Jun 01 2023 91 mins
Today I had the pleasure to have a conversation with Harvey Silverglate, he is an American attorney, author, and civil liberties advocate. He is best known for his work in defending individual rights and freedom of speech. Silverglate has been involved in numerous high-profile cases and has written extensively on issues related to civil liberties and the criminal justice system.
He co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 1999, an organization dedicated to protecting free speech and due process rights.
He has also written several books, including Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse and The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses.
We talked about The similarities between free speech, the scientific method and traditional liberal values, How the decentralized marketplace of ideas is better at finding truth than centralized power, How interests are aligned in the long term, How intolerance to opposing ideas fuels censorship, The impossibility of China overcoming the US as the world's superpower due to the internal corruptness of its system, The primacy of freedom over material abundance even if they are complementary, The need for the smallest units to be subjected to a process of natural selection so that bigger ones can prevail as in ‘‘The purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die instead of us’’, How dogmatism forced Larry Summers to resign his position as president from harvard, Harvey’s marriage advice, That a Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his actions, How administrators drain colleagues' resources, The counter productive and racist nature of affirmative action, The role of freedom of speech in allowing non-mainstream opinions to be voiced, Meritocracy, And how we have nothing apart from dialogue as an alternative to violence.