Erik Engheim
3 min read6 days ago

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Interesting thoughts Hiroki but don't confuse Westernes with Americans. Most of us Westerners are not Americans. Although you can be excused for thinking about this way because the Americans dominate media and frequently talk about Western as synonym for themselves, their values and culture.

As Northern European I increasingly feel we have less and less in common with he Americans. Our concept of free speech has never been like that of the US. We do have hate speech law in much of Europe. And we see a much larger role for government, where government is supposed to be a facilitator for enlightened speech rather than lies and disinformation.

The US is of course an offshoot from Europe and naturally has many cultural similarties but in other ways I think many of us have more in common with Asians over the US. The US in an extreme outlier in the world on so many areas. Their level of tax and government hatred is very unusual. They are the only country in the world without things like national vacation, maternity leave and universal health care.

I remember while living in North Dakota years ago how alone I felt. The people of North Dakota are descendants of Norwegians. They look like my people. They even have last names that sound Norwegian. Yet they acted nothing like Norwegians. Frankly I could not understand them. Their values and mentality was alien to me. I remember distinctly sitting across a young Japanese man in the laundry room. He was a student like me. We began talking about our struggles to fit into American society.

What surprised me was how much we had in common. How we saw many aspects of American society the same way. This suprised me grately as Japan is so far away, and was not settled by Europeans like the US. But there are some common things. For instance humility is an important virtue in the Nordics like in Japan. We do not brag about ourselves. Somebody like Donald Trump is the complete anthesis of Nordic personality and virtue: Loud, bragging, insulting, crude.

Anyway back to the points you made. Yes, I agree we should be able to use AI much more actively, to moderate. But I really want the central power of moderation in the hands of the community. But your AirBnB example seems to point in a simialr direction. That in a way we police each other. That is much of what I want. Today we have a problem of too much vile speech getting through while there is also too much that gets shut down for no good reason and with no recourse for appeal.

We should have a system that aims to treat each other more fairly.

I don't believe in requiring full names is the way to go either. But that is in part because I think many of the most important voices will be anonymous. There are women trying to escape stalkers and abusers who need anonymity. There are whistleblowers in government and in corporation that need anonymity.

But we should still be able to attach reputation to anonymous users, and limit ability to create multiple anonymous accounts. With things like proof-of-work approaches we can make it difficult for spammers and troll farms to manufacture lots of fake users.

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Erik Engheim
Erik Engheim

Written by Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.

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