I can say that tolerance requires a capability for abstraction that is not intuitive to everyone. When we take things personally or respond emotionally, it is because we have reached the limit of our ability to reason about them abstractly. An example would be someone attached to a solution to a problem at work. They reach for emotional tools when they run out of ability to reason about it as categories or as objects. Some people don't bother with abstract reason at all and just act with whatever tools on whatever makes them central. The most seductive aspect of a lot of current political discourse is that it elevates and centers people with limited cognitive ability and offers them redemption and exaltation in exchange for channeling their smaller urges like envy and malice. It's an ancient hustle, imo.
Politically and physically, it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts. Enjoy the ride. The whole thing is quite a spectacle.
I don't know if this is quite what you mean, but I've had more than one discussion (and seen many more online on twitter, reddit) that goes something like:
>Alice: say, for the sake of argument, that A is true
>Bob: But A isn't true?
>Alice: Whether A is true or not is a different question. For the purposes of our conversation (that we're talking about the consequences of A being true), it is.
>Bob: But... A isn't true.
>Alice: I give up!
>Bob: I win!
For Bob, it seems to be completely impossible to talk "stipulatively".
It's equal parts frustrating and baffling to me that some people just can't understand the concept of talking about logical conclusions from some starting point independently from the veracity of that starting point, and I'd agree it's one of the big issues with (online) discourse today.
I've been, and will probably continue to be, on both sides of this. The problem is that not every "A" deserves counterfactual analysis for both parties 100% of the time. As a silly nonpolitical example, imagine if A is "the earth is flat". I would be Bob in that example, because, well... I am not really willing to spend the time and effort required to debate the topic seriously every time it comes up, and I think most people are similar in this respect. It's not about cognitive ability, it's just that most people don't see the point of engaging in every conversation that's based on premises that are manifestly untrue to them.
You are assuming that you are always aware of when you might be wrong. In other words, your judgement on when a counterfactual deserves to be entertained is itself fallible, and is most likely to be wrong when you have emotional commitments around the issue that are preventing you from reasoning well. By refusing to follow a line of reasoning, you are placing yourself beyond the ability to be reasoned with.
I imagine you might dispute that that ever happens to you, and it may be that you are so thoroughly rational that it doesn't. But let me suggest a counterfactual for you: imagine you are not as rational as all that. How would you know? You would never engage in the conversations which would demonstrate this. So, as a general principle, maybe you should not assume that you are.
It's best to be aware of both. Yes, you may meet trolls and hardcore believers of some really stupid things, but if you always assume that anyone who disagrees with you is one of such people, you're bound to end up as one of them yourself.
EDIT:
Perhaps this is another skill, related to counterfactual analysis: being able to consider you're wrong just a tiny bit, even if you're certain you're right, just to reaffirm yourself. Holding the two conflicting states in your mind, in parallel, for however brief a moment. Kind of like speculative execution. Doesn't cost much if the other party is an obvious troll, but can pay off handsomely if you somehow ended up with a strong belief based on badly flawed assumptions.
> but if you always assume that anyone who disagrees with you is one of such people
That’s a strawman. Not being willing to entertain every prospective interlocutor with (as in the upthread poster’s specific example) flat-earth theories is not the same as assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a hardcore believer of some really stupid thing.
Perhaps so. However, I'm happy to let my point stand as a thing to consider when weighing those judgements. Refusing to engage in thought experiments, in my experience, is more often the product of a closed mind than a busy one.
Being closed minded is a justifiable defense in some circumstances. The ability to consider counter-factuals is often (and perhaps inherently) leakly. I mean, that once someone has entertained an idea, and relied on it to think about secondary and tertiary effects, they’re more likely to believe the premise… even if they have no additional information about the accuracy the initial premise. It’s an effective form of manipulation / gaslighting.
Lol, it is not gaslighting/manipulation. Are you really so unable to resist the temptation to believe an idea that you must choose not to even consider it?
Proof by contradiction[1] has quite a number of important results. We shouldn't denigrate that machinery.
"""
G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
"""
That really depends on the context. I can think of many discussions in which "imagine the Earth is actually flat" would be an interesting counterfactual and a legitimate start of a useful line of reasoning.
But even if (imagine...) I was dealing with a flat-earther, I'd probably listen just to respect someone being able to work with counterfactuals in the first place. There may be something interesting on the other end, perhaps something I could help them rethink. And, if it was ultimately a waste, and then if I kept hitting on "imagine Earth is flat" people, I'd probably just short-circuit my response to "Is this about argument $X for idea $Y? I've heard it before many times, it doesn't work because $Z.".
But, funny thing, I don't think I've ever met a person capable of discussing counterfactuals who also strongly believed in something completely stupid. In practice, being able to work with counterfactuals during conversations - particularly assuming, for a moment, something they disagree with - has been an effective litmus test for me. If they can handle it, we'll have a productive conversation. If they can't, there's no point in talking to them.
> The problem is that not every "A" deserves counterfactual analysis for both parties 100% of the time.
Maybe a counterfactual analysis is not the point, but it's the first step to making some other relevant point, say by formal analogy. You shouldn't shoot down an argument before it even starts. Judge the actual argument when it's presented.
I think the main problem raised by your statement is that people often don't have a sense of why they are talking or what the conversation is about. This is especially true on the internet, or as far as I can tell people are often just posting the first thing that comes into their mind. Speaking stipulatively may or may not be relevant, and that relevance depends on the subject and purpose at hand
Or the issue is you can't find a polite way to communicate it at that point. Like in the flat earth case, "your premise is so insane that I don't want to waste another second of my life debating it with you" would... not go over well - neither with the second party, nor with the moderators of the forum facilitating it.
I agree that direct debate is a waste of time in these situations, and I as understand, research shows only makes the flat-earther more adamant. In situations like this, I focus on trying to understand what the emotional underlying driver is that moves people to support these kinds of views and see if I can engage with that. Humans are not primarily logical. Our views are heavily driven by need for acceptance by our community or to rationalize our uniqueness/importance, both which relate back to our survival
> I focus on trying to understand what the emotional underlying driver is that moves people to support these kinds of views and see if I can engage with that. Humans are not primarily logical.
Now imagine if A was "you committed this crime yesterday". There are so many reasons beyond "acting emotionally" over why perfectly logical people wouldn't entertain a premise like that.
> Now imagine if A was "you committed this crime yesterday". There are so many reasons beyond "acting emotionally" over why perfectly logical people wouldn't entertain a premise like that.
You'd have to have some pretty non-standard circumstances. I have no problem entertaining such counterfactual in a normal discussion. I'd only squirm if there was a risk the conversation would be used against me - e.g. quoted by a journalist, a law enforcement officer, or some crazy rando on Twitter, with the fact that it was a hypothetical conveniently omitted.
I think you've nailed exactly why most people who "believe" in flat earth theories do so. They get some sort of emotional benefit from it that is not being met otherwise, which in my experience is a sense of community, belonging, or purpose.
Honestly.. yeah. That situation is so ridiculous that I can’t give a serious answer. I’d need to spend hours interrogating a flat earth believer just to figure out how to suspend my own disbelief. Question 1: how do you think Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the planet?
Might as well ask me “imagine gorgokanakawommbledorks were a real thing, who would have motivation to hide it?” WTF is a gorgokanakawommbledork and what does it have to do with a civilization that never even acknowledged them?
I think you are missing some easy answers for that prompt like “no one”. You don’t have to accept their whole constellation of beliefs to accept an arbitrary statement for the purpose of discussion. Hell I think it allows you to make a stronger point - “even if I agreed with you on some of your priors I still think your conclusions are flawed”.
Frankly though from your responses I think your real position is more that you are particularly weary of this topic and/or don’t feel the need to retread topics with new people if previous conversations have been unproductive.
> Frankly though from your responses I think your real position is more that you are particularly weary of this topic
I actually haven't had many interactions with flat earthers but the answers tend to follow one of two patterns: giant conspiracy in history or giant conspiracy in physics.
I feel like the former can be dismissed out of hand because the provenance of any evidence they present is suspect - if they had the qualifications to even know why provenance is important, they probably wouldn't be flat earthers [1]. Conspiratorial thinking is so popular now that you're right, I just don't have the energy to engage (which makes for some boring Thanksgiving dinners, thank god)
The other response is far more rare and interesting... and most people who hold this view are either trolls or come back around to reason really fast. The only time I've ever run across this kind of flat earther, all it took was to remind them that one of their family members - sitting right next to them in a permanent state of cringe - circumnavigated the globe in their sailboat.
And sure, I think your view point is fair, but I also think you muddied the top level waters a little because the topic at hand was the ability to reason abstractly past a point of contention and your point seems to be that there are signals where you don’t believe the juice is worth the squeeze. Which, yeah, fair.
To relay a related experience I once listened to this guys MLM pitch. The things that seemed to reach this guy the most were conversation points past ‘is there any indication this works that survives a cursory inspection’, like ‘given that this is good and everyone should do it, what happens to the half of humanity that joins and has no one to recruit?’.
>> The only time I've ever run across this kind of flat earther, all it took was to remind them that one of their family members - sitting right next to them in a permanent state of cringe - circumnavigated the globe in their sailboat.
Normally those cycles would peter out locally, but with the internet I think we may have a self-sustaining social contagion.
I remember a decade ago when r/conspiracy was all about Area 51, Orwellian surveillance, and the X-Files born from the cultural zeitgeist of the 90s. Now it's a bunch of closet pedophiles trying to distract us with QAnon MAGA bullshit.
That's fair, but I think there's a clear rule to be applied based on functional and practical considerations, which is to acknowledge that widely held assumptions must be debated in good faith. To take a political example, the majority of people in the world assume that marital unions (which are a feature of virtually every human society) exist primarily for the purpose of birthing and raising children. You can disagree with that premise, you can point out the other areas where society has agreed to deviate from that premise, you can point out the cruel ramifications of that rule in certain cases, etc. But you can't declare that premise ideologically and morally off-limits. Because you can't as a practical matter achieve a functional society by treating a wildly held belief as outside the scope of good faith debate.
The whole point is that it's only "obvious" now in hindsight that slavery is wrong. Now that our society treats that as an axiom, you can say, well, there are some things that are obviously just axiomatically wrong, let's ban those things. But if you were back in the 18th century it wouldn't have been an axiom.
"All slaves must be set free" was exactly as true in 1750 and it is in 2022. This isn't a historical or sociological analysis; it's moral. If you built a time machine and traveled back to 1750, you could not morally entertain the then-popular norm of slavery.
I am sincerely curious: are you able to provide a criterion or two that would allow me to make objective moral decisions (the possibility of which I think you are postulating)? How do I know slavery is immoral, besides that it is considered immoral in the given cultural context? I am sure an Athenian gentleman 3rd century BC didn't think that way; Aristotle surely didn't - and he spent a lifetime on systematic reasoning, ethics incuded.
I think there's actually a big difference between morality and truth, and what you're saying applies to truth and not morality. If you went around telling people about germ theory, you could say, I'm objectively right and you're objectively wrong, here's the proof. The truth is the truth; it's an invariant. It's arrived at through discovery and investigation. Morality is about people fighting to get what they want. The "right answer" is arrived at through conflict and seeing who wins. We live in a society where "slavery is bad" won.
When you say we should ban debate of slavery because it's settled, what you're in effect saying is that society has made a decision and you would like that decision to be final. So would I. But there's nothing final about it. It's not like God has spoken on the matter. Deciding to ban further appeal of the matter is just moral entrepreneurship, not some absolute right answer.
No you couldn't say that about slavery! Because only a small privileged group was able to have slaves. On the other hand a majority of people gets married or live in a relationship. What a weird comparison you made comparing marriage to slavery.
I'm obviously not comparing marriage to slavery. I'm observing that at various times, ideas that we today absolutely foreclose on were live debates, or even prevailing norms. In the early 18th century, if you'd gone around saying that all slaves must immediately be freed, and the matter wasn't up for discussion, you'd had been right. But Rayiner's logic could be turned against what you were saying, too.
