#davidrunciman — Public Fediverse posts

@Gotterdammerung I realise you're defending it, but thought you might find interesting that the "marketplace of ideas" trope has a chequered history. I'd found a piece years back by Jill Gordon, "John Stuart Mill and 'The Marketplace of Ideas'" which strongly corresponded to (and extended) my own thinking:

https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1997_0023_0002_0235_0250

More recently, David Runciman (podcast, sorry, and no transcript of which I'm aware) did a really good 'splainer in his "History of Bad Ideas" series on the Marketplace of Ideas as well:

https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-history-of-bad-ideas%3A-the-marketplace-of-ideas

(Others may find that more useful than you will.)

If you'd like I can re-listen and synopsise the podcast for you.

Upshot though is that good ideas don't tend to emerge in a free-for-all marketplace. Laboratories, seminars, and non-motivated (dialectical, rather than sophistical / rhetorical) exchange. My argument is that "marketplace of ideas" was more about selling markets (many early advocates were also free-market advocates) than the metaphor vis-a-vis ideas themselves.

(If you go through especially Oliver Wendell Holmes's characterisation in Schenck v. US, one of the strong influences on him was Francis Wrigley Hirst, former editor of The Economist, itself created to promote free speech ideas as is made clear in its prospectus: https://web.archive.org/web/20180825113414/https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus. The story's covered in The Great Dissent by Thomas Healy: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thomas-healy/the-great-dissent/)

#MarketplaceOfIdeas #DavidRunciman #JohnStuartMill #ThomasHealy #FrancisWrigleyHirst #OliverWendellHolmes

Last night I listened to podcaster David Runciman and journalist Helen Lewis talking about Fight Club, and how it holds up 25 years later;

https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%3A-fight-club-w%2F-helen-lewis

The political aspect of the discussion exemplified a common lack of understanding among the political class, about what fascism really is and how it works. One that I also lacked when I first watched the film, about 20 years ago.

(1/?)

#podcasts #PastPresentFuture #FightClub #DavidRunciman #HelenLewis

I’m sharing this article to make a comment about the framing for these kinds of things. The article is an extract from a book by David Runciman, and implicitly links human worth to jobs.
Part of the existential dread of AI replacing humans is that, if your job is your life, then who are you without the doing? Instead of hand-wringing about robots and machines, […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/08/21/jobs-ai-and-human-worth/