I agree that bad-faith weaponization of discourse norms is a real problem these days. Unfortunately, unapologetic closed-mindedness is also a real problem these days. I would like to see more analysis that acknowledges both of these points and carefully considers how to thread the needle. Masnick obviously means well and is making reasonable points, but I think we're past the point in the discourse where it's possible to make progress while bringing up just one side of the tradeoff.
I think its fine to be unconvinced by something without necessarily having a better argument.
Usually when people say "both siding", its more refering to an ad hominem falacy where someone tries to counter an argument by pointing to something bad the other side does that is separate (and hence irrelavent) to the original argument. I dont think that is what the person who you are responding to is doing because what they are saying is directly applicable to the issue at hand.
If I thought I knew how to solve the problem, I'd have said so. What I'm doing is pointing out that this style of argument isn't really helpful, because everyone already knows that "debate me, bro" is bad and a problem, so pointing it out as though it were a novel consideration doesn't advance the state of the discourse. What we haven't figured out is what to do about it; in particular, we need to invent discourse norms that are vulnerable neither to "debate me, bro" nor to just contemptuously ignoring counterarguments. Which is hard! But probably not impossible.
Is pointing this out as helpful as coming up with a real solution? No, of course not. But I don't have a real solution, so I'm sharing what I do have, which I think is at least slightly better than nothing even if it's not much better.
I don't think false balance is relevant here, because that's about the question of how to present a controversy to less-informed audiences, which isn't at issue in this case; if you're reading an internet argument then you probably have a decent understanding of how internet arguments tend to go and what makes them go wrong.
> because everyone already knows that "debate me, bro" is bad and a problem
No. They don't.
There are plenty of people—some of them right here on HN—who have bought into the idea that these debate-bros are just rationalists persuading people through good-faith argumentation.
That's why the debate bros do this: because it works on a lot of people.
So spreading awareness that they are bad-faith actors actively seeking to spread misinformation and cloud the truth for fun and profit, without any reference to some "other side" that is "just as bad", is very, very necessary.
>Isn't both-sidesing also a bad-faith weaponization of discourse?
Great question. Are there logical arguments for why both-sidesing/whataboutism is bad, backed up with evidence, and a comparative analysis against arguments that claim it is good? Surely there must be a rational basis for the claim so often made.
I think that closed-mindedness is the issue. I think bad-faith weaponization of discourse is closed-mindedness that wears a disguise. "No, really, I'm a reasonable person!" The unapologetically closed-minded at least is honest.
So I see the axis between the two as one of honesty, not one of closed-mindedness. The actual problem is to move both of them to a more open-minded position, not to balance honest vs. dishonest.
The thing I'm getting at here is not really about what's inside people's hearts. You can never know for sure whether your interlocutor is a saboteur. This is about what kinds of discourse norms society adopts, and what kinds of behavior participants are allowed to get away with.
The problem with having an oversensitive trolling detector is that then people can spew arbitrary nonsense and dismiss counterarguments as trolling, and observers don't get a chance to find out that what's being said doesn't withstand scrutiny. The problem with an undersensitive trolling detector is that discourse becomes an endurance contest rather than a test of who's actually right. Hence the need for a well-calibrated trolling detector, or rather, for norms that weight speech according to some reasonable proxy of whether it's the kind of contribution that stands or falls on its merits. This is the challenge.
In-person "debate" is probably a really bad vehicle for truth-finding to begin with.
Surely if disagreement emerges about something: it makes sense to "debate" in some sense of the word. But only insofar as that's indistinguishable from "trying to reach a mutual conclusion."
The other use of that word — what we see in televised debates or these little Kirklike pop up stands — is where both sides are predisposed/rooted in some opinion and are instead vying over an audience (real or imagined). It's a social exercise masquerading as an intellectual one. Which, to be fair, is maybe an exercise worth engaging for a prospective president, but that nuance is lost in how we treat them.
> In-person "debate" is probably a really bad vehicle for truth-finding to begin with.
I don't think that's its purpose. At its best, having your ideas challenged helps you sharpen and refine them so they're more nuanced and persuasive. But at a minimum it helps you understand what rhetoric works and what doesn't.
I think the fundamental problem is nobody does formal debates with rules and moderators (who actually do their job).
