prior probability

Happy Thanksgiving-break Friday! I had to do a double take earlier this week when I first saw the parody post pictured below via “shitposter” extraordinaire Alex Cohen (@anothercohen):

I first saw this thought-provoking autobiographical tribute to Thanksgiving Day by Comanche author Paul Chaat Smith when I visited the American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C. earlier this year (see here). Alas, I could not find this excellent and entertaining video on YouTube, but it is up and running on Facebook (here) and Instragram (below):

What a difference a day makes four or five days make!

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Homes

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the day President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas: 22 November 1963. To mark this somber occasion, check out the seven pop culture artifacts mentioned in this report via The Conversation as well as this excellent essay on “The Endless Assassination of John F. Kennedy” by Sean O’Neal, a writer for Texas Monthly. (This Wikipedia page and this report on “The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive” by Scott Sayare, a freelance journalist writing for New York Magazine, are also worth reading.)

In addition, check out the short video below, which surveys the history of the Zapruder film, perhaps the single-most important — and lucrative — piece of evidence regarding this endless enigma, one that was withheld from the public for years and that the greedy heirs of Abraham Zapruder eventually sold to the government for $16 million (greedy because they wanted even more money!). For a more detailed history of this infamous film clip, I recommend this excellent essay by my colleague and friend Brian Frye as well as David Wrone’s book “The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination“, and for an apology of the Zapruder family’s abject greed, see Chapters 13 & 14 of “Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film” by Alexandra Zapruder, who is the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder.

(Bonus confession: For my part, the JFK case has fascinated me since I was in middle school, when I first learned about the Warren Commission’s shoddy investigation and likely cover-up of what really happened that fateful day.)

Bonus video: “Andy Warhol, Nine Jackies | Videos in American Sign Language (ASL)”

Moonlight #1 [Dept (뎁트), featuring Sonny Zero (오넷) and OoOo]:

Moonlight #2 (Kali Uchis):

Moonlight #3 (Ludwig van Beethoven, featuring Anastasia Huppman on the piano):

I have featured Cuban surrealist street artist Yulier Rodríguez (a/k/a Yulier P.) on this blog several times before. Now, I just discovered his Instagram page; in addition, award-winning Cuban author and blogger Yoani Sánchez interviewed the grafitti artist in August of 2023. Her interview is in Spanish and is available here. (Bonus link: a 2020 profile of Yulier P., which is also in Spanish.)

Yesterday (17 November), the board of directors of OpenAI unceremoniously fired Silicon Valley legend and ChatGPT boy wonder Sam Altman. According to the official announcement, Mr Altman was fired for his deceit and chicanery: “A deliberative review process by the board […] concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board …” Wait, what?! Everybody lies (see here, for example), and OpenAI is the third most valuable startup in the world, so what is the real reason why evil genius Sam Altman was fired? Was it about money or “politics“, or was it the result of a bona fide dispute over A.I. safety? Alas, I wish there were a truth market for days like these! File under “truth is stranger than fiction” (hat tip: Mark Twain.)

I am now in the Twin Cities to attend the Journal of Law & Public Policy‘s fall symposium on “Free Speech and the U.S. Constitution” and present my work-in-progress “Solving the Free Speech Dilemma.” Note: Although the symposium will take place in person at the University of St Thomas School of Law in downtown Minneapolis, it will also be telecast for free (register here). The full program is below the fold (all times Central):

That is the new title of my newly revised work-in-progress, which I will be presenting this Friday (17 November) at a daylong symposium on “Free Speech and the U.S. Constitution” (see here) at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Below is an excerpt from the introduction to my paper; my footnotes are below the fold:

What is the free speech dilemma? On the one hand, if we adopt a laissez faire attitude toward speech, how do we screen out disinformation or lies?[1] If, on the other hand, we attempt to screen out bad information via content moderation policies or other forms of censorship, how do we distinguish falsehoods from truth?[2] Was Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, part of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK?[3] Did COVID-19 originate from a lab in Wuhan, China?[4] Were the 2020 U.S. presidential elections stolen.[5]

In principle, three types of responses to this dilemma are possible: hardcore government censorship (the Communist China model), soft censorship or content moderation (the Mark Zuckerberg model), and absolute free speech (the Elon Musk model).[6] Under the Chinese model, the government strictly monitors Internet access and blocks website content,[7] while the Zuckerberg or soft censorship approach consists of some combination of content moderation, deplatforming, shadow-banning, and other forms of speech suppression.[8] Free speech absolutism, by contrast, is the most permissive or laissez faire approach to the problem of disinformation: everyone is free to post whatever information they want as long as no laws are being violated.[9]

Alas, none of these “solutions” is capable of distinguishing truth from lies in a reliable or consistent manner. The main problem with the Chinese model—and with any type of content moderation approach more generally—is that one cannot always determine ahead of time which conspiracy theories or disputed news stories are true and which are false.[10] By the same token, with free speech absolutism there is no real disincentive for posting false information on the Internet, since the marginal cost of Internet speech is virtually costless.[11] Also, to the extent many Internet users are engaged in “motivated reasoning,”[12] free speech absolutism might exacerbate the problem of false information.

So, what is to be done? What if we promoted a “truth market model” instead of censorship, content moderation, or costless speech? As explained in the remainder of this Article, a truth market would operate as a retrodiction market and would specialize in conspiracy theories, fake news, urban legends, and other forms of disputed information. On this market, people could buy or sell belief contracts, allowing them to bet on the truth values of their favorite conspiracy theories. With enough bettors representing a wide variety of views, the price of each belief contract should reflect the truth value of the conspiracy theory being bet on.

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