Category: Speech

Three of the five fastest runners were wearing our shoes: using the rules of speech to squeeze more information out of fewer words

Many years ago I saw an ad for a running shoe (maybe it was Reebok?) that said something like “At the New York Marathon, three of the five fastest runners were wearing our shoes.” I’m sure I’m not the first or last person to have realized that there’s more information there than it seems at first. For one thing, you can be sure that one of those three runners finished fifth: otherwise the ad would have said “three of the four fastest.” Also, it seems almost certain that the two fastest runners were not wearing the shoes, and indeed it probably wasn’t 1-3 or 2-3 either: “The two fastest” and “two of the three fastest” both seem better than “three of the top five.” The principle here is that if you’re trying to make the result sound as impressive as possible, an unintended consequence is that you’re revealing the upper limit.

The quote above, which came from Phil Price, a guest poster on Andrew Gelman’s must-read blog for statistics wonks, is an application of the pragmatics of speech.

Case Studies Speech

Speech, Consequences and The MAP

Post author By rjb9@cornell.edu
Post date May 5, 2021
No Comments on Speech, Consequences and The MAP

It’s not easy to limit speech wisely–you need a LAAP that fits your venue and goals. But it’s even harder to impose consequences for “crebit” (speech that violates the LAAP), while still doing so in a moral way (as laid out in The MAP), because while we limit speech, we punish people. Today’s example in the news:

Facebook and Trump are at a turning point in their long, tortured relationship

On Jan. 6, as an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump posted on Facebook that his supporters should “remember this day forever.”

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he said in a post.

In response, Facebook did something it had resisted for years: banned Trump’s account indefinitely for inciting violence. Twitter, YouTube and others followed suit.The ban is that culmination of a long-running and tortured relationship between the politician and the social media company, one that will hit a new inflection point on Wednesday. That’s when a Facebook-funded panel of experts will announce whether Facebook must reinstate Trump’s account. The impending decision by the Oversight Board, a less than one-year-old body that describes itself as an “experiment” in the regulation of online speech, could be the most consequential decision ever regarding free speech on social media, according to experts. It could also alter the way that social media companies treat public figures going forward.

I’m not going to say anything about Facebook’s LAAP–its policies regarding what can be said. Instead, I’ll talk only about the consequences of speech.

This particular case involves one of the most extreme consequences available to the host of an online venue: the banhammer. But it extends easily to more traditional venues. When is it appropriate to ban a colleague from future business meetings? To ban a student from a classroom? To ban someone from holding their own meeting in your venue (like calling a meeting or giving a public talk)?

Case Studies Diversity Equity Inclusion Friedman Doctrine Speech

Basecamp: A case study in governing speech

Post author By rjb9@cornell.edu
Post date May 4, 2021
No Comments on Basecamp: A case study in governing speech

Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff

After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to The Verge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave.

As I wrote in a prior post, speech is rarely free. It costs time, so when time is short, people impose limits on what can be said: speakers need to comply with a LAAP. Just like GAAP restricts what you can say in financial statements, a LAAP restricts what you can say in some particular venue (the L is for Local).

Speech

Governing Speech

Hardly a day goes by without some story of a person facing consequences for what they said. The stories that make the front pages are typically the ones that tap into partisan politics, creating a flurry of controversy that obscures a simple fact: we hold people accountable for their speech all the time. In most settings, from the board room to the classroom to the dining room, not governing speech would be far more remarkable than governing it. In this post, I’ll use moral accounting to explain why and how.

Diversity Equity Inclusion Psychology Speech

Why I Rarely Use Images

The DuckRabbit War — Images are Powerful & Unruly

It’s become pretty standard for blogs to start every post with a picture at the top. I’ve decided to do that only rarely on this site (this post being my first exception). The reason is quite simple–good images are typically too powerful and unruly for productive discussions of moral accounting.

Last week HBS Professor Mihir Desai led a workshop on his challenges teaching a case he has written, The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations. It starts like this: