmare all over again.- Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating on Eric Weinstein and Dan Green - What is Wrong with Physics (YouTube Content)
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