Freedom of Blather

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have been slowly reading through the pieces David Brooks recommends in his latest Sidney Awards piece.  He begins with this interview, How To Tell If You're Being Canceled.  To motivate that selection, Brooks precedes it with a discussion of the experience of James Flynn.  He wrote a book that defended free speech.  The book was pulled by his publisher.  I am going to take on these pieces in my post.  

As a basis for my critique, I'll make reference to a post from a few years ago, The Demagoguery of the Reasonable Conservative Commentator, which does a rather thorough deconstruction of a column by Bret Stephens. In that post, I refer to Stephens' column as a hatchet job and that is mainly from what he omits in his argument that I thought essential to include.  I often have this feeling of reading a hatchet job when I do read pieces by Conservative authors (which I do with less frequency as of late).  So, here I will put in the missing pieces.

First, let me consider self-publishing such as in this blog post.  It is an option available to anyone with an Internet connection.  The host will have some terms of service that must be abided by, but otherwise, the author can say whatever he wants - complete freedom.  This freedom doesn't imply there will be any readers.  But the message can certainly get out.  For somebody like me who has been at it for some time, perhaps the quality of past posts provides some indicator of the quality of the current post.  But maybe not.  The term blather, as I'm using it in my title, is meant to be writing or speech that has no mechanism of quality assurance to accompany it.  Freedom of blather is a condition of the world we live in.  (For those in a university setting where there are codes of conduct, which may even govern blather on platforms not associated with the university, one can post under an alias and bypass the regulation that way.)

Is blather, as I've described it in the previous paragraph, sufficient when considering speech?  If it is, then all of this is much ado about nothing.  Stop complaining.  Freedom of speech is alive and well. 

Second, let us consider the examples that were presented in these pieces.  The examples feature some organization with a strong reputation itself, the New York Times is one, Middlebury College is another, giving its imprimatur to a piece of writing by publishing it or likewise giving its imprimatur by inviting the person to give a campus lecture.  The imprimatur is an implicit statement about quality assurance.  In each case that implicit statement is made to the organization's constituency.  For the New York Times, that is readers.  For Middlebury College, that is students, faculty and staff, and alumni.  

In both cases, it seems that there is an obligation by the organization to provide the constituency with well argued ideas that the constituency would tend to resist.  If most readers of the New York Times are Liberal, these would be pieces written by Conservative authors and likewise for students at Middlebury.  In doing this, the role is something akin to a parent making their kids eat their vegetables at dinner.  It's good for them, even if they don't like the taste.  Does paternalism of this sort survive, even when the constituency is itself comprised of adults?  (I will leave the question of whether college students are children or adults unanswered here.) The quote that I began this piece with provides a basis for arguing that the type of adults we aspire for in these constituencies should be able to handle the variety without undo difficulty.

In the economics analysis of quality assurance of this sort, as described in Klein and Leffler's article, The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance, it is the repeat purchases of customers that provides incentive for a firm to produce high quality of an experience good (a good where the customer can't tell the quality at the time of purchase) even when there is a one-shot gain for the firm from producing low quality, because doing that is cheaper.  In that event we say the firm "cashes in" on its reputation.  Then the customers will "punish" the firm by shopping elsewhere in the future.  Likewise, what Jonathan Rauch refers to as the Cancel Culture, can be thought of as institutions not honoring their trust relationship with their constituencies and then being punished for that. 

So, what I find missing in the Rauch interview, and I suspect it is missing as well in Flynn's book, it is certainly missing in the Webpage that Brooks linked to, is a look at what the implicit promise is between such a high profile organization and its constituency and what would constitute a breach of this promise.  Not everyone has an Op-Ed in the New York Times and not everyone gets to give a public lecture at Middlebury.  So there surely are criteria for ruling people out as speakers or ruling their written work out for publication.  Were those criteria applied well in the cases cited or not?  Rauch bypasses this entirely:

The notion here is that emotional injury is a kind of harm like physical injury, and because it's a kind of harm it's a rights violation. The problem is this is a completely subjective standard, and it makes any form of criticism potentially subject to censorship and cancellation and lumps science into a human rights violation.

Having dismissed emotional injury, it appears the organizations are never in a position to violate the trust.   The blame can then fall only on those doing the canceling.   In my view, that is a poor analysis of the situation.

Let me make specific comments about the cases cited.  Students at Middlebury could very well learn about the ideas of Charles Murray by reading The Bell Curve or by watching one of the many videos of him on YouTube.  It is a fatuous argument to say he has to be invited to campus for students to hear that view.  In the case of the New York Times publishing the Op-Ed by Tom Cotton, a quite different argument can be made for not doing it, which does not deal with emotional injury.  The Times, like it or not, is part of the political landscape.  When a well known Conservative political figure publishes a piece in the Times, it lends legitimacy to the argument being made.  We are living in a wackadoodle world now where Trump does crazy things that should be strongly resisted.  Publishing Cotton's piece was a mild form of embrace of the Trump view.  I would hope that in the future we can return to where this sort of consideration is not relevant.  But it would be naive to think it is not relevant now. 

Third, the interview with Rauch makes no mention of sexual harassment nor of misogynistic speech.  I can't tell whether the interviewer, Nick Gillespie, deliberately steered the discussion away from that example or not.  Had it been included, there would be a clearer linkage between the emotional harm and the physical harm.  There is no doubt #MeToo is a form of the Cancel Culture.  But if you interviewed women, many would say that it has had a material impact on reducing sexual harassment.   Including this, as example, would weaken Rauch's argument.  It's lack of inclusion is bothersome, for that reason. 

Let me close by noting that over the years I've written a handful of posts that focus on freedom of speech.  In case the current post stimulates thinking in the reader, its status as blather notwithstanding, the reader might find some of these others interesting as well. 

• There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom
• What Does Free Speech Mean? Some Issues to Consider
• Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech - My Take
  

What Small Non-Profit Organizations Want From Santa

A few days ago a friend from junior high and high school posted a link to this piece about the charitable giving of MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. She is an incredibly wealthy woman.  Her charitable giving is unlike yours and mine, even if you are quite generous in this regard.  Our giving is a drop in the bucket, one that we hope fills up with the collective giving of others.  Her giving matters in itself.  It is perhaps 5 orders of magnitude greater than what we give.  The piece, as I read it, was meant at least in part as a critique about how most foundations give out their money, particularly that Scott doesn't require grant proposals and she gives out large amounts with no restrictions on how the money is spent.  The recipients are identified with verifiable information about prior performance. (More on that idea below.)  These are organizations that have proven themselves trustworthy. 

Linked within that piece is an essay that MacKenzie Scott wrote, which describes the giving and provides a list of the recipient organizations that have received funds this year.  In this post I'm going to offer a critique of that post.  Before I do, however, I want to note that it is her money she is giving away.  She can do with it what she'd like, with the proviso that for tax purposes the recipients must have the right status to receive charitable donations as given by the IRS.  So my critique can be thought of as imagining a hypothetical where the funds were public monies instead, or a different hypothetical where I'm offering consulting advice to MacKenzie Scott that she doesn't seem to be getting yet from her team of advisers, for how she might modify the giving in the future.  

For those who don't already know me, I'm retired now but was an academic economist for about half my career at the University of Illinois.  I made a switch in the mid 1990s to educational technology and was a high level administrator on campus in that area until I retired.  I stopped publishing in economics journals at around the time of the career switch, but I continue to write on economics and sometimes on economics and higher education, such as this recent very long blog post.  (It is not peer reviewed.  It reads as something of a combination between an opinion piece and an economic analysis, with its own hypothetical to consider.)  Also, when I led the SCALE project on campus, from summer 1996 to summer 2000, I ran an internal grant program to support novel ed tech projects and I was also able to make "officer grants" that were smaller but could be given without the approval of our review committee.  This is clearly not the same thing as what MacKenzie Scott is doing, but it does suggest I have some experience that may be relevant in considering the perspective of the donor.

Let me make one other caveat before beginning, by focusing on the various food banks that are on MacKenzie Scott's list.  Recently I've been making donations to a food bank in my area, which did not make the list.  Indeed, I searched the list for organizations from Illinois.  There were 5 of them, but no food banks.  I then searched Google Maps for food banks in Illinois.  There are a multitude of them and it seems by their names that there are several different providers.  I began to ask myself the question, should this sort of service be provided by a charity or should it instead be provided by government?  Is there a way that economic theory can answer this question or is it simply a matter of individual preference?  Let me note that the University of Illinois, considered a public university, gets its funding from a variety of sources.  When I started here back in 1980, the bulk of the funding came out of State of Illinois tax dollars.  That is no longer true.  So one might want to consider the historical record on food banks and their equivalent.  I have a vague notion (one I haven't tracked down) that soup kitchens during the Great Depression were funded, at least in part, by the New Deal.  And the War on Poverty from when LBJ was President, amplified on these sorts of services - via Food Stamps, for example.  Then, since Reagan, much of this was undone.  So one might argue that Liberals have one answer to this question while Conservative/Libertarians have a different answer.  On the supply of funds for such services, maybe that is far as we can get. 

