Comment by asdfman123
4 days ago
I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.
> It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
You need a combination of both openness and intelligence to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. We don't need to debate whether or not I'm secretly a dolphin.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
A bad idea that is bad on its face is generally benign. Flat earthers have no political or institutional power.
There is more insidious kind of bad idea, like anti-vax philosophy. With these ideas, the layperson doesn't have direct access to comprehensive evidence, the necessary domain complexity exceeds common understanding, human tendency toward suspicious works against you, simple barometers like artificial=bad are useless or harmful, and evidence that seems to support them exists at the margin.
It should be clear that mass social media is causing these bad ideas to proliferate. On the other hard, trying to shut these ideas down through institutional or communal censorship seems to just give them a shot in the arm. Willingness to engage with their proponents shouldn't be seen as tacit support.
That kind of response is exactly why the Rationalists aren't taken seriously.
It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.
asdfman was the one moral grandstanding, I was just being rude
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