Anyone who cares about human freedom and flourishing should concern themselves with Internet freedom.
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The important thing about science is not that everything will be known, or that everything unanimously believed by scientists is necessarily true, but that science contains s system for seeking untruth and purging it.—Ted Nelson
My update to the first part of the 1st amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any system of belief, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of expression, or of the use of the technology of communication;[…]
“What you see is what you get.” Corollary: What you don’t see is what you don’t get, what is taken away, or what they wish you’d stop asking about.
If it’s easy for others to guess in advance what one’s opinion is going to be, there’s not really much point in expressing it, or, for that matter, expressing it could be efficiently replaced by publicly displaying whatever thinking pattern or formula one is using to generate it.
There’s no skill called “being right,” there is only error correction. If you focus on finding where you’re wrong and correcting it, you have a chance at being right; if you seek out places where you’re right, you will find only what you have achieved by accident.
Our document structures typically give us one or at best two dimensions, so we analyse our problems with one (black-white, left-right) or at best two (political compass) degrees of freedom. Thus, our view of the world is artificial, created by throwing out relevant information.
My favourite things are non-linear and/or multi-dimensional: literary references, great music, strange physics. Usually, however, our most common modes of communication give us just two dimensions: in documents, linear order and hierarchy, and in tables, up-down and left-right.
Dawkins said that the value of a theory = what it explains divided by what it assumes. For innovations, I say: value = the freedom offered divided by the number and strength of new handcuffs they bring: proprietary data structures, incompatibility, and limitations on imagination.