But there is a different argument for the Liberal side that the social safety net is needed in a just society a la Rawls, and should be considered a public good.  Public goods should be provided by government.  In the absence of government provision, private charities can take up some of the slack.  But they may end up excluding a good segment of the population.  There is also a supply side argument which, frankly, I don't know enough about to argue except by waving my hands.  This is in regard to the geographic distribution of the food banks and their respective supply chains.  Is that, perhaps, inefficient because of wasteful duplication?  I want to observe there are two such food banks in the Champaign-Urbana area, which is what suggested the question to me.  After all, we are a college town, not a major urban area.  But maybe we are a large enough MSA to warrant two food banks.  (Wikipedia lists us as ranked 202 in the U.S.)  In any event, if MacKenzie Scott will be funding food banks in the future, some of those not yet on the list and perhaps repeat funding for some that already are on the list, then it behooves us to understand not just the good function of an individual food bank, but function of the entire system.  Could things be made more efficient?  Could hungry people who find access to be difficult at present be granted access by some other approach?   These questions deserve an answer from looking at the system as a whole. 

Now let me turn to my critique.  I will begin with a brief mention of some small non-profits I'm aware of, either because I've made donations to them at the urging of a friend, or because I've had some other interaction with them.

• Montgomery's Kids - helping kids who live in foster homes in Montgomery County, Maryland.
• Imerman Angels - helping those with cancer via personal connections to others who have been through the experience. 
• Fit to Recover - helping former addicts lead a healthy lifestyle through exercise.
• Spirit In Action - A micro-grant organization that makes some of its grants internationally.
• Universal Love Alliance Foundation - A U.S. charity that takes donations and funnels them to Universal Love Alliance, a human rights organization that focuses on the rights of marginalized people in Uganda.  (I work for both ULAF and ULA and will elaborate about that some below.)
• BlaqOut - An organization to support and advocate for Gay Black males. 

To complete the picture here, the first three on the list I know through friends.  Universal Love Alliance has received several grants from Spirit In Action.  BlaqOut provided funding for ULA to do a session about HIV prevention, testing, and treatment held at the ULA office.  Also, none of the organizations listed above made MacKenzie's Scott list.  Do they have even an epsilon probability of getting funded by her in the future? Or is that completely out of the question?  Finally, I want to note that I tried to list the organizations by "edginess," perhaps not a well defined concept though I hope the reader gets the point.  Would edginess matter in whether an organization receives funding or not?

There are two criteria that I want to challenge.  One is how MacKenzie Scott is managing risk, trying to make sure that each grant has a high chance of success.  For someone with limited funding, this may be right.  But Scott isn't in this situation.  If there is some positive correlation between risk and return, then minimizing risk does not produce the socially optimal solution.   Consider this piece from more than a decade ago about cancer research during the previous 40 years.  It argues that while progress has been made, the big breakthrough we've been hoping for has eluded us, because individual researchers have been too risk averse in their approach.  But taking on  risks means failure is more likely and in the presence of failure there are apt to be Monday morning quarterbacks who challenge the entire approach.  In order to take on such risk, the funders must be secure from such external pressure.  Turning away from cancer research and to organizations that MacKenzie Scott might support, edgy organizations that pioneer new ways of doing things and do so at small scale in some particular locale might produce a replicable model in the event they succeed.  In this case the benefit would be far beyond the benefit created in their locale.  This sort of thing should be encouraged, even if there are substantial risks at the get go. 

The other criterion I want to consider is focusing exclusively on American organizations whose beneficiaries are also in the U.S. or Puerto Rico.  Why not fund internationally, and particularly to organizations in Third-World countries, perhaps through U.S. based organizations that already do that, like Spirit In Action (or ULAF)?  Is this too a matter of managing risk?  Or is there some other consideration?

Having been involved with some scams in my ULA/ULAF work, I will concede that risk is there and perhaps is larger than with domestic non-profit organizations.  But the need is enormous.  Further there are large social/political factors that matter.  Taking Uganda as but one example, it is worthwhile to watch the documentary, God Loves Uganda, which provides depth on American Evangelical Christians coming to Uganda, largely to spread homophobia.  This needs a credible counter force.  Where will that come from?  Further the U.S. Department of Defense has given military aid to many African countries, Uganda included.  The funds are diverted from their intended purpose by President Musuveni and then used to quash the political opposition.  So, even if one's concerns are purely humanitarian, there is a need to show presence in Uganda; so that ordinary people there can have realistic hope of a better future. 