Just because 51% of people believe something, that doesn't mean we're bound to respect it. If that was true, Wikipedia would be infallible.
Basically you don't want to have a discussion about something because 50%+ people were wrong about something at some point in history. And you give an example of slavery when rayiner was making a concrete point about marriage. Would ever post on a climate change thread about how once the majority of scientist believed earth was the center of the Universe and were wrong and therefore because majority of scientist was wrong once they are also wrong about the climate change today?
Hence my caveat regarding that “functional” and “practical” considerations. If maintaining a functioning social order isn’t the goal, and a bloody civil war is acceptable in pursuit moral ends, then obviously my point doesn’t apply.
No, of course that's not true. You just haven't set up a coherent classification here. It's easy to come up with comparably black-and-white issues where we did not in fact have to tear down society to resolve them. I can think of 3 off the top of my head.
All of those issues ripped tears in our society when they were decided by force (court orders being a form of force, backed by the threat of men with guns) instead of building consensus. It’s a civil war on the installment plan. It’s notable that Europe mostly handled those same issues by consensus and is much less internally polarized as a result.
Because there’s a large group of people in our society who are aligned along that same “can’t trust science/politicians/MSM” axis. Gaining an understanding of, and empathy for, those people will serve you well and is important for society. Talking with them about why they think what they think is a good way to do that.
I've had your exact discussion both online and in person, You aren't alone.
Sometimes online, I suspect it's insincere. They know why you are doing the hypothetical, it hurts their position, so instead of engaging with it they become absolutists.
Other times, though (especially easy to see in person) it is VERY real. They simply are not capable of dealing with hypotheticals.
Where that came up the most for me was when tutoring math in college. The abstract nature of math past algebra was just something some people could not grok. They wanted the hard and fast facts. "Ask me to do 7 * 5 and I'll have that answer in an instant, don't ask me riddles about x * 5 = 35".
Alice need to adapt to Bob's perception if she wants him to listen.
"If we lived in a completely imaginary world where A were true" could address Bob's sensibilities a bit better.
First make yourself heard, then make your point. Otherwise your point falls on deaf ears. This takes some ability to listen and tailor your arguments to fit your audience.
>Bob: False premises lead to absurd conclusions. Therefore your demand that I agree to a "hypothetical" that we both know is false, is an attempt to pull a fast one somehow.
Bob: And what are you trying to go with your argument?
Alice: A proof by contradiction
Bob: A proof by contradiction assumes not(X), shows that it leads to a contradiction, therefore proving not(X) is false, and X is true. In this case assuming P to perform proof by contradiction means you will prove P is False. If that's all you want to do, there is no need as I am already in agreement that P is false.
The Alices I speak to are rarely interested in this. It's usually an attempt to sneak in a plank of an argument to support some repugnant conclusion, without which plank said conclusion seems suspiciously like bigotry or a just-so story. Trickle-down economics, racial superiority, social spending, flat earthism, the divine right of kings, debt-to-GDP ratio-hacking, systemd, etc etc
This is where Bob claims to be an expert on Alice's motives (the motives that all people with her opinion secretly have), refuses to further participate in any discussions that allow Alice to contribute, and accuses anyone else who allows Alice to participate of carrying water for trickle-down economics, racial superiority, social spending, flat earthism, the divine right of kings, debt-to-GDP ratio-hacking, systemd, etc etc.
Refusing to bow down to false premises is not claiming to be an expert on anyone's motives, but I sure think insisting that false premises disguised as hypotheticals are meaningful contributions to support any conclusion is wrong as hell. That's right, I said it -- defending a conclusion based on made-up facts is wrong as hell. Yes, I'm willing to die on this hill, I guess I'm just old-fashioned in my desire to discuss reality...
Do either of those rest on "defending a conclusion based on made-up facts"? I don't think, say, proofs-by-contradiction are really comparable to the bad-faith "let's say, hypothetically" argumentative style under discussion.
>Are you afraid you'll be forced to accept their conclusion?
As per the great-great-grandparent post [0], the conclusion under discussion is based on a premise they just made up and that both speakers "know is wrong". Why should I be afraid I'll be forced to accept their conclusion? Is that a property of arguments using made-up premises? I was under the impression that such arguments were bullshit.
Don't ask me, you're the one who posed the concern that they may trying to stealthily introduce a repugnant idea. I was asking why you would need to be concerned. I assumed you were suggesting it was a reason not to engage in counterfactual arguments. From your response I guess it was just a non sequeter.
Why shouldn't I ask you? You're the one who asked me whether I was afraid I'd be forced to accept some repugnant conclusion based on false premises. Who else could I ask but you?
I think I've been pretty clear in my desire to not engage in bullshit arguments in which people are allowed to make up premises; you're the one who framed it as a "concern" I might be having. It seemed like you were initially suggesting that that was unreasonable. From your response I guess it was just a non sequitur.
Admitting that you're engaging in a bullshit argument takes a big person, but it takes an even bigger person to not bother with spellcheck when it's right there on the computer you're using to make posts.
The problem with doing this in an adversarial online setting is that it's often used as a trick to make someone admit to some position that's 'close' to the original, and then spin that as agreeing to the original position.
Especially on twitter where post length forces shortcuts which are very easy to maliciously leverage.
In some cases if the assumption is what's being argued itself doing this is an attempt at manipulation, not genuine discussion.
That's a nice factoid, but if you read a little further in the logic book you would learn it's quite useful. Proving implications, such a B -> C can be an important step in themselves. It's also essential for proofs by contradiction and proofs of impossibility.
Even if you were right, that particular definition of implication is just convention. There are other logical systems and views that don't interpret it that way.
If Bob had heard the phrase before, maybe he'd say "I don't deal with hypotheticals". If I were Alice, that would make me see Bob as smart as an amoeba, because even animals deal with "What if" scenarios...
This is the basis of the (apocryphal?) idea developed in the SAS of having a cup of tea. It's the same idea as "delay your reaction to a negative stimuli as long as possible."
Political disagreements have been structured in our society along dialectics of power and, as such, are designed to attack and malign the very identity of the parties who disagree. This triggers the social isolation / anxiety response and can amount to amygdala hijacking, and then people lose their cool.
It helps a lot to keep in mind that these responses have been exquisitely engineered via social media, cable news, etc. and that the person in front of you (or even online) is likely not your true enemy and you probably have more shared interests than you might think.
Apparently one of SAS author Andy McNab's top tips. Functionally equivalent to Douglas Adams' "Don't Panic!"
"If you stop, you calm down and sort yourself out. In the jungle in the SAS, if you were lost, you stopped, made a brew [cup of tea], worked out where you were and worked out where you needed to go. It’s desperate panic that gets people into really big trouble."
Not OP, but dialectics not dialects. Here's how I interpret it:
The phrase dialectics of power is framing the concept that a lot of a political discourse is centered around arguments of who has power, and who doesn't.
Its superficial arguing. "Oh no, X has won the house that means the future of Y is in peril!" instead of discussion around why X won the house or why idea Y is something we want in our future.
Much of this line of thinking is about making sweeping assumptions about policies, and what groups of people/political organizations believe and support.
Talking in the context of power relations seems inherently combative a form of discourse. If you feel you're up against someone with a differing viewpoint on a topic and it's so because of their different power vantage, you are going to what: either fight argumentatively or lecture to the person in front of you that they're naughty and need to see it. It doesn't seem productive.
As it plays out in the US, the discussions are framed in terms of two-sided issues, where the only real option is to choose one of those sides: Republican vs. Democrat, Capitalism vs. Socialism, Pro-Vax vs. Anti-Vax, etc.
It's almost taboo to suggest that these enforced dichotomies aren't really helping anyone but that they do seem remarkably well-suited to preserving the status quo.
> [...] it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts.
Quite so, at least empirically speaking (in my own observations, anyway).
I guess a natural follow up would be, is there any feasible external (to such a group) or general (trans-group) impetus to either (a) increase abstract reasoning or (b) avoid "baser" framing, assuming that's not intrinsically pointless? Obviously with e.g. politics, this is the goal of many folks (to incite emotionally rather than engage rationally, or to mask emotion as rationality), but I wonder how feasible it is to increase rational discussion (through abstraction, or other means) about rational topics for the sake of productive discourse.
It seems that encouraging this would have to start at a very young age, in elementary school. Parents may not have the capability (cognitive ability) or time to instill this kind of thinking in their kids.
However, school is usually a place where authority, hierarchy, and group-think is reinforced rather than questioned. I can't see schools encouraging kids to do thought experiments like "Let's say your parents don't like it that a boy wants to have a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend. Instead of you just believing whatever your parents say, let's talk about why they believe that, how they might be getting it wrong, and why it's okay if you don't agree with them." Actually, some schools are trying that, with the predictable backlash from parents and others in the local community.
> how they might be getting it wrong, and why it's okay if you don't agree with them
That's a pretty manipulative way you phrased it here. I'd agree with your example, if you phrased it as "if they could be getting it wrong, and why it's okay if you don't agree with them in that case". I.e. for a honest thought experiment, let's not sneak in the preferred answer in the phrasing, even if we both agree on what the preferred answer is.
> Actually, some schools are trying that, with the predictable backlash from parents and others in the local community.
That's the unfortunate effect of... I'm not sure exactly what. I initially wanted to say "democracy plus media", but perhaps a better way is just... "transparency". The context of this subthread contains, quoting from the top-level post:
> it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts
In case of schools, as you correctly note, when a school attempts - or even discusses - something like it, they'll get a backlash from whichever side feels threatened in a particular case. There's no room for trying and observing anymore, because it's a standard aspect of our society to run disagreements through broadcast media at one level above the actual parties involved. E.g. in school case, it'll run the gossip mill and if that doesn't help, someone will alert the local journalist. For larger issues, it'll hit national news. Etc.
For one if they recognize that they are getting repeatedly ripped off, even the dimmest bulb may draw a conclusion eventually that as great as a feeling the idea of getting rich off of the traffic of the Brooklyn Bridge may be, that guy selling it is scamming you.
Fanatics are remarkably reality resistant but sustaining it within a group is more difficult and expensive in abstract ways, such as worse ability to recruit.
There’s a theory that human reasoning evolved in such a way that humans collectively don’t search for the truth or the correct decision but rather for the most convincing reason. Whether or not this true it does appear to be how groups of humans act.
In every language with a finite number of words there must be words that are not definable in terms of simpler words/concepts. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon such a word with “truth”. I think it is obvious what I meant to most people.
The signs of neurodegeneration like Alzheimer's include irritability and impulsivity, which intuitively supports this. It's like a failure of higher cognitive functions, so the basal emotions take over. Alternatively, it could just be a failure to regulate emotions.
The research in this link isn't about whether or not people's behavior becomes emotional when encountering disagreement. But it's certainly interesting that takeaway is the top comment here.
>I can say that tolerance requires a capability for abstraction that is not intuitive to everyone
there's some pretty interesting research related to this done with criminals. At lower levels of IQ they aren't capable of hypotheticals like "how do you think the person felt when you robbed them" or "how do you think the mother of the person you killed felt about that". Which raises the question of how much they can even be held accountable for their actions to some degree
Empathy requires a certain level of intelligence, children don't have the cognitive ability for it until they are a few years old and there are many "normal" adults walking around with IQ in a similar range as those children. High IQ psychopaths are interesting because they seem to be able to overrule most criminal behavior despite also not feeling empathy, they probably just run some sort of cost-benefit analysis that simulates empathy
Nobody is saying they have to do it blindly, given access to the internet they can learn as much as they want about the theory of why something is illegal. I don’t fully understand how clots are formed despite having read a number of papers about it, but I know I’m supposed to apply pressure to a cut.
Do you have any evidence for that? I’d be interested in reading serious papers that explain how reason is an accident as opposed to the point. Also that we are “emotional first and foremost”. I have found that people are generally emotional in situations where reason has failed them, implying that we are reasoning beings first.