Its not like falacious arguments and bad faith rhetoric is a new phenomenon. They've been with us since the beginning of time. They are problems we have solutions to.
With fair rules and moderators. Political talk shows in German TV almost always have a moderator, yet they rarely intervene when people cut each other off or talk over each other - but they will immediately if a person takes too long to elaborate their point or touches subjects that are scheduled for a later part of the show.
That kind of moderation encourages bad-faith behavior instead of preventing it.
I think Jubilee and Munk Debates try to do this. The problem is that a super formal debate like what you're suggesting might be quite dry and boring for most people to watch so it wouldn't get a lot of viewership.
True, which is the fundamental problem - people like bad faith debate a lot more than good faith. The issue isn't that people engage in it, but that the crowds eat it up.
IMHO, the most insightful comment on that article came from Arianity at September 17, 2025 at 12:34 pm:
>> This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work.
> Fundamentally, it’s not actually a marketplace, and the analogy starts to break down. One of my crank takes for awhile has been we should retire the term. It gives people a false sense of the inevitability of good ideas winning out.
>> The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion
> I think you’re underselling this, a bit. Kirk wasn’t in the business (just) for money. It’s because those viral clips can persuade people. There’s a lot of people you can win over with zingers. Spectacle is persuasion. It shouldn’t be, but it is effective.
>> Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift
> I don’t think it’s inadvertent, he’s smart enough to know better. In the circles he cares about, it’s better to be seen as “open minded” and “bipartisan” than accurate, even if it means inventing a legitimate counterparty that doesn’t exist. it’s toxic, and it’s precisely the tic Kirk exploited.
> specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
The author is describing a symptom of modern society: “viral video clips” are the most powerful way of building an audience right now. They’re powerful for getting re-shares but lack nuance and are dangerously prone to misinterpretation.
As a society we need more and better ways to engage and debate ideas. People are coming around to the idea that a soundbite doesn’t cut it for a complex issue, which is good. But platforms haven’t caught up - so predictably we shoot the messenger.
I think who is funding the troll is the most crucial detail here. If it's funded by opolitical activists like Koch to the tune of 90M annually that ceases to be a marketplace and really just a propaganda platform.
> one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse
I'm not a fan of the national month of mourning for a b-list podcaster that the right is trying to institute but this is just disingenuous. "Toxic"? "Intellectual harassment"?
Does the article's author think that standards of debate were any kinder and gentler in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, British Parliament, revolutionary era United States, leftist Russian revolutionaries (until they stamped out any debate), etc?
> They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality.
Someone is trying to talk about the marketplace of ideas without reasonably engaging with Mill[1]. The positing of an idea being viable if and only if passing "peer review" is beyond ridiculous from a purely Millian standpoint. In his own words[2]:
> ...though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
I agree that CK was a political grifter (e.g. someone that found great wealth by partaking in inflammatory speech), but the marketplace of ideas allows for people like him to engage in any dialog he pleases. After all, TMZ does the same thing. Tabloids do the same thing. Tons of podcasts do the same thing. Hasan Piker, Destiny, Piers Morgan, Bill O'Reilly, and Alex Jones all do it, too. I may not agree with Charlie Kirk's politics or with his rhetorical methods, but I'll defend his right of free speech to the death.
> It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed.
No it doesn't. This is a carefully-crafted contingency to ensure that you always have the higher ground via: "you're not an expert" (when experts can be, and sometimes are, wrong) or "you don't have the same standard or evidence as me" (when standards of evidence are often contextual).
If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
If we define truth as something real, and something that we determine based on evidence and correspondence with reality, then you absolutely need some shared epistemological standards for what constitutes evidence and correspondence. I'm not sure if you need peer review for everything, but building expertise in those epistemological standards and approaches _is_ a requirement for well functioning marketplace of ideas, especially if our goal is to develop and understand the truth.
This is distinct from free speech -- I wouldn't want to impose restrictions on one's ability to speak, but that's not the same as saying all speech is equally valid in the pursuit of truth.
> If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
This is semantic posturing, as, at the end of the day, any "truth" will always require some degree of consensus. Even in the hardest of sciences, we must agree to some (definitionally unprovable) axioms by consensus. Logical positivism died many years ago (though I do know modern-day "rationalists" are attempting to reanimate its corpse).
