I recently watched the two controversial Joe Rogan episodes. Frankly, what I heard on those episodes was that out of the norm for current political discourse. I wasn't in anything close to hundred percent agreement with those guests had to say, of course.

I would say the controversial guests did make good points. I would say the discussion was about 50% reasonable points (many of which haven't been discussed very much elsewhere) and about 50% crackpottery.

I think censorship is counterproductive. When a large portion of the population is sympathetic to what your opponents say, you can't censor your way to public consensus and maintain public trust.

And even if you could enforce the correct viewpoint on the public, censorship is fundamentally a Faustian bargain where society is creating extremely dangerous infrastructure of mass surveillance and social control. The type of centralized authority and centralized infrastructure that is required to force the censorship that we've seen recently on the Internet is intrinsically dangerous. It's an extreme act of hubris to think that if you give the right people that type of power, you'll get an utopia.

Another issue of widespread censorship is that suppressing discussion affects moderate speakers more than the extremists. Basically, when you're an extreme critic of policy you're going to get the ire of people no matter what you do. But when you're more moderate, people are going to tolerate you as long as you shut up on the parts where you disagree with the party line.

And I think that there is a dynamic where people hear cognizant points from these speakers and when the discussion has been suppressed, they often first hear those cognizant points from the controversial people.

This gives a lot of credibility to the somewhat eccentric crackpots even when they are full of shit. I think that's why a lot of people are interested in hearing these controversial podcasts, podcasts like Joe Rogan's podcast are one of the rare places that you can hear actual discussion of some of these issues, instead of parroting of a party line is in many ways incoherent, arbitrary and rapidly changing.

I don't think anyone thinks that it's the best possible source of commentary, I think a lot of people do think it's the only place where you won't hear commentary that's internally lockstep of everyone else.

And the whole idea of building public trust by censorship and basically telling people that they're not allowed to have opinions on policies that are affecting their lives, is self-effacing fundamentally policymakers taking this approach will necessarily offend a large portion of the population and they will degrade public trust even more. It creates an adversarial relationship between policymakers and the public. And it creates a world where policymakers are too used to barking orders at the population, instead of finding ways to build public trust. This also ignores the vast variety of perspectives that are actually relevant to coming up with the best policy response. Different Americans are affected by the policies in different ways, policy elites will have their own biases and interests that are different than those of the typical American. This means that tight control over policy discussions will shut out many perspectives in a way that goes far beyond enforcing scientific objectivity or truth.

I also think that as a whole US coronavirus policy has been highly corrupted by the fact that policymakers and media outlets who decided to treat China's response as the objectively ideal response, or at least a baseline for one response should look like, instead of the policy responses of Asian democracies like Taiwan or South Korea. The implication of this has been that US policymakers and media outlets have been acting like leaders from a communist dictatorship and using measures that would only reasonably be sustainable in an authoritarian state, instead of coming up with measures that would be reasonable for a pluralistic democracy.