None of us responded to Barb’s post online before Eben did in class. I’m irrepressible, but I worry that others may now feel uncomfortable responding—even here, on the TWiki, and not just to Barb but to others in the future. That saddens me, because the TWiki is the best forum to hear each other, and the safest forum to learn from each other.

Last week, I would have told those classmates what I posted under ClassNotes17Jan08:
The professor believes in open information, and … this class is, after all, about challenging authority. I grant that Eben presents a difficult classroom environment for that. But I theorize that he asserts his opinions so strongly in class to force us to absorb them ("listen"), so that we can only critique them later—i.e., after thinking—i.e., intelligently. He reserved the TWiki as our forum for that critique.

I value the power of free speech to hone ideas. If anything, Eben, your rhetorical style prepares us for the disputes we should expect if we hope to become passionate intellectuals debating other passionate intellectuals, and that is why I enjoy confronting it—here, on the TWiki, where no one can shut me up.

But TWiki censorship also emerges from social forces external to its rules. Free Speech that deters Free Speech is a "prior restraint" on speech, functionally if not legally. Authority figures can mobilize laughter, which is a kind of public force. And many of us respect teachers as authority figures. And many of us confuse descriptive statements for prescriptive ones, since that is what humans do. And many of us can't learn to think like lawyers by learning to argue like lawyers, because we who can't yet argue like lawyers will default to surrender.

Eben, I am not saying that you, the teacher, should not respond to the TWiki, here or in class! But maybe the values of free speech benefit by sacrificing a little free speech, and this applies to us all. Public speech conveys private values, and not all private speakers can be treated equally, even in the forum. Some ideas are best understood by a limited audience. Some ideas need to gestate publicly before they can be challenged publicly.

What do you guys think—was the TWiki designed for free speech? If so, is its design successful, both internally and accounting for exogenous forces? You don’t have to go out on a limb to answer these questions: Say nothing until class next week, and we will find out the answer experimentally.
-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008