Re: Voluntary Mandatory Self-Ratings and Limits on Speech
On 21 Aug 2001, at 14:10, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
You're missing my general point. If you prefer that I not use "religion," I could just as easily use an example where certainly people of some community think that some otherwise-constitutional practice is "harmful."
True. Yet harm gives you cause for Common Law action, no?
Harm does, but "harm" doesn't. It's pretty easy to claim that books and movies etc which "glorify" "bad" behavior lead to viewers being more likely to engage in the bad behavior glorified, or bad behavior in general, without even trying to claim that a particular "bad book" was responsible for a particular crime. I have two differnet reponses to this kind of accusation: 1) Bullshit, I'm not responsible for other people's actions. 2) If I agreed about it being "bad behavior" I wouldn't be "glorifying" it in the first place.
It's a question of where you draw the line between coerced and uncoerced. If many enough of your peers think it's good behavior to label your communications, and failure to do so leads to an amount of badwill, does that constitute coercion? If not, we have a voluntary system where social pressures encourage you to rate, but where the gain is not a direct economic advantage, but rather the avoidance of the badwill of others. One might argue that such "bad behavior" should be tolerated, and that rating is no longer properly "voluntary" if rating only means you avoid an extra-legal social sanction. Nevertheless, there is a definite incentive for a non-anonymous person to rate correctly (to maintain his reputation), sometimes an incentive to misrate regardless (like when you're advocating a politically incorrect opinion), and the extra possibilities afforded by anonymity in these situations (using a disposable tentacle to communicate and/or misrate). This way, anonymity does make a difference even in an uncoerced situation.
The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the crucial point that the people calling for labelling ("voluntary" or otherwise) are not your customers, they're people trying to protect their own or their children's virgin eyes from content they find offensive or blasphemous or whatever. You have an economic incentive to please your customers, but you have no incentive to please people who aren't your customers. George
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001 georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
Harm does, but "harm" doesn't. It's pretty easy to claim that books and movies etc which "glorify" "bad" behavior lead to viewers being more likely to engage in the bad behavior glorified, or bad behavior in general, without even trying to claim that a particular "bad book" was responsible for a particular crime.
Agreed. As Tim said, one first needs to show that there is a rights violation, and that harm is indeed being done. In fact I'm of the opinion that even when that *can* be achieved, it's still not quite ok to regulate if the harm is not immediate -- even if violent entertainment does cause violence, and people are dying because of it, you need to show that the subjects are not left a choice, but are compelled to act violently. Probably you'd need to show that they've been forced/tricked into watching the stuff in the first place. None of that can be done in the case of "entertainment unsuitable for young eyes", of course. The reason I started talking about harm is that *if* we could satisfy the above conditions, we would have a case for regulation, even if basic rights are thereby infringed.
The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the crucial point that the people calling for labelling ("voluntary" or otherwise) are not your customers, they're people trying to protect their own or their children's virgin eyes from content they find offensive or blasphemous or whatever.
Those who campaign for voluntary labelling without a covert agenda (who Tim argues represent a negligible minority of rating advocates) naturally hope that those who *are* your clients will be requiring the ratings, and so providing the incentive to rate. In essence, they hope that the presence of voluntary ratings will become the norm, and as essential to the reputation of an online entity as its credit rating, or the accuracy of its past communications. They are daydreaming, of course, but I do not see where the basic fault in this reasoning is.
You have an economic incentive to please your customers, but you have no incentive to please people who aren't your customers.
The trouble is, rating schemes can be turned into certification schemes, where the label represents an assurance that the information is kosher. In this case, you *do* rate for the customer. The same would happen with current rating schemes if they were to become widespread enough; one can imagine MAPS like blacklists, non-cooperation of ISPs and so on, where people who are not your direct customers still react to unrated content as a part of a collective effort to control some (imaginary) externality. Nobody wants this to happen, of course, and it hardly will, given the effort it would take to "rate the Internet". The point is, there is nothing wrong with the economics per se. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
Agreed. As Tim said, one first needs to show that there is a rights violation, and that harm is indeed being done. In fact I'm of the opinion that even when that *can* be achieved, it's still not quite ok to regulate if the harm is not immediate -- even if violent entertainment does cause violence, and people are dying because of it, you need to show that the subjects are not left a choice, but are compelled to act violently. Probably you'd need to show that they've been forced/tricked into watching the stuff in the first place. None of that can be done in the case of "entertainment unsuitable for young eyes", of course.
Hume's Fork. You have a logical fault in your thinking. -- ____________________________________________________________________ natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty warriors'...dream-tracks Matsuo Basho The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (3)
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georgemw＠speakeasy.net -
Jim Choate -
Sampo Syreeni