> When we take things personally or respond emotionally, it is because we have reached the limit of our ability to reason about them abstractly.
> Politically and physically, it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts.
But this is not purely a matter of raw, inherent intellectual potential. Academics are notorious for having a history of rationalizing power or depravity of all kinds. The tyrannies of communism, for example, were the product of intellectuals who exploited the vices of the "proletariat" as a cudgel against their opponents. Ultimately, these intellectuals were fools because they either actually believed the absurdity of communism or they exploited a communism they didn't actually believe to gain power for themselves and through especially wicked deeds, and all evil is, after all, foolish and opposed to reason. I object to the notion that the more intellectual potential you have, the less evil you are just because you have a greater potential for intelligence. You can choose to be unwise for emotional and vicious reasons, thus thwarting the exercise of reason when it leads you some place you cannot handle.
I'll just say, this doesn't necessarily line up with my experience. The extremely intelligent people I know are every bit as likely to be politically intolerant as the less-intelligent people I know. They just have different reasons (overconfidence in their own logic/education, in their mental modeling, in the stupidity of the other side, etc)
Would be curious to see a study where one high-IQ group is shown a fictional study with this conclusion and one isn't
N=2408 members of the Danish military or mechanical Turk participants, in a paper with one citation but a huge amount of retweets, in the time of the replication crisis. How is this paper credible?
In the replication crisis, psychology and sociology papers replicated about 30-35% of the time IIRC. In your experience, do random internet comments have a higher or lower chance of being true?
As a random internet commenter, I think I face a bit of a paradox when answering this question. Do you, a random internet commenter, think this is a good paper? Should I believe you and the other people here? Should I look at how many upvotes this has on HN and see it as a sign of credibility, when all the upvotes come from random internet people?
I think evaluating credibility by placing a paper in the evidence pyramid is generally a good idea. I don't think the replication crisis is a reason to outright dismiss a paper, but certainly skepticism before replication is always warranted. I think one should also always be skeptical of how universal one's own experience truly is.
I don't know. It features thousands of data points from different groups in two different countries showing the same trend. That's substantially more compelling than anecdotes IMO, even after tempering expectations due to the replication crisis, but to each their own.
The only reason we're seeing it is because a largely untrained audience decided to upvote it, because it matches their anecdotal experience enough that they think it's a good paper.
As another random internet commenter, I anecdotally find that the least tolerant people I know are indeed substantially dumb.
Thus, whatever probability you assign, between this comment and the original equally valid one contradicting it, we can derive no information, and must therefore rely on the study as the tiebreaker, however suspect we find it.
Some of the (outwardly?) most tolerant people I know are quite dumb, and I know many extremely intelligent people capable of tremendous feats of abstract thought who are both very tolerant and very intolerant.
This is an unreplicated social science paper. It’s worth approximately the paper it isn’t printed on.
Sure. There's nothing wrong with saying "this is counterintuitive to me, and I think it's worth exploring with an open mind why my mental model and the study diverge." But it's not really an interesting contribution to the dialogue to say "meh, I don't buy it" without any kind of followup. What are we meant to do with that?
Good job that’s not what they did then, I suppose.
They gave examples of why they’re skeptical, theories about what might be causing those discrepancies, and proposed an experiment for how to tease that out. You are meant to engage with what they actually wrote.
More intelligent people base on data, statistics and facts often than less intelligent ones, which are driven by emotions, feelings and intuition. And data are often against political tolerance/correctness. That's my opinion.
Yes, I have in mind people that I know quite well (several of whom I've worked with)
The biggest predictor I've seen for political tolerance is exposure (or lack of) to those they disagree with (in non-political contexts). It's really easy to demonize people you've never gotten to know or develop rapport with as an individual, multifaceted person. And demons don't need political rights
For anyone else curious how they measured "cognitive ability", here's the relevant section from the paper[1]:
Børge Priens Prøve
The Danish Draftee Board administered the Børge Priens Prøve (BPP; Kousgaard, 2003) to the draftee sample. This 78-item test has a correlation of .82 with the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Mortensen et al., 1989). We have access only to the composite BPP score, but a study of its four subtests demonstrated that Cronbach's alpha for the four tests, composed of verbal analogies, number sequences, letter matrices, and geometric figures, ranged from 0.72 to 0.82 (Hartmann & Teasdale, 2005).
International cognitive ability resource
MTurk participants completed the 16-item International Cognitive Ability Resource measure (Condon & Revelle, 2014). Alpha reliability was high (0.80), and strong convergent validity has been reported for the test (such as a correlation of 0.81 with the Shipley-2 measure of cognitive abilities: Condon & Revelle, 2014).
The first sentence of the introduction clarifies the definition of "political tolerance", which seems to be a term of art; "Citizen support for the rights and liberties of even those political groups that they dislike, commonly termed political tolerance, is an important element of liberal democracy." So what is being measured is support for the civil liberties of political groups that are disliked by the respondent. Survey respondents were given a list of groups and asked to rate, from -4 to 4, a. how much they liked that group, and b. how much they would protect that group's rights.
Draftees in Denmark, which includes all men, plus women who volunteer. So it's skewed, but not quite as skewed as if you used only self selected people.
I am told by people who do this kind of research that using Mechanical Turk isn't as pointless as it would sound. I have to take them at their word in that.
In this case they filtered for Americans. They put some effort into validating identity, and into ensuring that you are taking the survey seriously (trap questions, for example).
It doesn't strike me as sufficient but it's not my field.
I can say (but not visibly prove, unfortunately, NDAs) that large mechanical Turk surveys tend to get distinctly different results to mail and phone call surveys. Enough so that the commissioners of the study were not interested in replacing existing surveys with mechanical Turk.
"Deplatforming" has nothing to do with "rights and liberties", and everything to do with the "rights and liberties" of those whose computers they formerly used space on.
I am astounded by the amount of both political tolerance and cognitive ability that my political opponents has shown by downvoting my comment and outright flagging the (completely valid) criticism of your response.
Yeah, it's all tribal for them. Freedoms are to be defended if and only if it's good of the political tribe, over and against the rival political tribe. Adherence to the valued principles of yesteryear is all just for optics.
Nowadays, freedom of speech is a funny meme about how nobody should be able to hear you yell "fire" at a crowded gay bakery. Let it all burn down.
Yeah same, the definition of tolerance is very important here. Like for example I think a lot of people would view me as very intolerant of transphobia, but I doorknocked 1000 doors in our recent state election here, so in some ways I'm very tolerant when encountering people that don't agree with me.
I dont see how canvassing for a political agenda is tolerance of opposition. Sure, you'll run into people who disagree with you, but you don't tolerate their POV and are actively encouraging political action against their POV.
Actually, a lot more listening happens on a successful doorknock than most people would think. Listening and really hearing people is necessary, much more necessary than making a specific political point.
Also yeah, while I was actively campaigning I met many people from other parties - and the other side of the aisle, and stood next to them outside voting booths and had some nice conversations.
Encouraging people to rethink their political position isn't intolerant unless it cross over to some sort of coercion. There has to be an ability to argue what a best policy is, or there would be no reason for democracy in the first place.
Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance springs to mind where he postulates that every free society that aims to remain just that: free has to be intolerant to certain opinions that (should they become too widespread) would endanger the freedoms of others as well.
Freedom is a complicated thing, because it has both positive and negative definitions. You can have the freedom to do what you want on the one hand but also have the freedom to be placed into certain situations (e.g. tortured) on the other hand.
Now obviously there is going to be a collision space where somebody wants to excersise the positive freedom to do a certain thing that hurts the negative freedom of another perspn or a group of persons to not be subjected to that very thing.
Freedom in that sense is the attempt to constantly balance those two sides and allow the individual to be as free as possible, while also preventing malicous actors to take away the freedoms of others.
The thing is that freedom in that sense takes constant effort and adjustment to keep alive and up date and this goes beyond just writing new laws and enforcing them.
Intolerance toward the intolerant is a crucial thought if you want to keep your and everybody elses freedom as it is.
"Paradox" of tolerance is a narrow notion. Being intolerant of people who are intolerant only is the solution, the question is only of degree.
Now what you're talking about is tolerance of use of violence, which is related to but not the same as intolerance. One can be perfectly tolerant yet willing to use force to defend their interests - perhaps even disproportional force.
Tolerance is also not maximization of freedom. It's the bare minimum of allowing some people to live or not suffer odious consequences for being who they are, for what they believe and sometimes what they do.
Now the thing about laws, if the authority enforcing or decreeing them is considered to be illegitimate...
>"Paradox" of tolerance is a narrow notion. Being intolerant of people who are intolerant only is the solution, the question is only of degree.
So more generally this. Person x who associates with group A is intolerant of group B because they think they are intolerant of C.
To me what's really going on here is tribalism and lack of respect and dignity for other humans.
Person x has decided to be intolerant of a person because they have placed them in a group of ideas they find wrong. Person x then shows no dignity or respect for that individual. The respect and dignity that everyone expects to be treated with.
I've just become a father and I'm getting to experience my kids learning to walk, talk and develop ideas for the first time. It reminds me that all humans start this way. All knowing nothing as we go on our journey of development and understanding in life. Somewhere along that way, some of us decide that we being part of group A are more intelligent and/or have better values then others that we have decided to associate with group B. Therefore we decide that they don’t deserve human respect and dignity when engaging with them. We have decided just to ignore them or cancel them or worse.
Even intolerance of advocacy of violence doesn't work as a solution as the law is enforced via the threat of violence. So any change to the add new laws is advocacy of state sanctioned violence.
> free has to be intolerant to certain opinions that (should they become too widespread) would endanger the freedoms of others as well.
As you allude to later on, this isn't really actionable from an objective perspective. Some hypotheticals:
Imagine a society that currently doesn't require seat belts in cars. Any statements that the government should mandate seat belts would endanger others freedom to drive without seat belts, thus all such discussion and advocacy would be banned.
Imagine a society which has a law that people may use whatever pronouns they think are appropriate for other people and neither corporations, nor individuals, nor the government may infringe on this. A proposal to allow corporations to make a policy requiring people to use others preferred pronouns in emails? Infringes on freedom and thus cannot even be discussed.
Imagine a society which currently has no laws preventing people from copying information and distributing it. Copyright? Not even an idea you can discuss.
I think this reply avoids the thrust of the argument: there's no simple way to draw a clear line around the behaviors that shouldn't be tolerated. We need a robust process, and it is bound to be an ongoing effort to maintain a free society.
> Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance springs to mind where he postulates that every free society that aims to remain just that: free has to be intolerant to certain opinions that (should they become too widespread) would endanger the freedoms of others as well.
People really love paraphrasing Popper into saying what they personally think tolerance means. Popper did not say that a free society must be intolerant of ideas that would endanger other freedoms should they become widespread. In fact he specifically says we should not do this:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Popper was far less strict on the matter of "opinions" as your seem to portray, I quote:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
His position on opinions is that they're all fine, as long as they remain in the plane of opinions and are bound by rational dialogue. To him intolerance is pretty much physical violence or incitement to physical violence when faced with a logical argument.
Intolerance of the intolerant is often word mincing to justify one's own bigotry.
You only hear about it in reference to all five Nazis or few hundred KKK members, but never in reference to the thousands of articles about the problems with Whiteness.
"I will justify my prejudices in a way that sounds nice to liberal professionals".
The paradox of tolerance, as it is commonly argued, has to be one of the worst philosophical arguments actually taken seriously. It basically boils down to an argument from fear - We all believe in the importance of {Sacred Value}, but the Evil Ones are coming to take {Sacred Value} away! By using our own good natures and {Sacred Value} against us, they will claim power, and then destroy {Sacred Value}! The only way to stop them is to destroy {Sacred Value}, thereby depriving them of the ability to use it against us!