Now I want to turn to the human rights work that ULA does.  In 2018 ULA received a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Kampala to do workshops for religious leaders, teaching them about tolerance and acceptance of LGBTI people.  While this might seem a strange thing from a U.S. perspective, Uganda is a very religious country and these religious leaders have important positions in their respective communities, as they guide the views and beliefs of other community members.  The workshops were transformational and highly regarded by the Embassy members who sponsored the grant, some of whom attended for a day or two.  Near to the end of the first workshop, video interviews were done with some of the participants; each interview has just one participant, who described what was learned.  These videos are compelling to watch and speak to the strong impact of the workshop.  Unfortunately, they can't be publicly shared.  Doing so might put those who attended the workshop in danger.  So we have credible information about workshop effectiveness, but we can't broadcast it.  The best we can do is to rely on word of mouth, via the endorsement of sponsors.  And, I'm not sure why this is, but Embassy personnel seem to turnover fairly frequently, as these people are assigned to other U.S. Embassies elsewhere around the globe.   Based on this experience, my expectation is that others who do edgy type of work often can't share information about the effectiveness of the work, for similar reasons.  This makes it harder to get future funding.  Maybe the funders, such as MacKenzie Scott, should go looking for such projects, to counter these difficulties.  Or they should go looking for organizations like Spirit In Action, which through their own funding have identified useful projects and organizations that would otherwise defy identification.  

I want to make one other observation.  I am the ghostwriter for ULA.  I help them with grant proposals, training documents, and correspondence.  I described what I do at some length in this blog post.  The question for MacKenzie Scott is this:  Can the ghostwriting function be replicated, performed by others and incorporated by different organizations? I'm going to guess at the answer here.  It is not immediately replicable, but we can learn how to replicate it, so the service is provided by others and made available to organizations that have neither the skill nor the resources to devote to writing grants themselves.  One impediment that surely must be overcome happens when the ghostwriter has substantially more formal education than the leaders of the organization that employ the ghostwriter, which seems likely to me.  The ghostwriter must be a partner along with those leaders, but the ghostwriter can't act as a boss without the relationship breaking down. 

If that guess is right, then MacKenzie Scott could fund a variety of pilots that would be aimed at replication.  If some of those pilots are promising, the next step would be to scale up the approach, then "make a market" between the ghostwriters and organizations they support, by covering the full cost of the activity and developing a matching process that is effective.  Viewed in its entirety, this would be a kind of hedge.  It may be that other large foundations abandon their grant funding approach and embrace, instead, the approach MacKenzie Scott has already taken.  But if there is a lot of inertia, the old ways will stick.  The hedge then would accommodate that and yet make many organizations credible for grants from these foundations where in the past these organizations wouldn't have bothered to apply. 

Let me close.  As the Treasurer for ULAF, I dream for a very generous donor, or a small number of regular donors who make substantial contributions.  Now it's a constant struggle to assure adequate funding for ULA to operate, especially given all the uncertainty in Uganda at present.   On the other hand, I don't expect Santa to fulfill this wish soon.  But I hope he can leave a note - keep at it, good things come to those who wait.

Doing What Is Right - Following An Ethical Code Or Figuring It Out By Situational Analysis?

I accidentally deleted this post.  I found the editor version and it is republished below.  But the url of the post is different now.  Sorry about that.

-----

Fiction, whether a short story or a novel, a movie and a TV show as well, offers entertainment, certainly, but also gives the author's point of view, sometimes on issues where the characters must make ethical choices.  This author point of view stands in contrast to the point of view of the reader, who may not have thought about the underlying issues at all, or considered them only from a substantially different perspective.  We readers thus get a bonus from having a go at a work of fiction.  We get pleasure from the story, but we also get moral instruction of a kind that might actually reach us, as long as we embrace the story and consider it in reflection as well as reading it the first time through. 

As I've been a John le Carré fan for quite some time, typically reading one of his novels during the winter holidays, I can report that I was first drawn to them purely for the entertainment, but in the more recent ones I've read the ethical components were more evident to me.  Perhaps I've reached the age where I'm ready for these ethical lessons, or especially want something of this sort as a contrast to the tenor of our time, a way to keep a bit of idealism alive inside me when it is so easy to become completely jaded.  Given le Carré's recent passing, in the next day or two I do plan to read one of his older books for a second time, one that has gathered dust on my bookshelf.  And I do want to note that the ethical education in the stories is not about purity in behavior, but rather a way to navigate turbulence of actual life.

