Comment by asdfman123
4 days ago
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.