Incidentally, here's what Karl Popper himself had to say on the matter; "Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."[0]
The form of "intolerance towards the intolerant" he actually discusses in his essay is rather far removed from the sweeping authority to suppression that it bestows in the eyes of many of the people who invoke it. He does not recommend censoring or removing any liberties of the intolerant, unless and until they respond to rational argument by force. Unless they instruct followers to disregard rational argument as itself deceptive. Unless they are inciting actual criminal activity.
The idea that some ideas are in and of themselves too dangerous to allow to exist in the public domain, that rational argument should be monitored, controlled, and suppressed to ensure that "tolerance" remains is nowhere to be seen. It is only when the methods of a liberal democracy (that is, open conversation, debate, the marketplace of ideas) fail catastrophically that Popper sees the need for open intolerance towards those who answer argument with violence.
In fact, the argument of the "paradox of tolerance" is actually, you may be surprised to learn, an argument in favor of autocracy. Its whole point is that liberal democracies can't sustain themselves without a "benevolent despot". Popper was arguing against that idea. Per Wikipedia, again; "In the context of chapter 7 of Popper's work, specifically, section II, the note on the paradox of tolerance is intended as further explanation of Popper's rebuttal specific to the paradox as a rationale for autocracy: why political institutions within liberal democracies are preferable to Plato's vision of despotism, and through such institutions, the paradox can be avoided. Nonetheless, alternative interpretations are often misattributed to Popper in defense of extra-judicial (including violent) suppression of intolerance such as hate speech, outside of democratic institutions, an idea which Popper himself never espoused."
First: "as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise"
That's the trick, right? Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well. There are still people in US convinced that "the election was stolen" whatever argument is used, and they will never change their mind (they don't have any reason to change their mind: any argument can be claimed being "part of the conspiracy" so they don't have to accept a result that they don't like).
Second: I don't see why it should be "all or nothing". Intolerance has different degrees of application. It goes from using violence to just refusing to give a platform to intolerant people (which is very mild: they can go everywhere else). It's part of "keeping them in check by public opinion". If someone has an intolerance level of degree 10, we can reply with an anti-intolerance measure of degree 10. If they have an intolerance level of degree 2, why should we not reply to anti-intolerance measure of degree 2?
>Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well.
Have you had a very different experience of reality than me? Apart from some very niche places, the response to crazy ideas has been insult, ignore, and call for censorship. In the rare case that any good faith response is made, it's an appeal to an authority that the crazies don't respect because it repeatedly and unapologetically lied about someone they do.
From my perspective it is abundantly evident that the decades-long push of these people out of the public and into their own spaces is the cause of our current strife. In the aforementioned niche places, election doubts were all but extinct within a month because people actually addressed them at the object level. But I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely curious about where/when you've seen rational argument fall short.
> Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well
It's working quite well really. There are few things that people stick to their guns on in the face of a good argument. For the average person maybe only a dozen or so.
> There are still people in US convinced that "the election was stolen" whatever argument is used, and they will never change their mind (they don't have any reason to change their mind: any argument can be claimed being "part of the conspiracy" so they don't have to accept a result that they don't like).
This is a bad example, actually providing a compelling argument on a case like this which is built on divergent world view would be the length of a book (to rebuild the erroneous parts of the world view), not an essay.
The correct solution is to give people general epistemological tools and habits that are applicable in most situations that allows and encourages them to do properly rigorous research to understand a complex issue. That teaches them what kind of questions they need to ask, what sort of context might be relevant, how to judge reliability of information and ensuring they make their hypothesis disprovable.
Your first point is what I never see addressed in these discussions. I agree that "intolerance of intolerance" is dangerous since it could easily be abused or misused, but what's the alternative? What we are doing now isn't working.
I'm not sure it is. There are still numerous anti-trans laws being passed. The supreme court struck down the right to an abortion and looks set to allow businesses to discriminate against gay people. Police brutality and unequal legal outcomes are still common. Gerrymandering, the electoral college, and campaign finance reform means that the weak still have almost no voice in government.
Saving children from being sterilized is actually a very good thing. It's one of the few things that conservative legislatures are getting right. They have, perhaps unintentionally, adopted some of the radical feminist position on this - to the benefit of women and children.
The rest of their legislative agenda, agreed, it's not so great.
Is "noone" a euphemism for Donald Trump (and his many followers and sycophants and white supremacist dinner guests)? That's the only way I can make sense out of your argument.
Donald Trump says he plans to pardon US Capitol attack participants if elected:
> Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well.
Really? Seems to be working great actually, we've had centuries of great social progress and increased liberties, an explosion of scientific knowledge, and religious adherence has never been lower. Rational argument seems to be winning in the long arc of history.
Maybe you think there have been some disturbing recent hiccups, but if people seem to have "crazy ideas", you can also consider whether you truly understand where they are coming from.
Well, the centuries of progress you are referring to are sometimes happening in countries that, at the time, were applying a anti-intolerance stance. Laws again libel, for example, exist for centuries in countries where progress grew sometimes faster than in other places.
On top of that, for your argument to work, saying that progress happened is not enough. You also need to prove that progress happened _better_ than otherwise. For all I know, we had great social progress, but we would have had super great social progress if more anti-intolerance happened.
> Laws again libel, for example, exist for centuries in countries where progress grew sometimes faster than in other places.
Ok, I'm not sure what you think this proves. Libel is specifically a charge that's proven using rational argument in a court of governed by rational procedures of evidence. Furthermore, libel is a charge of making false statements that injure someone's reputation. True and false are again established using rational argument, so it seems like you're saying that places that prized rational procedures that enforced the distinction between true and false progressed better than others? That doesn't seem to agree with your thesis.
> On top of that, for your argument to work, saying that progress happened is not enough. You also need to prove that progress happened _better_ than otherwise
Well the entire history prior to the rise of rational argument consisted of religious wars. Were those environments more tolerant?
I don't really understand exactly what alternative to rational argument you're proposing, because it sounds like just another religious war that you're justifying because you are obviously morally superior to everyone else, and this will not at all be like every previous religious crusade in the name "goodness".
My initial point was that some people will not be persuaded by rational arguments, and that therefore, we should account for that and consider that letting any affirmation run freely without some sort of intervention may not be the best.
Libel laws is an example of such intervention. If indeed it's just a matter of "showing the rational argument and everyone will agree with them", then libel laws have no reason to exist: if someone says something incorrect about someone else, the second person will obviously react, show the rational arguments showing that the claim is not proven, and everyone will agree that the first person was incorrect, which means that saying something incorrect was always a bad idea: no gain, only loss. The fact that we need a justice system to judge and statue on libel case seems to show that it is not enough to just let the people decide what is true because they are rational and check the argument of the two persons and will therefore not be convinced by the libelous claim. The reason libel should be settle by laws is because people are giving credit to irrational claims.
I believe that rational reasoning is indeed beneficial. My point is that I think rational reasoning is not able to change 100% of people opinion, and therefore it is legitimate to add some sort of intervention (not a dictatorship, but something that is well balanced, such as "libel laws").
> Well the entire history prior to the rise of rational argument consisted of religious wars. Were those environments more tolerant?
I don't think that humans had somehow the "irrational gene" until suddenly the "rational gene" emerged leading to the rise of the rational argument (not even sure when this "rise" is, the most impressive development of formal logic and rational argumentation was in Ancient Greece, in a society deeply religious, well before the end of religion wars). The reason why there is a change in the usage of rational argumentation is, I think, because we choose at some point to build societies that value rationality. As I've said before, I believe that rationality is a good thing, so, sure, societies that value rationality will develop better. Yet, it does not prove that 100% of the population are convinced by rational arguments. You are saying that they were not in the past (how can a "rise of rational argument" even happen if people were all naturally trying to be rational by nature? why were there religious wars if humans were valuing rationality without needing guidance of the social organization?), so, I think it's legitimate to think they may sometimes not be in the present.
Let me illustrate what I mean.
A society S1 where people are all convinced by rational argument will grow with a speed of, let's say, 20.
A society S2 where there is no value in rationality will grow with a speed of 2.
A society S3 where rationality is valued, but some people are still not sway with rationality alone, and there is not much intervention to stop irrational theories to spread, will grow with a speed of 10.
A society S4 where rationality is valued, but some people are still not sway with rationality alone, but there is some interventions (not a dictatorship, just some interventions) to stop irrational theories to spread, will grow with a speed of 14.
Your previous argument was, I think, "see, there is a speed of 10 growth in S3 (which is much better than S2), so it's the proof it works and some intervention is not needed". Well, no, S4 shows that intervention is needed if we want to get an even better society.
> The fact that we need a justice system to judge and statue on libel case seems to show that it is not enough to just let the people decide what is true because they are rational and check the argument of the two persons and will therefore not be convinced by the libelous claim. The reason libel should be settle by laws is because people are giving credit to irrational claims.
No, it's because people operate rationally on bounded information. Introducing a poison pill into such a bounded context undermines the effectiveness of this type of reasoning. Changing the type of reasoning isn't possible, ergo you should punish defectors to reduce the incentives to introduce poison pills.
> My point is that I think rational reasoning is not able to change 100% of people opinion, and therefore it is legitimate to add some sort of intervention (not a dictatorship, but something that is well balanced, such as "libel laws").
Rational argument doesn't have to change 100% of people's opinions, we just have to ensure that most people share democratic values and the rest will follow.
> I don't think that humans had somehow the "irrational gene" until suddenly the "rational gene" emerged leading to the rise of the rational argument
Actually something like this probably did happen. The field of memetics studies this sort of thing.
> Your previous argument was, I think, "see, there is a speed of 10 growth in S3 (which is much better than S2), so it's the proof it works and some intervention is not needed". Well, no, S4 shows that intervention is needed if we want to get an even better society.
First, you assume that "growth" has some intrinsic value that exceeds the values of freedom of thought, speech and association. I don't see why I have to accept that.
Second, you also neglect to complete your argument: exactly what "interventions" should be permitted and what qualifies as "rational" or "irrational". These are questions that can only be answered by democratic consensus, and democratic consensus implies a rational debate with the intent to persuade.
This demonstrates that your S3 and S4 are not actually distinct. Thus, any S4 would be constrained to grow at exactly the same rate as S3.
> No, it's because people operate rationally on bounded information.
Being able to realize the information is incomplete and should be taken critically is a step of the rational reasoning. When a person who is doing a rational reasoning is exposed to "one side of the story", this person will suspend their judgement until they have heard all the side.
The fact that they swallow the pill is the proof they are not being rational.
And it does not change my argument: if indeed you just need to publish your side of the story to see the public opinion realizing the other person is a loser, NOBODY WILL EVER DO ANY LIBEL. Doing a libel is BOUND TO FAIL, and, if, as you say, rationality wins, then why people will do it.
> Rational argument doesn't have to change 100% of people's opinions, we just have to ensure that most people share democratic values and the rest will follow.
Well, that's the crux of the argument: if you agree that _some_ people don't change their opinions when exposed to rational arguments showing their opinion is not rational, then, we agree on my first affirmation that just exposing rational argument is simply not enough.
The "ensure that most people share democratic values" is exactly my point. This is exactly what "anti-intolerance reactions" are doing. How do you ensure that most people share democratic values if, at the same time, you are just not taking any measures to counter-act people who push for non-democratic values?
> The field of memetics studies this sort of thing.
Well, of course, the "gene" in memetics is not a real gene, but is ... exactly what is transmitted in what I've called "the built society valuing rationality". That's basically my point: the rise of rationality is not "human nature", but a choice of society to counteract human nature. Which means that, yes, human tends to not be convinced by rationality, this is why we needed, in a first step, to "rise it to an important value", and in a second step, to somehow protect the rationality in a more efficient way than the naive libertarian "every social rule is tyranny just because" way.
> First, you assume that "growth" has some intrinsic value that exceeds the values of freedom of thought, speech and association. I don't see why I have to accept that.
What? Why are you saying that? You were the one saying "Seems to be working great actually, we've had centuries of great social progress and increased liberties, an explosion of scientific knowledge, and religious adherence has never been lower". Growth, in what I'm saying, INCLUDES freedom of thought, speech and association.
