In an environment of scarce information, free speech is a useful approximation to what we’re after. In an environment of scarce attention, not so much. Authoritarians like the CCP know this well, which is why they prefer flooding the information space to censorship mostly.
@glenweyl In other words, the old paradigm may have been "The solution to bad speech is more speech". This may still apply when we are dealing with a new topic for which we don't have much good information. But in a content flood, we need to pay more attention to selecting content that provides useful, accurate information.
@glenweyl Do you have any thoughts on this criticism of peer review?
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review/comment/11127579
Peer review could be seen as a way to improve where we allocate our attention -- but the standard pre-publication peer review is clearly a very expensive way to do so (and possibly not very effective anyway)
@DecaturNature the solution to bad attention is better attention