In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Gus Hurwitz pronounces “gotcha” on Nate Silver:
Political data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com recently tweeted that Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about free speech were mistaken because “false statements of fact aren’t protected speech in the U.S.†That was a false statement—which, fortunately for Mr. Silver the First Amendment does protect. As the saying goes, the remedy for bad speech is more speech.
Those who want to purge “misinformation†from social media should learn from this incident. Mr. Silver is smart, thoughtful and well-educated. He’s an active participant in policy debates and has every reason to be familiar with the First Amendment. And the First Amendment isn’t an obscure area of law. Most Americans are broadly aware of it; it is constantly discussed and in the news and throughout the education system; it is foundational to our democracy. How can someone like Mr. Silver confidently misstate such a familiar part of U.S. law?
Actually, although I think he’s clever and skilled, I have seen few signs of education in Mr. Silver. Mr. Hurwitz is confusing education with training. Mr. Silver is not well-educated. He is well-trained like a competent blacksmith or weaver. As Plato wrote in Republic:
Education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as through they were putting sight into blind eyes…but the present argument, on the other hand…indicates that this power is in the soul of each and that the instrument with which each learns–just as an eye is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole body–must be turned around from that which is coming into being together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at that which is and the brightest part of that which is
Education is something that emerges over a lifetime not something that is conveyed in a few short years. It is wide-ranging and brings with it an understanding, not just of current events but of the human heart.
Today’s emphasis on the relevant and job preparation followed by total pre-occupation with work and killing time is not conducive to education. It is, as Mr. Hurwitz notes, at odd with with views of the Founders:
Yet the idea that more speech is the remedy for bad speech assumes more than a polity of speakers eager to correct their peers. The cacophony is deafening, making it difficult to sort fact from fiction. More speech is only a cure in a polity of charitable listeners. Judge Learned Hand once observed that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.†If we don’t accept others’ good faith and the limitations of our own expertise—if we are so quick to attack others’ errors that we forget how often we too are wrong—the enterprise of free speech is fraught, and the spirit of liberty of which it is part is at peril.
” I have seen few signs of education in Mr. Silver.”
I only read his stats stuff occasionally, which started with baseball. How do you assess his lack of education. Wouldnt he need to address a much wider set of issues? If the best educated person in the world was, just as an example, an architect, and his public writings were limited to modern architecture, how would you assess his education? Seems kind of harsh? (Maybe you read Silver more thoroughly that I do.)
Anyway, this is really just a hit piece since Silver writes from a left wing POV.
“In United States constitutional law, false statements of fact are an exception from protection of free speech under the First Amendment. In United States law, a false statement of fact will not be exempt from some civil or criminal penalty, if a law has imposed one. This exception has evolved over time from a series of Supreme Court cases that dealt with issues such as libel, slander, and statutes which barred fraudulent solicitation of charitable donations.
A major limiting factor to this concrete First Amendment exception are statements made against public figures. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the Court strongly suggested that even “deliberate lies” could not be punished if made against the government. Since that decision, many cases that have dealt with this rule have struggled to define the line of who actually is a ‘public figure’. The Supreme Court has also extended this doctrine to non-political figures who are simply famous or well known in the media.”
Steve