I have summarized "centuries of great social progress and increased liberties, an explosion of scientific knowledge, and low religious adherence" with one word: "growth". Maybe it was a bad choice of words, but that's missing the point, just replace "growth" by that in my argument and it works as it was intended.
But, no, I'm not saying "growth" is better, I was just answering your argument "growth happened in the past, so it is successful".
> Second, you also neglect to complete your argument: exactly what "interventions" should be permitted and what qualifies as "rational" or "irrational".
I think you put the finger on the problem with people who are rejecting the idea that anti-intolerance interventions may be advantageous. They are basically saying "there is a grey area, so, it's impossible and the best way is therefore to have no structure at all". This is a fallacious reasoning: the existence of a grey area does not mean that no decision can be taken for the full-white and full-black cases.
We can, if you want, have a lengthy debate on "what interventions" and "what is rational and irrational" (a bit of a strange question from someone who says that "rational wins in the long term": how can you say that if now you are saying that "rational" is not so easy to define). The short answer is easy: we have the same problem with "justice" or "good" vs "bad", and yet, we still have a concept of justice system. It does work ok for white and black cases (no concept of justice system is ever saying that plain obvious murder is good), it does not work very well for grey area, but no concept of justice system at all is way worse. I think it's the same with anti-intolerance: it's not smart to refuse to have some kind of intervention to stop crazy ideas (the ideas that can be proven incorrect with basic rational argument) just because you can imagine grey area.
> This demonstrates that your S3 and S4 are not actually distinct. Thus, any S4 would be constrained to grow at exactly the same rate as S3.
Ok, several things.
First, this is a ad-hoc example: I've SET, as an illustration, the level of "growth" (or whatever you call it) to show a fake situation where your logic was incorrect. Your logic was "I see growth of 10, which is bigger than growth of 2, therefore it's the proof that we cannot do better". This is about your first comment that was saying "Really? Seems to be working great actually, ...": the fact that it is working great does not mean that it will work worse if we change something.
Second, neither your "first" or "second" point affects anything on the S3 and S4 distinction. You seems to come up with arguments or questions, some more legitimate then others (the "first", as I've explained, is missing my point, probably because I did not explain clearly). But they have no connection to suddenly imply that "S3 = S4".
And thirdly: if indeed S3 and S4 have the same "growth", what's your problem with S4? I remind you that "growth" refers to all the good things that goes "great" according to you. Even if now you are saying "no but S4 is bad for freedom", then ... what about your demonstration that S3 = S4. You pretended that, for reasons that I don't understand, your "first" and "second" implies that S3 = S4. How suddenly S3 != S4 when we can either take your argument as they are, or in the worst case, modify them slightly so they account the element that you may add to justify that S3 is better than S4.
Per the second point, I have a thought experiment I like to present people. Let's say you were a judge at a murder trial. The evidence has been presented, and it's up to you to make a final decision, but you remain unsure. After taking stock of every scrap of evidence presented, you think there's a 60% chance that the defendent committed the crime. The punishment for murder is 10 years of jail time. After some thought, you decide to give him 6 years, to match the level of evidence.
Is that just?
What you are proposing is normalizing intolerance. Systemitizing it, so that it has the appearance of fairness and justice while altering the culture and expectations around it. And as Popper (and Plato before him) argued, such a distinction requires a despot to determine who is unacceptably "intolerant" and who is merely intolerant of the intolerant. That philosophical position is incompatible with liberal democracy - that's what makes the "paradox of tolerance" a paradox!
Your thought experiment does not correspond to what I am talking about. Your thought experiment correspond to the following situation: "someone is intolerant and are doing intolerant actions, but you don't these actions. Maybe these actions are intolerant to level 10, maybe they are intolerant to level 2".
In what I'm talking about, you assess the situation and come to the conclusion "Mr A has done an intolerant action of level 2, so, we react by using anti-intolerance of level 2. Mrs B has done an intolerant action of level 10, so, we react by using anti-intolerance of level 10."
The "all or nothing" is not working well, I have a thought experiment. Let's say you were a judge at a trial. The evidence has been presented, and it's up to you to make a final decision. The trial contains a lot of proofs and shows that the defendant stolen something. But you can only condemn the defendant for murder. If it's not murder, you need to let him free, and, if he want, he can steal again. If he steal, he may be arrested again, judged again, and released again without sentence, because it's not murder.
> And as Popper (and Plato before him) argued, such a distinction requires a despot to determine who is unacceptably "intolerant" and who is merely intolerant of the intolerant
That's social study 101, and if you don't realise that this challenge appears in EVERYTHING related to social, then I doubt you can provide anything constructive. Who decide that murder is bad? Who decide that underage alcohol drinking is bad? Who decide that putting employees in situation where they have to choose between bad salaries and not having anything at all is bad? ... There will always be a "despot" who judge what is good or bad. The trick is that this despot should be an active and continuous discussion between citizens not based on emotions, but based on what is fair.
I don't think that's a comparable scenario. In the scenario that you present the question is whether someone actually did what they are accused of. In the parent's scenario the question is how they should be punished for what they did.
A better comparison would be a defendant who was found guilty but there were mitigating circumstances and a low probability of reoffending. In that case I would definitely support a reduced sentence.
Similarly, the parent would presumably advocate overlooking intolerance when there are mitigating circumstances or if the intolerance is unlikely to have a serious effect. It's the difference between your uncle telling an off color joke at Thanksgiving and the chief of police villainizing black people in a press conference.
Thank you for this. I’m seeing the argument and that particular misinterpretation raised frequently in online discussions lately. I suspect that few of its proponents have actually read Popper, and have based their interpretation on that terrible comic that’s often reposted on Reddit.
>The paradox of tolerance, as it is commonly argued, has to be one of the worst philosophical arguments actually taken seriously.
I think you meant that people use it as an excuse to be intolerant, instead of applying it whole. They are not "taking the philosophical argument seriously" in the first place.
You do not need a strong mechanism to suppress intolerance all the time, nor autocracy, not even hierarchy.
People used shaming, ostracizing and exclusion since forever against odious individuals. The real problem is groups of such people, especially bigger ones, and preventing such groups from accumulating or a strong demagogue with such odious views from taking control.
The Internet makes it easier for such people to aggregate...
There also is no such thing as a benevolent despot. To remain a despot, that person must ultimately do very calculated nasty things to remain in power. If only economic exploitation.
(This as opposed to a chosen dictator who can be removed from power at any time, presumably.)
>You do not need a strong mechanism to suppress intolerance
I would argue that you do need one, evidenced in your examples. You need a strong cultural bias/expectation towards tolerance. You need people to understand that tolerance is a good thing, a universally positive attribute. If the cultural holds that as a central belief, it has a strong defence against intolerance. The problem with the pop-culture formulation of the paradox of tolerance is that it weakens that belief.
I heard a quote some time back that I loved; the only thing harder than holding to your convictions all of the time is holding to them some of the time. Any weakness in a people's belief that tolerance is a virtue, any exception that they carve out, can be worked on, widened, and manipulated by malicious actors. The danger of this idea of the paradox of tolerance is that it naturally leads people to accept intolerance - in the specific sense that the paper under discussion is using the term, the revocation of civil rights and liberties - as normal, necessary, and right.
The idea of the benevolent despot is a Platonic one that Popper was arguing against. Fundamentally, the argument that some ideas are naturally dangerous and require suppression demands such a despot - at the very least, to determine which ideas are to be suppressed. Hence why the paradox of tolerance is an argument in favor of autocracy.
> The paradox of tolerance, as it is commonly argued, has to be one of the worst philosophical arguments actually taken seriously.
My understanding of the “paradox” was consistent with the long-form argument that you provided, and it always made perfect sense to me. In the face of a violent group who don’t respect the arguments and traditions of tolerant society, societies must defend themselves with means other than rational argument, or perish. You seem to be arguing not against Popper but rather against some nebulous “as it is commonly argued” (maybe on Reddit?) and you haven’t done a very good job of defining the position you’re critiquing.
Arguing in bad faith and encouraging their followers to disregard rational arguments is precisely what right wing groups (Fox News, Crowder, InfoWars, etc.) are doing. For example:
The popular idea of "owning the libs" is based on trolling instead of engaging in rational debate.
Labeling any even remotely left wing economic policy as "communism" is an attempt to invoke fear of Stalinism rather than considering the policy on its own merits.
Refusing to understand what progressives mean by "gender" vs. "sex" in order to make discussion of the related issues impossible.
> The paradox of tolerance, as it is commonly argued, has to be one of the worst philosophical arguments actually taken seriously. It basically boils down to an argument from fear - We all believe in the importance of {Sacred Value}, but the Evil Ones are coming to take {Sacred Value} away! By using our own good natures and {Sacred Value} against us, they will claim power, and then destroy {Sacred Value}! The only way to stop them is to destroy {Sacred Value}, thereby depriving them of the ability to use it against us!
Hmm. If I were trying to present a bad-faith interpretation of the paradox of tolerance, this is how I'd do it. If I were trying to present a good-faith interpretation of the paradox of tolerance, I'd probably replace the last line with something like "The only way to stop them is to physically guard {Sacred Value}, thereby depriving them of the ability to destroy it!" Tolerance, as a {Sacred Value}, isn't like a treasury or fortified position, it's an open-air exhibition never intended to be hidden away. The only option, if we're actually serious about having it, is to stand against those who openly and boldly identify themselves as trying to take it away.
>He does not recommend censoring or removing any liberties of the intolerant, unless and until they respond to rational argument by force. Unless they instruct followers to disregard rational argument as itself deceptive. Unless they are inciting actual criminal activity.
I suppose you've never heard of right-wing militias showing up to left-wing protests while cops look on, or plot to kidnap and overthrow a governor? [0] I suppose you've never heard Donald Trump suggest that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening"? [1] I suppose you haven't heard of the banners at the most recent CPAC? [2]
>"In the context of chapter 7 of Popper's work, specifically, section II, the note on the paradox of tolerance is intended as further explanation of Popper's rebuttal specific to the paradox as a rationale for autocracy: why political institutions within liberal democracies are preferable to Plato's vision of despotism, and through such institutions, the paradox can be avoided."
I suppose you've never heard of Project REDMAP? [3] I suppose you've never heard of Murc's Law? [4] I agree with you -- the paradox of tolerance is best resolved by guiding our collective choices to avoid a direct confrontation with it, but the "political institutions within liberal democracies" seem powerless or unwilling to do anything about the encroachment of violent intolerance.
> I suppose you've never heard of right-wing militias showing up to left-wing protests while cops look on,
Note that the reverse is also quite common. "Punch a Nazi" was very popular for a while and antifa was big. Political violence is back on the rise in the USA, though its not as bad as the 70s.
> I suppose you've never heard Donald Trump suggest that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening"?
It really sucks that it was Trump who popularised the idea of "fake news". It tarnished an idea that long predated the most untruthful politician in modern US politics: While the big reputable news corps will very rarely lie in their own voice (I've only seen a couple of examples over many years of news reading) it is extremely common for those reading the news to pick up an incorrect view of what happened. Two years later I'm still correcting educated people who believed that the 6/6 capitol invaders beat a policeman to death with a flagpole and a fire extinguisher. Or those who believe the Canadian protest truckers were Nazis proudly waving Nazi flags (as opposed to being disproportionately waving signs declaring the government were Nazis and these signs having swastikas or SS symbols etc on them).
>Note that the reverse is also quite common. "Punch a Nazi" was very popular for a while and antifa was big. Political violence is back on the rise in the USA, though its not as bad as the 70s
If the Nazis self-identify, and the most famous cases indeed did, I can't say I'm terribly concerned. Publicly espousing the view that some people are naturally inferior not by creed but by nature, and that you intend to impose physical consequences on them for that nature, isn't compatible with a free society. I don't think violence is a necessary condition to stop the Self-Identified Nazis from carrying out their murderous plans, but history shows that it is a sufficient one. Now look at the numbers: who hurts who, and by how much? Which is the bigger threat, as assessed by the US government: "left-wing terrorism", or "right-wing terrorism"? And what's "antifa"? Is it an organization with a website and funding, like the Proud Boys or Stormfront or the National Socialist Movement?
