Free Speech and the Constitution of Knowledge

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Liberal science is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality base community. On free speech question, i think the american supreme court jurisprudence has it about right. There are certain well established, carved out, narrow and stable categories that are a not first amendment protected. Those are well established exceptions, and thereare good rules for them. What counts is knowledge, what doesn't. We know you can have boundaries,. ecause we've had boundaries now for many, many decades, and they've worked.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.