This is basically what I'm saying -- you need consensus on the standards of evidence and the procedures for accepting evidence. Not just "argue whatever with no standards and see what sticks". The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
It's fair to critique arguments or debate formats that do not establish those standards, or which throw out agreed upon standards with no basis, as not really participating in a marketplace of ideas.
> The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
I have a hard time seeing if this is true or not. The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards. I guess "doing more math" is a bit of an epistemological standard, but AC also leads to all kinds of weird stuff (Tarski's paradox, etc.), so I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con. To me, AC seems more ad hoc than not.
But the more salient point here is that you can have people that vehemently disagree with AC (and a minority of mathmaticians do). Now, I'm not arguing that Charlie Kirk is some intellectual giant here, nor was he even a conservative thought leader (like Scalia was, for example). But, and admittedly this is a pretty soft argument, I'd rather err on letting him do his thing rather than stifling his speech by arguing that he's somehow orthogonal to the marketplace of ideas. I think J.S. Mill would agree. To me, even the homeless weirdo yelling "THE END IS NIGH" at the street corner seems to be a part of that marketplace.
Do I believe that C. S. Lewis has more interesting things to say about Christian doctrine than Charlie Kirk; or that Alvin Plantinga makes better arguments than Ben Shapiro? I do, but that doesn't make Kirk's or Shapiro's speech less "speech-y."
> The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards.
Usefulness in proofs _is_ an epistemological standard. Axioms are evaluated based on how they impact mathematical proofs and their compatibility with other axioms, and mathematical disagreements with the Axiom of Choice also follow similar epistemological standards and procedures. We take Banach-Tarski seriously because it meets the standards.
If you wanted to make an argument that "The Axiom of Choice is nonsense" and be taken seriously, you would be expected to show how it is incompatible with other axioms, or how it generates a paradox. You wouldn't be arrested or silenced if you went around denouncing the axiom of choice without following these standards, but you would (rightfully) not be taken seriously.
Similarly, the article isn't saying CK should have been silenced or had his speech stifled, but it is objecting to the notion that what he did was real debate or real intellectual discourse. I don't think that argument equates to stifling speech.
> I'll defend his right of free speech to the death
See, I don't think you would. That's not a knock against you, practically no one (myself included) has that firm of convictions. But very, very few people are willing to even knowingly put their lives at risk for their beliefs. In fact, the only person who did so in this entire situation is the shooter. Kirk almost certainly didn't think he was in any real danger. You or I writing HN comments certainly don't.
I don't think the world would be a better place if our bluffs on firmly held beliefs were more regularly called. But it definitely doesn't sit right with me that you glamorized the very kind of extreme behavior that you're criticizing.
>When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.
Oh good, then my usual strategy of completely ignoring these types is the correct response.
No, it's inadequate, if others are listening to those types. Then you have to disinfect the people around you, or else suffer the consequences of them believing the nonsense.
Regardless of whether he was grifting or not, he still didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody apart from serious criminals or warlords deserve that. He was neither.
Why not just embarrass him in a viral stunt. Nobody even tried to do that. They leaped all the way from 0 to 11 by shooting him dead.
Who is to say they were mentally ill? Major left wing streamers openly were calling for violence before it happened. TechDirt's position conveniently ignores this. Kirk being a charlatan, even if that were true, is small potatoes.
Look, i checked the first 20 seconds, it's called a "spun metaphor", even if poorly done. Basically, this guy (with a grating voice tbh), calls democrats to "show some gut" then "you need to be gutting them" and "shank them and let their intestine drop on stage".
It's obviously cut to look inflamatory, but be honest, do you really think he calls for democrats to _literally_ gut republicans? Or, and i don't know about eitehr this long-hair guy or the context, he was talking about a US debate democrats just lost because they showed no heart and refused to reach for the jugular after a successful initial attack, on a debate show?
Because, and again, not a native speaker, not from the US, don't know about it, i might be too charitable, it looks to be to be missing a lot of context. Was it recent? was it during the election cycle? To me its very, very suspicious that an editing like this comes out just now, it seems like a hit job.
TechDirt is unapologetically, wildly left wing, so of course calling the opposition "trolls" who "weaponize" the "marketplace of ideas" is nothing but a theatrical self-righteous take; at best a pot calling the kettle black, at worst a complete lack of self-awareness.