>it is extremely common for those reading the news to pick up an incorrect view of what happened
Sure, anyone who regularly reads HN has probably noticed the Gel-Mann Effect [0] in news articles pertaining to tech; other experts regularly notice them regarding their fields of expertise. Whether due to an overworked "staff writer" or intentional puff-piece (or imperative commands from The Owners to say this or that), the idea that one can "pick up an incorrect view of what happened" isn't unreasonable.
I don't think that's what Trump is talking about when he suggests that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that the Constitution should be suspended in order to restore him to power.
>Or those who believe the Canadian protest truckers were Nazis proudly waving Nazi flags (as opposed to being disproportionately waving signs declaring the government were Nazis and these signs having swastikas or SS symbols etc on them)
Or those who believe the "Canadian protest truckers" were mostly truckers, or that they didn't have a memorandum of understanding that the Canadian Prime Minister should be violently deposed and replaced by a council chosen by them!
> If the Nazis self-identify, and the most famous cases indeed did, I can't say I'm terribly concerned.
You should be. Normalizing a behaviour encourages more of that behaviour, and outside of the original context.
> Publicly espousing the view that some people are naturally inferior not by creed but by nature, and that you intend to impose physical consequences on them for that nature, isn't compatible with a free society
Sure it is, as long as that view remains fringe, which it is. Encouraging or even tolerating violence against such people emboldens them and their claims of persecution, and the violence itself generates sympathy. You're better off ignoring them and addressing the factors that cause people to gravitate to these ideas. That's where we're failing today.
> Publicly espousing the view that some people are naturally inferior not by creed but by nature, and that you intend to impose physical consequences on them for that nature, isn't compatible with a free society.
In my experience the SJW version of this is more commonly espoused than the right wing version. I've certainly talked to more people who believe men are inherently worse (more violent, worse students, etc) and believe in affirmative action quotas than I've met right wingers wanting to deport all black Americans to Liberia.
Most of the desire for immigration restrictions seems to come from belief in potential immigrants coming from undesirable cultures and bringing it with them, though there's admittedly a noticeably large minority who believe IQ gaps are partially genetic.
Btw: would I be correct in saying that you don't think genes are irrelevant on an individual basis, just that we should treat people according to what they actually do, rather than what their DBA says?
> Self-Identified Nazis from carrying out their murderous plans
Not sure I've ever come across anyone in the modern world who espoused killing undesirables and self identified as Nazi, even in the news. Not convinced these people exist in non-negligible numbers.
> Now look at the numbers: who hurts who, and by how much? Which is the bigger threat, as assessed by the US government: "left-wing terrorism", or "right-wing terrorism"?
I would be quite interested in the numbers here if you have them. Though there are methodological questions like, do you include people killed in the Floyd protests (e.g. extending things to "political violence" rather than "terrorism") and do you include those killed on 6/6 (e.g. extending it to those killed as a result of the political action rather than just those killed by the action initiators)?
>The only way to stop them is to physically guard {Sacred Value}
When the {Sacred Value} is participation in the marketplace of ideas, then guarding it against unwelcome elements is the same as destroying it. When your justification can be used, identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of your beliefs, then it's not a logical reason, but a justification.
Regarding the examples of criminal action, I'd heard of some of those events. I've also heard of a CNN host say that a teenager had a "punchable face" because he wore the wrong kind of hat and stood silently while being accosted by a screaming stranger banging a drum in his face. I've heard a lot of talk about punching Nazis, which seem to be a broader and broader group every year. I've heard of comedians jailed for jokes. I've heard of teenagers jailed for singing along to rap songs. I've I've heard of that quote by Trump, just as I've heard stories of news anchors standing in front of streets aflame, calling protests "mostly peaceful." It all reduces down to that Orwell quote, doesn't it?
I'm insulated from most of this, I realize, by not being American and not having the same intense loyalty to your political tribes. But "the other group is doing all these terrible things to us" is not a very convincing argument for changing beliefs like this. Every group wants to claim it is being marginalized, and basically every group can point out specific examples of exactly that marginalization happening. Giving one group the right to cancel the civil liberties of the other group, as the paradox of tolerance suggests, does not strike me as a particularly wise idea, given the stakes involved. I have no confidence in any group to hold that power justly.
>When the {Sacred Value} is participation in the marketplace of ideas, then guarding it against unwelcome elements is the same as destroying it. When your justification can be used, identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of your beliefs, then it's not a logical reason, but a justification.
My "justification" is not usable identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of my beliefs, because they do not believe my beliefs. I, and you, and anyone else, can establish this by reading the cited links in my post above. Further, the {Sacred Value} under discussion isn't "participation in the marketplace of ideas", it's tolerance!
Society does value "participation in the marketplace of ideas", but that's another can of worms; not entirely orthogonal to tolerance, but it's obviously not the same. In fact, I'd suggest that overreliance on the "marketplace of ideas", which, like any marketplace, is most easily dominated by those with the most money, is exacerbating society's problems with tolerance.
>Regarding the examples of criminal action, I'd heard of some of those events. I've also heard of
All the examples you cite (a CNN host, individuals talking about physically opposing self-identified Nazis, "comedians jailed for jokes", teenagers jailed for singing) are individuals. They may be being oppressed, in your view, by monolithic forces of intolerance, but they themselves are not monoliths baldly angling to protect in-groups which the law does not bind, alongside the exclusion of out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Speaking of which--
>Giving one group the right to cancel the civil liberties of the other group
But that's not what's happening. One group is cancelling the civil liberties of another, visibly, but they are keeping those rights for themselves. When the Black Panthers armed themselves, Reagan, of all people, instituted gun control, and now LGBTQetc groups protecting LGBTQetc events get called out by those who were previously using those same arms to threaten them; curtailing access to abortion is a great good, but "the only moral abortion is my abortion", and so those with means get 'em anyway from elsewhere. [0]
>It all reduces down to that Orwell quote, doesn't it?
Yes, some animals are more equal than others. That's what I'm saying. Rules are for the little people, not the important people. The important people can break the law and act immorally, and it's our fault for not stopping them. That's Murc's law. Popper's political solution only actually works if there are actual checks and balances, but most of them seem to be legally toothless and highly dependent on the moral standard of the individuals involved. It's my understanding, for instance, that every President since Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns in order to promote trust; Nixon didn't for eerily similar reasons to those bandied about in modernity.
>I'm insulated from most of this, I realize, by not being American and not having the same intense loyalty to your political tribes
I'm not American. I assumed you were, by the examples of left-wing badness largely drawn from talking-head American media, and certain nuances of your defence of the political right. I don't like the American uniparty, but the simple fact is that one wing of it acts very differently than the other. They seem to functionally agree on like 75% of things (big military budgets, pro-Israel, the 1/5 of the GDP provided by for-profit medical care), but the wedge issues have become meaningful socially, and are being exported abroad. We all benefit from, and are all bound by, the Pax Americana.
>My "justification" is not usable identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of my beliefs, because they do not believe my beliefs.
"If we tolerate {people with out-group beliefs}, they will take power and restrict our civil liberties, therefore we must guard {Sacred Value} from them" can be - and is - used by both sides to justify restriction of civil liberties.
>All the examples you cite (a CNN host, individuals talking about physically opposing self-identified Nazis, "comedians jailed for jokes", teenagers jailed for singing) are individuals.
I didn't know quite how to parse this. Are you saying that the victims are all individuals, or that the oppressors are? In both cases, that's not necessarily true. There were many people involved in calling that teenager a terrible person and harassing him - the force of the media, hate mobs on Twitter, and the like. And the people chilled into silence by "cancel culture" form a large group themselves. All of these groups, of course, are composed of individuals, but that doesn't seem to weigh on either direction. Of course the people who most acutely feel oppression are going to be individuals; how else would that work? Of course the oppressive group is going to be large; how else would it have any power?
>One group is cancelling the civil liberties of another, visibly, but they are keeping those rights for themselves.
And this is exactly what I mean about the symmetry of these arguments. I have heard this same idea repeated by right-wing people about the left! And they are able to produce examples of the same - that's what their complaints about cancel culture are. Here's an example of that; in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I have seen people on this very forum put forward the idea that allegations of sexual assault and rape are so serious and so traumatizing to the victims, that they should be assumed to be true and damning in the absence of evidence or trials. That is, that the accused should have their right to a fair trial, the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, revoked. That's a really damned worrying thing to hear as a liberal who's actually interested in protecting civil rights! Apparently some people have never heard of Emmett Till.
The thing is, the pop-culture paradox of tolerance - the idea under discussion - is literally about being able to declare some ideas "intolerant" and thus remove them from the discussion. It's a claim that some ideas are so dangerous that the public needs to be protected from them, and the claim that the group presenting that paradox are the people who should make that determination. I don't trust any group with that power. To do so would be to willingly place myself under the power of a despot.
It's not in-group vs out-group, it's tolerant versus intolerant. If, for example, someone believes that homosexuality is a sin, but they treat gay people with respect and support them having the same rights as straight people, then there's no problem.
The people "chilled into silence by "cancel culture"" have let you know about their situation on talk shows and Twitter. They have not only not really had any rights taken away, but they are individuals being "oppressed" by individuals. The power of a mob of individuals deciding that they don't like you is not comparable to those in control of government making decisions about everyone's reproductive rights.
>Of course the oppressive group is going to be large; how else would it have any power?
Those in control of such government are actually in the minority; abortion and gay marriage and social programs are actually pretty popular. That's why they need Project REDMAP: to maintain power. The beneficiaries of endless tax cuts are an even smaller minority. But this is all just by the numbers, not how it makes a celebrity on Twitter feel, as platformed by a multinational news conglomerate.
Emmett Till "was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States." [0]
Just so we're clear, you're suggesting an equivalence between Emmett Till being actually lynched -- not an isolated event, but a zenith of decades of racism and oppression -- and the suggestion, not implementation, that those accused of sexual assault receive no fair trial? Are these the symmetrical arguments you're referring to?! They might have a symmetric character, but what those arguments are actually for aren't realistically comparable under anything like human morality. Unpunished murder as a result of systemic oppression versus angry suggestions on a forum are not the same, but I can't imagine what else you could be trying to say. If you're not actually American, you should be aware that you're carrying water in their culture war.
One is what happened, one is powerless angryposting about what might happen. One group has taken away reproductive rights (for some, see "only moral abortion", above); one group is trying to prevent their own rights from being taken away. Symmetry!
In the methods section they mention a survey. So that is likely how they meassured it. Of course the particulars would be more interesting, but for this access to the paper would be needed.
Looking into the paper (see the sci-hub link), it's a bit odd. Data source is Mechanical Turk respondents in the USA, and Danish military draftees in Europe, who had to take a 'cognitive ability test'. "Political groups" don't include members of political parties - they have 'neo-Nazis', 'Christian fundamentalists', 'socialists' and 'communists'. Seems like there are a great many other groups one could list.
Social science papers are notorious for being non-replicabale and based on non-representative samples, so I doubt these conclusions really mean much.
Tied to this topic seems to be the ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions.
My impression is that avoiding negative emotions is something we all impulsively attempt, and it takes practice to increase one's ability to tolerate them. This, in turn, seems necessary to tolerate positions so different to our own that they cause us to feel threatened, which can, if the fear is intense enough, lead to outright hatred.
I assume quite some intolerance can be linked to this principle.
It seems our earlier evolutionary impulses (fight, flight in this case) can easily take over unless we not only learn to become aware of them but also to tolerate them.
I don't know that it's necessarily so much unpleasant emotions
Let me paint a picture:
My maternal grandparents are country folk, from Kentucky. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and a sort of whizz kid type. Architected/drafted and built his own house, made youngest highest-ranking naval officer in Coast Guard history, stuff of that sort.