“Thematically, le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”

However, rather than use le Carré as my focus for discussing the question in the title of this post, I'm going to rely instead on Game of Thrones, which I've been watching recently as I do the treadmill in our basement.  Indeed, I've learned to turn on captions while doing this so the noise of the treadmill doesn't block the message that I should be hearing.  I recently finished going through all 8 seasons and am now going through the episodes again, to make further identification with the characters and the story line.  I actually want to focus only on one little bit of the plot.  Jon Snow's true identity is revealed near the end of season 7.  When Jon learns this he feels obligated to tell others, first Daenerys, then his "sisters," Sansa and Arya.  Daenerys pleads with Jon not to tell them, but he does what he feels he must.  He swears them to secrecy.  Yet Sansa doesn't keep the secret and that leads to many adverse consequences. This makes much of season 8 a tragedy.  So, one wonders, could the tragedy have been avoided if Jon exercised discretion rather feeling bound by some code?  

Before trying to answer this question, I'd like to make several asides.  First, I've been noodling on this post for several weeks, but not fully satisfied with what I had come up with.  I did come to an overall conclusion, which was based in part by my son Nathan, who had read all the books by George R.R. Martin, telling me that seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones went beyond the books.   David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who wrote the screenplays for TV series based on the books in the first six seasons, were the authors of that part of the story.  The conclusion is that they should be encouraged to write a few different versions of the end of season 7 and season 8, keeping the war with Ice King intact, but varying the story by whether Jon Snow ever learns his true identity or, if he does, whether he keeps it secret. I'm guessing there would be quite an audience for these alternative endings, even if they never were made into a TV show.  

Second, in the middle of the noodling it occurred to me that some of my old economics research is actually somewhat relevant to the question in the title. Thirty years ago I wrote a paper called Flexibility Versus Commitment in Strategic Trade Policy Under Uncertainty: A Model of Endogenous Policy Leadership.  (The Working Paper is dated April 1990 while the published version appeared in the Journal of International Economics the following year.)  Indeed, in the second quarter of my first year of graduate school, we learned about the debate in macroeconomics between those who favored rules for fiscal and monetary policy (Monetarists) and those who favored discretion (Keynesians).  So in other contexts, where the concern is not fundamentally ethical, though you could take economic performance as a kind of ethical imperative, I've been exposed to this type of question for quite a long time and find myself engaged with it.  I'm not sure whether others who watched Game of Thrones would be likewise engaged, but perhaps they would.  

Third, this bit about Jon Snow's true identity exposes a variety of potential inconsistencies in the story.  I'll mention only a couple here.  There may be others.  Daenerys views Jon Snow's true identity as giving him more of a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne than she has, because he is a male heir in the Targaryen bloodline and the society is quite sexist that way.  Yet Ned Stark doesn't consider Jon Snow as a possible successor to Robert Baratheon at all.  Indeed, in retrospect it seems Jon was sent to join the Night's Watch so the question would never come up.  But shouldn't Ned Stark have seen Jon as the rightful successor rather than Stannis Baratheon?  The other inconsistency is that Catelyn Stark never questioned the story that Jon Snow was Ned's bastard son.  But Ned was otherwise such a good and upstanding person.  Did he whore around nonetheless?  And Ned's sister is Jon's true mother.  Catelyn must have known approximately when she died, though she wouldn't have known that she died from complications in childbirth.  But might Catelyn have put two and two together, given what she did know?  For the story to work as it was told, it required that Catelyn, for whatever reason, didn't do this. 

The last aside comes from a lesson I learned the last time I taught a class for the Campus Honors Program, back in fall 2009.  The CHP students are among the best we have on campus.  Yet they asked me pointedly, more than once, to be very direct with my instructions and to avoid subtlety.  I gathered from this experience that they felt they weren't very good at reading between the lines and/or they had been badly burned from having made what they considered a minor mistake of this sort.  This point actually manifests in Game of Thrones repeatedly.  Once he became the King's Hand, Ned Stark is terrible at playing the game of palace intrigue.  He doesn't understand fully what is going on and he doesn't seem to care to devote his attention and energy to figuring this out.   The characters who are good at this game in the first season - Cersei, Lord Varys, Littlefinger, and Tyrion, are each ethically challenged, though some more than others. The story makes it seem that one truly understands what's going on only if one wants to practice deception.   I don't think that is true, but in the world created in Game of Thrones, the ones who practice deception surely need to have a good understanding of what's actually happening. 