Still better than "educate yourself", or "do better", which is what you often get when you start to ask questions of someone proclaiming extreme left wing ideas.
Edit: Also, what's the deal with calling everyone a "grifter"? I see no evidence that Charlie Kirk was insincere about what he believed, where's the "grifting"? Isn't any kind of political activity for pay "grifting" by this standard?
"Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution."
- According to an unapologetically left wing perspective on what happened. That doesn't mean even a word of that is true, any more than a word of what Kirk said was true.
Who is to say whether the college student's positions were actually nuanced? Is well-researched just "agreed with my perspective" or a fact?
(Edit: I missed the hyperlink somehow, point still remains this is an interpretation dance.)
Honestly, to me once someone start to fight over semantics on words that are well understood, he is a grifter and does not deserve my time.
He can't really make his point because his argument fell apart, and rather than integrating the critique on his argument to make it stronger or even (i've never seen it), changing his point of view, he has to comeback to semantics to remake the same argument without even thinking on how to integrate the critique.
I'm not saying this guy is like that, i honestly don't watch US culture war (unless they critique the best Olympics ceremonies i've seen because they don't like/understand French culture)
But i've seen some weird Jubilee videos, content about one of the current genocide, and i follow my country's politics. Often (not always), "debate bros" are just people who, when they lost the argument, start to debate over semantics. I'd rather listen to a poorly-informed student than listen to that kind of person.
I agree that bad-faith weaponization of discourse norms is a real problem these days. Unfortunately, unapologetic closed-mindedness is also a real problem these days. I would like to see more analysis that acknowledges both of these points and carefully considers how to thread the needle. Masnick obviously means well and is making reasonable points, but I think we're past the point in the discourse where it's possible to make progress while bringing up just one side of the tradeoff.
Isn't both-sidesing also a bad-faith weaponization of discourse? Make your own argument rather than demanding someone else makes it for you.
I think its fine to be unconvinced by something without necessarily having a better argument.
Usually when people say "both siding", its more refering to an ad hominem falacy where someone tries to counter an argument by pointing to something bad the other side does that is separate (and hence irrelavent) to the original argument. I dont think that is what the person who you are responding to is doing because what they are saying is directly applicable to the issue at hand.
If I thought I knew how to solve the problem, I'd have said so. What I'm doing is pointing out that this style of argument isn't really helpful, because everyone already knows that "debate me, bro" is bad and a problem, so pointing it out as though it were a novel consideration doesn't advance the state of the discourse. What we haven't figured out is what to do about it; in particular, we need to invent discourse norms that are vulnerable neither to "debate me, bro" nor to just contemptuously ignoring counterarguments. Which is hard! But probably not impossible.
Is pointing this out as helpful as coming up with a real solution? No, of course not. But I don't have a real solution, so I'm sharing what I do have, which I think is at least slightly better than nothing even if it's not much better.
I don't think false balance is relevant here, because that's about the question of how to present a controversy to less-informed audiences, which isn't at issue in this case; if you're reading an internet argument then you probably have a decent understanding of how internet arguments tend to go and what makes them go wrong.
> because everyone already knows that "debate me, bro" is bad and a problem
No. They don't.
There are plenty of people—some of them right here on HN—who have bought into the idea that these debate-bros are just rationalists persuading people through good-faith argumentation.
That's why the debate bros do this: because it works on a lot of people.
So spreading awareness that they are bad-faith actors actively seeking to spread misinformation and cloud the truth for fun and profit, without any reference to some "other side" that is "just as bad", is very, very necessary.
>Isn't both-sidesing also a bad-faith weaponization of discourse?
Great question. Are there logical arguments for why both-sidesing/whataboutism is bad, backed up with evidence, and a comparative analysis against arguments that claim it is good? Surely there must be a rational basis for the claim so often made.
I think that closed-mindedness is the issue. I think bad-faith weaponization of discourse is closed-mindedness that wears a disguise. "No, really, I'm a reasonable person!" The unapologetically closed-minded at least is honest.
So I see the axis between the two as one of honesty, not one of closed-mindedness. The actual problem is to move both of them to a more open-minded position, not to balance honest vs. dishonest.