Having lived their entire lives together, they are on very different sides of the political spectrum. My grandmother is... unfortunately, a somewhat stereotypical Kentucky old white lady. You can guess her stance on things like immigrants and who she voted for. I love her but I have to try to blank out some of the things she says.
My grandfather on the other hand will just say things like "Well, you have to try to see it from their side.", and "Don't you think that's a bit of a generalization?"
But God help you if you cross the old man. I've done it once in my life and rarely seen a scarier thing.
So (IME), you can have political tolerance separate of your emotional tolerance and emotional experiences.
Political tolerance (for me) really boils down to: "Treat others how you want to be treated; Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.
I might be reading this wrong, but it seems to me from your description that your grandfather simply did not get "ticked off" by the same things as your grandmother. Those topics do not seem to have generated strong emotions in him. But they seem to have done so in your grandmother.
What raises strong emotions in people seems to be highly subjective. To what extent you are able to have those stronger emotional responses while at the same time not succumbing to the impulses that go along with them, is what I would argue determines your ability to tolerate the stimuli that generate these emotional responses.
Since these responses are physiological, rooted in our survival instincts, they greatly affect our ability to be rational, open, and contextualize. Instead, they move us into increasing levels of black-and-white thinking and fight or flight, first mentally, then physically.
Whenever I explore topics that stir up strong (negative) emotions in myself, I find that they are usually tied to this, if I can get deep enough in my exploration.
After all, we're just animals trying to survive and procreate, even though we have become very elaborate and ornamental in our pursuit of these goals.
You are dismissing a level you are apparently incurious about — that of why certain seemingly irrational responses happen.
Using “highly subjective” for something that is much better understood than you are implying is only an indicator of where you’ve chosen to draw your own boundary in pursuit of a constrained cognitive ability.
It’s also an indicator of this limit that the two things you’re inaccurately taking as given are intimately linked: emotionality and reproduction. When things get too complex you conversationally reduce humans to emotional animals and end of.
I am sorry, but your comment is so terse that I find it quite difficult to really understand.
I am very interested in learning and growing, though, so maybe you can help me understand what you were trying to say.
This is what I got and my associated comments and questions:
> You are dismissing a level you are apparently incurious about — that of why certain seemingly irrational responses happen.
You seem to be saying: There's something (a) you think I'm incurious about (b) that also is relevant to this discussion.
My thoughts: What exactly is this "level" you are referring to? I do have thoughts on "why certain seemingly irrational responses happen", but I'd first be curious to know what you are referring to.
> Using “highly subjective” for something that is much better understood than you are implying is only an indicator of where you’ve chosen to draw your own boundary in pursuit of a constrained cognitive ability.
You seem to be saying: There is "something" (a) that I qualified as "highly subjective" in my comment ("What raises strong emotions in people"), and (b) that me qualifying it as such is an indicator of a "boundary" (c) which I have drawn (d) in order to "constrain" my "cognitive ability".
My thoughts: I am not sure where your argument against my statement is. How is "What raises strong emotions in people" "much better understood" "than you are implying"? What am I implying in your opinion?
> It’s also an indicator of this limit that the two things you’re inaccurately taking as given are intimately linked: emotionality and reproduction. When things get too complex you conversationally reduce humans to emotional animals and end of
You seem to be saying: (a) I am limited in my cognitive ability, (b) as evidenced by my inability to realize how emotionality and reproduction are linked, (c) the two of which I also "inaccurately tak[e] as given". I also (d) flee from complexity by referring to the fact that we are animals.
My thoughts:
How am I taking emotionality and reproduction as given, and how so inaccurately?
Where do I dispute a link between the two?
What are we in your opinion if not animals?
Also, I read an undertone of both "you are stupid" and "you are evil" in your comment. Was that intentional or am I misunderstanding you here?
The level I was referring to includes the emotional and embodied level of being.
You seem to be parroting a Dawkins view of humanity which is a reductionist, incomplete view that people are fond of stating as fact because it supports their worldview (and often an escape from a religious upbringing).
Apologies for the tone — it was a rushed response. I do not think you are evil or stupid. I do think that by stating your own learned limits of exploration as absolute facts you are making a common mistake of assuming that entire realities can be reduced to something that doesn’t need to be considered.
There are some fairly clear classes of emotional response that are probably rooted in evolutionary function, however their evolutionary function is probably substantially altered from the animal roots (if each function has any) due to our recent and unique evolution.
Behaviors that appear irrational in a modern synthetic evolutionary view are probably under selection at a different level of abstraction, or they may be evolutionary hybrids or merged palimpsests, but to refer to humans as animals in such a way is almost always done to condemn the behavior of others, excuse ones own poor behavior, and/or end the conversation.
> "... Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.
Only if you assume we're not a society, and that there's no social benefits to enforcing socially desirable behaviors and suppress socially undesirable ones.
“live and let live” has traditionally described the more tolerant end of the spectrum of possible “social enforcement”, not the absence of such enforcement - the problem is that the group that wants religious rights for society doesn’t want marriage rights for others in society, and the group that wants abortion rights in society doesn’t want gun rights for others in society. And so on.
So the question is whether to have a society where we generally allow people to do things we don’t like, as the price of being allowed to do the things we do like, or a society that prevents us doing what we want as the price of preventing others doing things we don’t like. Or, you know, each side trying to get freedom for the things they care about but trying to ban the things they dislike?
There is an obvious analogy with religion and religious freedom that I think the US constitution and bill of rights handled very effectively (compared to most other countries) at the “live and let live” end of the spectrum, maybe as a society we might want to see if the same principles might work more broadly?
> There is an obvious analogy with religion and religious freedom that I think the US constitution and bill of rights handled very effectively (compared to most other countries) at the “live and let live” end of the spectrum
While the post civil war amendments were ruled to have changed it, at the time of ratification the establishment clause did not apply to the individual states. And many of the first thirteen had some official religion or other. So while it was live and let live at the federal level, at the local level it wasn’t so much.
Yes, the original design of the U.S. is something more like live and let live at the community level rather than the individual level. The idea was that you could have different groups of religious nuts living alongside each other, not to eviscerate the ability of each group to enforce rules within their own communities.
That's a false equivalence. "Pro-life" advocates use a topic that some people find emotive purely for political ends.
Gun control advocates object tto avoidable gun massacres in schools, malls, and other public places.
They're not remotely comparable.
The obvious difference is that if a woman has an abortion it's fundamentally a private matter. The outcome affects a single person. Or two people at most.
The outcome is not a line of ambulances and coffins and a traumatised community of teachers, parents, and neighbours.
Of course they're framed as if they're equivalent freedoms, because in the US "freedom" is a master-frame that can be used to justify almost anything.
And that's the real problem. One group consistently uses deceptive single-issue appeals to emotion to gain and hold political power. If there are no real issues to appeal to, they'll quite happily invent some. They fundamentally don't care what the issue is as long as it's politically useful.
The other group actually cares about outcomes - not just in a negative sense of wanting certain things not to happen, but in the positive sense of expanding political access to everyone in the community for the benefit of the entire community.
What's missing - in the US particularly - is a political system which makes this fundamental distinction clear and explicit. Democracies have few defences against deceptive framing used for political grift.
And that's not a good way to build a better future.
This reads to me as a perhaps unwitting but excellent demonstration of political intolerance.
Is it possible that the pro-lifers have a genuine belief that a fetus is worthy of protection equal to (or similar to) a human life? If that's their initial belief, it seems reasonable that they'd conclude that 40-50x as many abortions as firearm homicides per year represents a greater problem in the former than the latter.
I don't think your proposed "fundamental distinction" is anywhere near as fundamental as you seem to believe.
that’s a very long and eloquent way of saying “the thing I want is right and the thing you want is wrong” - unless you think you can persuade the people who disagree with you to support your position, my earlier point about “live and let live” still stands, and in fact, you’re making my point for me, that many people feel that the freedoms I believe in with should be available to everyone, while the freedoms I disagree with must be forbidden.
> That's a false equivalence. "Pro-life" advocates use a topic that some people find emotive purely for political ends.
No, we think killing innocent human beings is gross and wrong in principle.
There’s nothing emotional or religious about it. If you accept the premises that a fetus is an innocent human being and that intentionally killing innocent human beings is wrong, then if you have any respect for logic you must conclude that abortion is wrong.
Biology tells us that at the moment of conception that single diploid cell is a human being. Therefore, in that model, in order to justify killing a fetus it must either be unintentional or the fetus must not be innocent. The intentional case can apply to procedures that are intended to help the mother that unfortunately harm the fetus. For the other case I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death. However, as an counter-example, I’m given to understand that’s the case in Jewish law at least some of the time.
Anyhow as you can see there is no deception, in framing or otherwise. It’s just simple premises and sound logic from them. On the other hand I rarely see logical moral reasoning with generally acceptable premises from the pro-Choice side, so you're correct that the subject is, for some people, primarily an emotional one.
Anyhow I've kept this to just a simple explanation of why we're pro-Life, because I don't think HN is the right place to debate political issues, but it is the right place to correct erroneous statements.
There's nothing metaphysical about that. Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens." A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive, and undisputedly has human DNA. It is "a human." Now, it's a human at an early stage of human development--and that might have various ethical and moral implications--but it's scientifically unsupportable to say that it's not a human.
For example, the OED defines "tadpole" as "the tailed aquatic larva of an amphibian (frog, toad, newt, or salamander) breathing through gills and lacking legs until the later stages of its development." There is nothing metaphysical about saying that a tadpole is "a frog."
> Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens."
You seem to be conflating linguistics with biology. If we agree to change the definition of a word "human", this isn't going to make pro-lifers happy, because their problem is not with words.
Also, I don't think "human" means alive Homo Sapiens. Human and Homo Sapiens are synonyms.
> A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive
But that's exactly what is being disputed. For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead, yet an embryo has even less brain activity.
> For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead
No, they’re not. If they were indisputably dead we’d just say dead. The qualifier means it’s something other than actually dead.
You could quibble that after medical death biological processes continue in various cells and organs for a while though. And of course there’s the old first responder’s adage that the patient isn’t dead until he’s warm and dead. Cold and dead, as in fished out of ice water, isn’t necessary dead dead.
This is a good example of a premise that isn’t generally acceptable. If we agree that persons who lack agency have no right to not be killed then we can kill infants, the severely mentally ill, involuntarily commited persons, and arguably severely physically disabled persons.
Not to mention, determining who does and doesn’t have agency and thus a right to not be killed strikes me as considerably trickier than the basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat. Hence the observation that cold and dead might not really be dead. Severe hypothermia can make the pulse undetectable.
> basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat
This is an extremely reductive statement. There is no unified medical definition of death, precisely because it's a highly controversial topic.
Closest to what you're trying to say is UDDA (which, ironically, is currently being revised), and it explicitly mentions brain death: "An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead."
> I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death
Paradoxically the Catholics do (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin) I’m sure there’s finicky nuance that the current devout could counter with—apparently they recently decided they were just kidding about limbo being a thing—but that was the mindset drilled into me during my formative years.
You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag. Diploid cell, lol. If your body except for one diploid cell was pulverized, you won't consider it death? Stoics redefined human being to be primarily mind, and body being secondary to mind. Mind is the difference between a fetus and a human.
> You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag.
I use the Christian notion of a human being defined as a human body and a human soul unified in one creature. I believe both human body and soul are created at the same time, namely conception. While most Muslims agree with that assessment, most Jews do not[1]. Therefore it's not an Abrahamic notion.
In fact, the very concept of a soul, or anima in Latin, is that which animates a body. By definition, every animate creature has a soul because it is the name for the animating principle. And so death then is the transition from being a living animated body with a soul to being an inanimate dead body without a soul.
[1] The Talmud says that the soul enters the body with the first breath.
