Knowing more

I was reading the following tweet:

Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2023

And its contrast with Elon’s “freedom of speach absolutist” approach. It’s easy to fall onto the trap of seeing him as an hypocrite. Or to further make comparasions with Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia:

What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan. https://t.co/tHkx1Wa06r

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) May 13, 2023

But there are numerous details that most people, myself included, aren’t privy to. Or Elon is just a coward and has simply capitulated.

This exchange is irrelevant of course. But it teaches a bigger lesson and something I have seen in people I admire. People that are able to analyze a situation without jumping to conclusions. They know it’s impossible to know all the details of a complex problem, but they are genuinely curious to know more. Other folk will grab the first floater their mind conjures and won’t let go. But by doing this, they hinder their ability to know more.

I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

- Plato