The thing I'm getting at here is not really about what's inside people's hearts. You can never know for sure whether your interlocutor is a saboteur. This is about what kinds of discourse norms society adopts, and what kinds of behavior participants are allowed to get away with.
The problem with having an oversensitive trolling detector is that then people can spew arbitrary nonsense and dismiss counterarguments as trolling, and observers don't get a chance to find out that what's being said doesn't withstand scrutiny. The problem with an undersensitive trolling detector is that discourse becomes an endurance contest rather than a test of who's actually right. Hence the need for a well-calibrated trolling detector, or rather, for norms that weight speech according to some reasonable proxy of whether it's the kind of contribution that stands or falls on its merits. This is the challenge.
In-person "debate" is probably a really bad vehicle for truth-finding to begin with.
Surely if disagreement emerges about something: it makes sense to "debate" in some sense of the word. But only insofar as that's indistinguishable from "trying to reach a mutual conclusion."
The other use of that word — what we see in televised debates or these little Kirklike pop up stands — is where both sides are predisposed/rooted in some opinion and are instead vying over an audience (real or imagined). It's a social exercise masquerading as an intellectual one. Which, to be fair, is maybe an exercise worth engaging for a prospective president, but that nuance is lost in how we treat them.
> In-person "debate" is probably a really bad vehicle for truth-finding to begin with.
I don't think that's its purpose. At its best, having your ideas challenged helps you sharpen and refine them so they're more nuanced and persuasive. But at a minimum it helps you understand what rhetoric works and what doesn't.
Rather than "hurting America," Crossfire was the highest form of political debate America could suffer before retreating into info bubbles.
Ancient Greece called and wants its sophistry back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
I think the fundamental problem is nobody does formal debates with rules and moderators (who actually do their job).
Its not like falacious arguments and bad faith rhetoric is a new phenomenon. They've been with us since the beginning of time. They are problems we have solutions to.
With fair rules and moderators. Political talk shows in German TV almost always have a moderator, yet they rarely intervene when people cut each other off or talk over each other - but they will immediately if a person takes too long to elaborate their point or touches subjects that are scheduled for a later part of the show.
That kind of moderation encourages bad-faith behavior instead of preventing it.
I think Jubilee and Munk Debates try to do this. The problem is that a super formal debate like what you're suggesting might be quite dry and boring for most people to watch so it wouldn't get a lot of viewership.
True, which is the fundamental problem - people like bad faith debate a lot more than good faith. The issue isn't that people engage in it, but that the crowds eat it up.
You might find Cambridge union to be refreshing.
https://www.youtube.com/@cambridgeunionsoc1815
I’d rather deal with intellectually dishonest argumentation than live in a walled garden where only certain opinions are acceptable.
IMHO, the most insightful comment on that article came from Arianity at September 17, 2025 at 12:34 pm:
>> This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work.
> Fundamentally, it’s not actually a marketplace, and the analogy starts to break down. One of my crank takes for awhile has been we should retire the term. It gives people a false sense of the inevitability of good ideas winning out.
>> The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion
> I think you’re underselling this, a bit. Kirk wasn’t in the business (just) for money. It’s because those viral clips can persuade people. There’s a lot of people you can win over with zingers. Spectacle is persuasion. It shouldn’t be, but it is effective.
>> Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift
> I don’t think it’s inadvertent, he’s smart enough to know better. In the circles he cares about, it’s better to be seen as “open minded” and “bipartisan” than accurate, even if it means inventing a legitimate counterparty that doesn’t exist. it’s toxic, and it’s precisely the tic Kirk exploited.
> specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
The author is describing a symptom of modern society: “viral video clips” are the most powerful way of building an audience right now. They’re powerful for getting re-shares but lack nuance and are dangerously prone to misinterpretation.
As a society we need more and better ways to engage and debate ideas. People are coming around to the idea that a soundbite doesn’t cut it for a complex issue, which is good. But platforms haven’t caught up - so predictably we shoot the messenger.
I think who is funding the troll is the most crucial detail here. If it's funded by opolitical activists like Koch to the tune of 90M annually that ceases to be a marketplace and really just a propaganda platform.
