It is this tension that underlies my skepticism of both complaints about the lack of freedom exhibited in current Twitter, and about anything Musk has or might propose to fix it.

Even Jonathan Haidt, whom I admire greatly, seems not to have been able to directly grapple this bull's horns. From his article, I can't quite tell whether he's aware he's missed it, though his comparatively dour conclusion (for him) suggests to me that maybe he knows his suggestions aren't getting at the core of the matter.

In a battle between good ideas and bad, I believe that the good ideas will tend to win. The reason is reason: even though the conditions for us to be responsive to reason are delicate and fleeting and the effect is sometimes weak, bad ideas are usually bad because their reasoning is wrong. We can understand when the reasoning is wrong. Our core impulses, moderated by an understanding of reality, thankfully seem to aim at a pretty reasonable outcome: we embrace ideals like universal fairness, protection from harm, freedom to seek inspiration, courtesy and respect for others and those things they hold most dear, and so on.

However, in the battle between good ideas and bad, what happens if we give the bad ideas better weapons--like the bad ideas get infinite ammo which ignores body armor? What happens if we chain people to the first ideas they ever expressed, so victory of a good idea doesn't mean you get a chance to improve but rather than you're publicly bloodied should you have started with the bad one? What happens if we invert control so that rather than onlookers being influenced by the messages and nuance and changing positions of thought-leaders who from a position of knowledge engage one another, instead the onlookers drive these leaders by puppets, essentially controlling their actions by a flurry of likes whenever they rhetorically body-slam their opponent?

Now, suddenly, the vaunted "freedom of speech" doesn't look so rosy. You have the freedom to lie in a more emotionally gripping way than the other side. You have the freedom to talk to people on your side, reassuring each other about how right you all are, with only fleeting peeks into the other side to maintain your engagement by prompting you to fire off some choice insulting memes, whereafter you bask in the adulation of your tribe. You have the freedom to hound and badger anyone on your side who isn't the perfect vessel for uninformed populist instinct about whatever your side is on about.

To the extent that freedom of speech is valuable because it enables a contest of ideas, it needs to be a fair fight. Firstly, victory on matters of objective truth need a mechanism by which to be based in reality. Secondly, the losers need to be the ideas, not the idea-holders. Thirdly, the contest needs to be about the validity of the ideas, not the passion of the supporters--a basketball game is not decided primarily by which set of fans cheers louder.

Even though Twitter and most other social media gets all these things wrong, often badly, almost catastrophically wrong, it still has some value. It can raise awareness of new information. It can quickly poll select subgroups for their gut instinct opinion. It can shine a harsh light on an inconvenient truth that the powerful would rather sweep under the rug. And, yes, occasionally, competing ideas can be aired and the defects of bad ones can be identified. But, on balance, Twitter fails at the task of being the seat of public discourse quite massively.

None of this has anything to do with censorship. It has entirely to do with the nature of human attention: we seek that which is emotionally gripping, share readily that which is a perceived threat, slide effortlessly into our roles as tribe members where we support our side over all else simply because it's us (sensible when your life is on the line; not sensible when your belief in ballot stuffing in Arizona is on the line).

Social media is simply an engine that hooks powerfully into those of our instincts that give unfair weapons to bad ideas and rob the good ones of energy.

Knowing that Twitter users are real people doesn't help, because the problem is people. Yes, you can engineer something even worse with bots, but that's really just a match to get people lit. Knowing what the algorithms do doesn't help on its own because nobody has any algorithms that solve this problem. Maybe some will be developed, but how will it really help if we peek under the hood and see that Twitter is doing the obvious pandering to human desires that everyone else is also doing?

I don't have a precise solution. If I did, and thought it would sell, I'd start a new social media company, or maybe run for office.

But I do want to point out that we have examples of free speech done well, or at least well enough: scientific publishing, academic discourse, standard rules of argumentation, even to an extent populist efforts like those in the civil rights movement or the free speech movement. (My read is that the free speech movement mostly wasn't about free speech except in retrospect, but the radical leftists were judoed into adopting free speech as a central and most important demand by the centrists. However, this too is an example of good ideas winning: protests and sit-ins were good at raising awareness of displeasure with the status quo, but the good idea of "our voices should be heard, not suppressed" was the one that lasted, not stuff like "down with capitalism".)

Looking through the venues where ideas get a somewhat fair fight, you find commonalities--space for nuance, a culture of restraint and respect, time to think and reply, admiration of clear thinkers regardless of position, and usually a healthy embrace of evidence with a keen eye to what extent it is relevant, accurate, and sufficient to prove the point.

Enough space to just. Take. Some. Deep. Breaths.

Getting that into Twitter in a meaningful way is a monumental undertaking. And I think the naive conception that the freedom part of free speech is the big thing here is more a hindrance than a help.

I also have a good deal of respect for Musk, but I'm unconvinced that he even understands the problems yet. What if he does not--or he does, but pushes in the wrong direction--and makes Twitter even more destructive of an influence? What if in a naive attempt to resist restraints on "freedom", he jettisons restrictions that might have, in a limited, flawed, and abusable way, bought us a little more time to get our collective act together?

One of the biggest threats to civilization as we know it is our own tribalism: that we become so awash in our insular hatreds that we unleash destruction on an unprecedented scale. As a powerful engine of tribalism ("social network"), Twitter is implicated in such threats. Though I think the chance of a direct and substantial causal connection is small, given the almost unfathomable risks, I do not think that it is completely ludicrous to say that in the situation with Twitter, the future of the world could be at stake.