But cowing critique is not censorship when it channels speech to a more thoughtful form and a less destructive forum. The opportunity cost of speaking in a classroom is that everyone in the room—including the speaker—can't listen to someone else. A teacher with scarce time ought to judge which of 50 students' ideas are less helpful than others', and discourage those until we improve them, for our own good and for everyone else's. It conditions us to respect the intellectual forum.

For everything else, there's the TWiki. The TWiki removes the externality of speaking on listening. Ideas interact here more like J.S. Mill expected them to, more like particles in an ideal gas (i.e. here, when we don't listen, we don't WANT to).

Last week, in ClassNotes17Jan08, I compared class to TWiki this way:
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.

TWiki stands for town-hall democracy. We must protect our democracy. It's the best forum for us to hear each other, the safest forum for us to learn from each other, and the LAST asylum for free speech. I should thank AdamCarlis, then, for suggesting that we write a Bill of Rights.

However, [*I need to figure out a middle section that has something to do with peer pressure. It's a work in progress, but that shouldn't stop you from commenting.*] Therefore, [ ...]

If we can advance free speech by suppressing a little free speech, then we should sacrifice a piece for the sake of the whole. We all should critique the TWiki. But we should also shape those critiques to encourage responses, even if those responses can't survive anywhere—except the TWiki.

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? If you won't risk your own hides to answer these questions here, that's fine too: Say nothing until class next week, and we will learn the answer experimentally.
-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008