> one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse
I'm not a fan of the national month of mourning for a b-list podcaster that the right is trying to institute but this is just disingenuous. "Toxic"? "Intellectual harassment"?
Does the article's author think that standards of debate were any kinder and gentler in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, British Parliament, revolutionary era United States, leftist Russian revolutionaries (until they stamped out any debate), etc?
"Grift" is becoming another one of "those" words...
> They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality.
Someone is trying to talk about the marketplace of ideas without reasonably engaging with Mill[1]. The positing of an idea being viable if and only if passing "peer review" is beyond ridiculous from a purely Millian standpoint. In his own words[2]:
> ...though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
I agree that CK was a political grifter (e.g. someone that found great wealth by partaking in inflammatory speech), but the marketplace of ideas allows for people like him to engage in any dialog he pleases. After all, TMZ does the same thing. Tabloids do the same thing. Tons of podcasts do the same thing. Hasan Piker, Destiny, Piers Morgan, Bill O'Reilly, and Alex Jones all do it, too. I may not agree with Charlie Kirk's politics or with his rhetorical methods, but I'll defend his right of free speech to the death.
> It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed.
No it doesn't. This is a carefully-crafted contingency to ensure that you always have the higher ground via: "you're not an expert" (when experts can be, and sometimes are, wrong) or "you don't have the same standard or evidence as me" (when standards of evidence are often contextual).
[1] https://web.uncg.edu/dcl/courses/vicecrime/m3/part1.asp
[2] https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Western_Washington_...
If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
If we define truth as something real, and something that we determine based on evidence and correspondence with reality, then you absolutely need some shared epistemological standards for what constitutes evidence and correspondence. I'm not sure if you need peer review for everything, but building expertise in those epistemological standards and approaches _is_ a requirement for well functioning marketplace of ideas, especially if our goal is to develop and understand the truth.
This is distinct from free speech -- I wouldn't want to impose restrictions on one's ability to speak, but that's not the same as saying all speech is equally valid in the pursuit of truth.
> If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
This is semantic posturing, as, at the end of the day, any "truth" will always require some degree of consensus. Even in the hardest of sciences, we must agree to some (definitionally unprovable) axioms by consensus. Logical positivism died many years ago (though I do know modern-day "rationalists" are attempting to reanimate its corpse).
This is basically what I'm saying -- you need consensus on the standards of evidence and the procedures for accepting evidence. Not just "argue whatever with no standards and see what sticks". The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
It's fair to critique arguments or debate formats that do not establish those standards, or which throw out agreed upon standards with no basis, as not really participating in a marketplace of ideas.
> The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
I have a hard time seeing if this is true or not. The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards. I guess "doing more math" is a bit of an epistemological standard, but AC also leads to all kinds of weird stuff (Tarski's paradox, etc.), so I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con. To me, AC seems more ad hoc than not.
But the more salient point here is that you can have people that vehemently disagree with AC (and a minority of mathmaticians do). Now, I'm not arguing that Charlie Kirk is some intellectual giant here, nor was he even a conservative thought leader (like Scalia was, for example). But, and admittedly this is a pretty soft argument, I'd rather err on letting him do his thing rather than stifling his speech by arguing that he's somehow orthogonal to the marketplace of ideas. I think J.S. Mill would agree. To me, even the homeless weirdo yelling "THE END IS NIGH" at the street corner seems to be a part of that marketplace.
Do I believe that C. S. Lewis has more interesting things to say about Christian doctrine than Charlie Kirk; or that Alvin Plantinga makes better arguments than Ben Shapiro? I do, but that doesn't make Kirk's or Shapiro's speech less "speech-y."
> The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards.
Usefulness in proofs _is_ an epistemological standard. Axioms are evaluated based on how they impact mathematical proofs and their compatibility with other axioms, and mathematical disagreements with the Axiom of Choice also follow similar epistemological standards and procedures. We take Banach-Tarski seriously because it meets the standards.
If you wanted to make an argument that "The Axiom of Choice is nonsense" and be taken seriously, you would be expected to show how it is incompatible with other axioms, or how it generates a paradox. You wouldn't be arrested or silenced if you went around denouncing the axiom of choice without following these standards, but you would (rightfully) not be taken seriously.
Similarly, the article isn't saying CK should have been silenced or had his speech stifled, but it is objecting to the notion that what he did was real debate or real intellectual discourse. I don't think that argument equates to stifling speech.