Now I want to briefly sketch how a "what if analysis" might be done by the character of Jon Snow on whether to tell others about his true identity.  First, one might imagine playing out the story as if Bran never learned about Jon's identity nor conferred with Samwell that it was a birth done in wedlock, so Jon wasn't a bastard.  Without this as part of the plot line, the story still holds interest because of the evident rivalry between Sansa and Daenerys.  Would Jon have been able to resolve this in a way that was tolerable, if not amicable?  

Here is an interesting wrinkle that some viewers might have liked to see.  Sansa became good at the palace intrigue game by carefully observing others who were good at the game and, of course, by being the victim of many of those decisions without having the power to undo them herself.  This provided the strong motivation for her learning.  Jon recognized this in Sansa early on after his return to Winterfell. Could he have Sansa design an arrangement that Dany would accept which would also work for her. In this arrangement Jon would somehow be released from his being King of the North or be allowed to hold that title in absentia, while Jon would be living with Dany in King's Landing.  Sansa would be the Lady of Winterfell and the surrogate King of the North (or some other title to that effect).  The bending of the knew part might be moot because of the great distance between Winterfell and King's Landing. One would think a peace along these lines would be possible.

There is a different issue in this scenario that would have to be confronted.  Daenerys' downfall was an example of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely.  In this case, substitute feeling betrayed for corrupting.  Of course, everyone was betrayed by Cersei, who didn't send her troops to fight the Ice King. That sense of betrayal was still there.  But Daenerys' sense of betrayal was so much stronger in the version that aired, because after Jon Snow's secret was made known to certain characters, they betrayed Daenerys, Lord Varys, certainly, Tyrion for telling Lord Varys, and Jon Snow too, both for telling Sansa though Dany had requested not too, and for no longer loving her physically, as it became apparent that Dany was Jon's aunt and intimate relations between close relatives was unseemly.  With all this betrayal, Daenerys felt a rage that couldn't be contained and blocked her good judgement.  It made her a fierce opponent in fighting the war against Cersei's forces, but it made her unsuitable to rule. If, instead, none of the other betrayals had occurred, would Daenerys then have been able to thread the needle, having enough rage to still win the war but then, with that accomplished, being able to pull back and show compassion for the vanquished as long as they would lay down their swords.  Two possible story lines emerge depending on whether the needle gets threaded or not.

In the next scenario, Jon does learn about his identity, but he decides to sit on this information rather than tell those people he felt obligated to tell in the show as it aired.  This would keep the secret, as Bran and Samwell wouldn't tell anyone else.  In some ways, it would play out the same as in the case where there was no secret to reveal. The big issue in this case is Dany being Jon's aunt, and how he would deal with that fact.  Two alternatives are first, that once Jon verified Dany couldn't bear children, her being his aunt pretty much becomes immaterial, as inbreeding wouldn't happen. The other is that the possibility of a child can't be ruled out, so Jon figures out a way where he wouldn't sleep with Dany thereafter.  As King in the North, he would return to Winterfell after the war while Dany would stay at King's Landing.  Could this be pulled off so that he avoided situations to sleep with Dany both before before the big battle and after?  Again there are two possible story lines.  In the one where it doesn't work out well, Dany starts to question whether Jon loves her, but she won't have a good reason for why he doesn't. This could lead to a personal tragedy for them, without it leading to the large tragedy for all the resident of King's Landing.

That last scenario I'll consider here is where Jon obeys Dany's wish and tells nobody else but her.  They then would have it out about the aunt thing.  (It is odd to me that it was never discussed between them and it didn't seem to bother Dany at all.) Somehow they work through a mutual understanding, even if that is laden with tears and emotional pain.  

I do have this feeling that the bending of the knee, as a symbol, could be modified if Jon was at Dany's side.  She could be more generous then and treat those in leadership of the other kingdoms as partners rather than as subordinates. The show was long on tragic outcomes, which for pure entertainment might be right.  But as an approach to good management, the purely traditional approach was lacking.  Further, the external threats to the seven kingdoms seemed to have been eradicated, at least for the time being.  Once the war with Cersei was won, this appeared to be a time where all should get along.  If that was obvious to the viewers, why wasn't it obvious to the characters in the show.