> I'll defend his right of free speech to the death
See, I don't think you would. That's not a knock against you, practically no one (myself included) has that firm of convictions. But very, very few people are willing to even knowingly put their lives at risk for their beliefs. In fact, the only person who did so in this entire situation is the shooter. Kirk almost certainly didn't think he was in any real danger. You or I writing HN comments certainly don't.
I don't think the world would be a better place if our bluffs on firmly held beliefs were more regularly called. But it definitely doesn't sit right with me that you glamorized the very kind of extreme behavior that you're criticizing.
>When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.
Oh good, then my usual strategy of completely ignoring these types is the correct response.
No, it's inadequate, if others are listening to those types. Then you have to disinfect the people around you, or else suffer the consequences of them believing the nonsense.
Regardless of whether he was grifting or not, he still didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody apart from serious criminals or warlords deserve that. He was neither.
Why not just embarrass him in a viral stunt. Nobody even tried to do that. They leaped all the way from 0 to 11 by shooting him dead.
You are complaining that the mentally ill assassin did not used measured steps to redress grievances?
Who is to say they were mentally ill? Major left wing streamers openly were calling for violence before it happened. TechDirt's position conveniently ignores this. Kirk being a charlatan, even if that were true, is small potatoes.
https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/1966264506486853810
Edit: Downvoters, if that wasn't calls to violence, especially at the end, post it on HN on a reply. I dare you to be consistent on your vote.
Look, i checked the first 20 seconds, it's called a "spun metaphor", even if poorly done. Basically, this guy (with a grating voice tbh), calls democrats to "show some gut" then "you need to be gutting them" and "shank them and let their intestine drop on stage".
It's obviously cut to look inflamatory, but be honest, do you really think he calls for democrats to _literally_ gut republicans? Or, and i don't know about eitehr this long-hair guy or the context, he was talking about a US debate democrats just lost because they showed no heart and refused to reach for the jugular after a successful initial attack, on a debate show?
Because, and again, not a native speaker, not from the US, don't know about it, i might be too charitable, it looks to be to be missing a lot of context. Was it recent? was it during the election cycle? To me its very, very suspicious that an editing like this comes out just now, it seems like a hit job.
TechDirt is unapologetically, wildly left wing, so of course calling the opposition "trolls" who "weaponize" the "marketplace of ideas" is nothing but a theatrical self-righteous take; at best a pot calling the kettle black, at worst a complete lack of self-awareness.
Okay, but do you have a counter to the points they've made here?
[flagged]
> gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students
Fair enough, but there are those who won't even engage with those ill-prepared to counter their ideas.
Still better than "educate yourself", or "do better", which is what you often get when you start to ask questions of someone proclaiming extreme left wing ideas.
Edit: Also, what's the deal with calling everyone a "grifter"? I see no evidence that Charlie Kirk was insincere about what he believed, where's the "grifting"? Isn't any kind of political activity for pay "grifting" by this standard?
Whether or not it's grifting depends on whether you agree with the political stance
AKA "come at me bro"
"Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution."
- According to an unapologetically left wing perspective on what happened. That doesn't mean even a word of that is true, any more than a word of what Kirk said was true.
Who is to say whether the college student's positions were actually nuanced? Is well-researched just "agreed with my perspective" or a fact?
(Edit: I missed the hyperlink somehow, point still remains this is an interpretation dance.)
It's a quote from TFA and links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRLV5Is-Pc4
> this is an interpretation dance
Honestly, to me once someone start to fight over semantics on words that are well understood, he is a grifter and does not deserve my time.
He can't really make his point because his argument fell apart, and rather than integrating the critique on his argument to make it stronger or even (i've never seen it), changing his point of view, he has to comeback to semantics to remake the same argument without even thinking on how to integrate the critique.
I'm not saying this guy is like that, i honestly don't watch US culture war (unless they critique the best Olympics ceremonies i've seen because they don't like/understand French culture)
But i've seen some weird Jubilee videos, content about one of the current genocide, and i follow my country's politics. Often (not always), "debate bros" are just people who, when they lost the argument, start to debate over semantics. I'd rather listen to a poorly-informed student than listen to that kind of person.