Partly, yes, but it also assumes that "leaving each other alone" results in societally beneficial outcomes. That's not necessarily true. For example, in many Asian countries it's common to call out family and friends on their weight. It's not a "live and let live" approach, but it might explain why Asians tend to be skinny. (I'm reminded of the line from "Everything, Everywhere All at Once," where the mom goes "Wait. You are getting fat. And you never call me even though we have a family plan. And it's free. You only visit when you need something. And you got a tattoo and I don't care if it's supposed to represent our family. You know I hate tattoos.")
Fair point and great anecdote. Though when I think "interference of my 'let-live'" my mind jumps to things a decent bit worse than family who make some well-meaning remarks that sting.
I don't want to turn this into a big political/philosophical thing, but it feels like the line is between suggestions or commentary and forcible policing.
There's a line where you should intervene when others are not letting others live and let live. That's the overall human societal obligation that everyone has to each other.
Then there's another line where you build the type of society you want, but only within your own circle of culture or geography or whatever.
Live and let live requires assuring the first part, while also not imposing your own version of the second part on people who are not within your circle. The expression has always had nuance. Until now, I had never heard such a simplistic interpretation.
> There's a line where you should intervene when others are not letting others live and let live.
But why should that be the line? Why shouldn't we police each other's behavior to ensure everyone is making better decisions that serve larger societal ends while preserving social peace?
The Counterpoint is that individuals should serve their own ends as long as it preserves social peace.
Many object to the idea that Society should extract as much utility value from individuals as possible up until they're breaking point is reached.
Furthermore, the breaking point for social peace can be modified and delayed by harsh repression and subjugation, so I don't think it is a suitable limit on suppressing the desires of individuals
Maybe I wasn't clear, but that's the second line I described in the second paragraph that I wrote.
You can build whatever society you want. But there are also different societies. Some by choice, some not. People can be part of multiple societies at the same time. The trick is to manage the interfaces between societies without imposing yourself on a society you don't belong to. Live and let live.
You assume that there is and of a right aught to be enforcement. Others view that social evolution as up to god. We all cooperate and the least rigid will adopt the best and we’ll all copy one another.
This isn't possible when one major political party refuses to allow that to happen. Many conservatives claim to just want to be left alone and then turn around and try to legislate who can marry who, how people live their lives, who is "worthy" of being part of our country, what books are available in libraries. You can't live and let live when you're constantly being attacked for intrinsic traits and being disenfranchised.
> Many conservatives claim to just want to be left alone and then turn around and try to legislate who can marry who, how people live their lives, who is "worthy" of being part of our country, what books are available in libraries.
That's not very let-live at all, is it?
I don't like to get into politics, but in my very unread and not-up-to-date opinion (I didn't even know some kind of election was happening recently, I care that little) neither end of the political spectrum is a good place to sit.
Sitting on an end means you have an agenda and a strong set of ideals. I have my own morals/ethics, but they sort of start and end at the boundaries of my own being.
As long as you have people who think that other people ought to behave/think more like them, you'll have conflict.
I hold out hope for biohacking advanced enough that we mod ourselves out of this in a few hundred years.
I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate. If everything you've been told up to now is "be positive, be happy!" then it follows that unpleasant emotions are to be avoided.
As someone who grew up watching the media of that era, I have trouble agreeing with that characterization.
Most of what I saw wasn’t encouraging Stepford/Disney saccharine positivity nearly as much as it was encouraging basic decency and politeness in day to day interactions, including those with groups that traditionally hadn’t enjoyed that. It didn’t even discourage arguments but rather emphasized being productive with them — in other words, argue to find solutions, not to stoke each others’ emotional bonfires.
If anything based on the steep decline in basic decency in the past couple of decades, I think it could be argued that the messaging of the 90s was unfortunately a failure.
I seem to find the opposite, that people appear to be admired and build audiences based on how much they can troll or generally how nasty they can be to whichever rival group. People aren’t avoiding each other to stay in safe, happy and positive bubbles, it’s more like rival football club ultras out to kill each other.
Those views can go together, can't they? If you've never learned to accept the existence of things you don't like, and feel entitled to have everything done your way, you'll love people who are fighting for your side. If you also believe that "the others" aren't doing it because they are different from you but because they are evil and know better but hate you and all things that are good, then you'll especially enjoy the vicious and nasty attacks on them.
I don't think they could avoid each other, given that they're trapped within the same reality. If anyone manages to fork the simulation into multiple branches strictly divided by tribe, will they be happy places? Or will new factions form, and the process repeat?
> I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate
This is one of the core ideas behind prof. Jonathan Haidt's book "Coddling of the American Mind". There's probably something to it.
I'm afraid the title could be misread as "I'm tolerant so I'm more clever than you" or "the population of democratic nations are more intelligent than nondemocratic". All of that is obviously bullshit if you give it 2s of thoughts.
That being said, democratic countries typically focus greatly on 1/ free speech (a driver of diversity) and 2/ education, which certainly is a good driver for cognitive ability, and might very well be a good driver for tolerance as well.
BTW if you or anyone in this thread do not know of how this all started check out the Metcalf sniper attacks[0]. Basically suspiciously after a weakness in power infrastructure was identified it was exploited.
The purpose of these laws is making it impossible to exist as a trans person in public. The playbook is to 1) suggest that wearing gender nonconforming clothing as in drag shows is inherently sexualized (not true) and thus doing so around children is inappropriate and then 2) outlaw "drag shows" around children because many conservatives and cops can't tell the difference between a person in drag and a trans person, so it gives cops plausible deniability to harass trans people (even more than they already do).
In parallel there's a massive ongoing social media campaign equating being publicly LGBT with pedophilia, which is an old trope that I thought had died off in the US but has sadly resurfaced.
This situation is extremely dangerous for trans people and it's going to be dangerous for gays and lesbians too if it succeeds. Major conservative Christian groups have stated publicly that they think gay rights are too entrenched to attack right now, so the plan is to try to divide the "T" from "LGB", go after trans people, and then build up the public appetite to roll back gay rights again.
Many of the most impassioned activists who are against including the T with the LGB are themselves part of the latter. Groups such as the LGB Alliance have formed in recent years as a direct reaction to the forced teaming of the LGB and the T.
Partly this is to dissociate themselves from the bad reputation that mainstream LGBT activists are giving the movement. The drag shows for children are part of this. Really, this really should have nothing at all to do with being gay, or trans for that matter, yet it's being promoted and defended by various LGBT activist groups.
But the main reason to separate the LGB out from the T is because having one's sexuality rewritten from being same-sex attracted to same-gender, as has happened with this ideological change that centers gender identity instead of sex, is a quite offensive form of erasure.
By and large, lesbian women (female) aren't romantically or sexually interested in transwomen (male). And the same for gay men (male) and transmen (female). From an shared activism point of view, it makes little sense for the LGB to be stuck with this modern incarnation of the T.
It's not that powerful of a predictor. I know many intelligent people who absolutely hate the opposite party.
Although I do see some truth to the overall idea. I have also seen many average or below average people parroting whatever inflammatory stuff they heard from the media or others, without even understanding the topic.
Reminds me of the YouTube video where participants had to rank each others intelligence. And the person who sorta took a leadership role in the socializing ended up being lower and some of the more jar-head types were pretty high if not highest.
There's no fallacy here. I didn't mention the silent people. There are some. There does not appear to be a strong enough effect to have a noticeable difference in the ratios between the group with cognitive ability and those without.
You're making the same fallacy again thinking the sample you have of politically intolerant people represents the wider population.
Only 66% of Americans voted
That means 33% are likely highly politically tolerant. So tolerant they can't be bothered to vote.
Even if Intelegence and Political Tolerance had nearly perfect positive correlation you would expect even extremely intolerant people to show full spectrum of IQ and the converse.
Add on that, the discourse is dominated by the extremely intolerant and you get your claim.
Let’s all remember that these “unintelligent” people exist on both sides of the political divide. Whatever you believe, some one without a clue it parroting it.
It merely says that cognitive ability is the strongest single predictor. That may very well be true when comapring to other indicators. However, it doesn't mean that it's powerful enough to have any practical application. I don't see anything that we can use this information for - another useless study.
Again, even that has huge holes in the definition, considering each side denies certain rights even exist. Hard to say you defend someone's right to an abortion/gun/etc, especially when someone's rights on those sorts of issues can vary by state.
This is interesting since cognitive ability can exacerbate confirmation bias, which would suggest the opposite conclusion regarding political tolerance.
Anecdotally people in their mid/late twenties + thirties are often the most tolerant. Teenagers and young adults are often more extreme in their views and hence often less tolerant.
I'd argue the reason some grow less tolerant in the later half of their life is just that people often just stop giving a shit.
Yup. Same conclusion I accidentally reached today, randomly thinking about the adage that old people lean a certain way.
Perhaps it's not stupidity, perhaps it's just experience and less emotional volatility. They've experienced how easy it is to be an earnest believer and activist for an idea that later they learned to be misguided, or completely wrong. They've understood that real life is more sophisticated, that simplistic ideas, even pursued with best of intentions, will do more harm than good.
There may be some degree of exhaustion and no longer caring about things too, of course.
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell (1933) in “The Triumph of Stupidity”
I'd bet on this not replicating, but if it were to, it would remind me a lot of Idiocracy. The "smart" people will tolerate the fascists until they are eliminated by them (keeping in mind this nearly happened in recent history.)
Cognitive ability is forged in reading and discussions. After you’ve seen the arguments rehearsed hundreds of times you’ve become inundated and exhausted by the arguments and counter arguments from both sides of many debates.
I'd like if ChatGPT would know what are the most common arguments (as word-for-word as possbile) for X, where it started and how people picked up and how often it gets repeated. For example "crossed state lines"
I find academic fads fascinating. "Intelligence" has become a taboo word, and so we find "cognitive ability" in its place, which is I guess a shibboleth for the in-group when you mean intelligence.
Given how often intelligence is conflated with education or knowledge I don't think they're trying to avoid the word per se they're just trying to be explicit.
They do use the term intelligence in the article itself.
This sort of churning around of words happens all over our culture, not just academia. Back in ~1985 when I was in school it became not ok to say retarded as that is derogatory , and there was shift to use the word "Special". Immediately then "special" become derogatory.
Anyway this is normal human stuff that is always going on, its a bit silly, but its also fine. Find other battles to get irritated about that matter, is my advice.
That's not an academic fad, it's just how languages organically evolve. The connotation of words shifts over time. Retard was ok before, now people say braindead instead. Switching one "medical" condition for another doesn't really change much but here we are because one is considered more ok than the other. In the future it'll be something else again.
Why? And by "why" I mean "for what reason". And by "reason" I mean "a cause for an action or event". And by "cause" I mean "a thing that gives rise to a phenomenon". So I suppose what I am saying is: "What cause for an action or event gives rise to the phenomenon of your belief that "cognitive ability" is clearer?"
Intelligence is used in multiple contexts and that makes it confusing even as a technical term. For example, in the context of national security or corporate strategy, it means "knowledge" rather than intellect.
Have you considered the possibility that “cognitive ability” is a technical term of art in this context, or an “improper noun”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32673100 It’s always worth assuming that terminology used for a technical scientific paper was chosen carefully and may imply certain specific things that those of us not working in the same field might not know.
Still, even the words themselves don’t seem to mean exactly the same thing; cognitive ability does seem more specific than intelligence (especially if you consider the common terms emotional intelligence, general intelligence, and artificial intelligence). It’s pretty easy to find evidence that cognitive ability and intelligence mean slightly different things. https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/12/21/are-cognitive-abilit...
Plus there are different aptitude tests, some named IQ Test (Stanford-Binet) and some named Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT).
The term intelligence has popular connotations that dilute its usefulness as a term of art. Once you zoom in on it, as with any abstract folk concept, you realize that there is no such thing as intelligence and because of that you cannot articulate a sensibly accurate position in a narrow field based on its use.
In any sense of applied science “intelligence” is intractable. The historical equivalent definition would be maybe something like “cognitive ability for logic puzzle solving in Western culture”
Or maybe you were making a joke, but this is a real problem, and “reason” has the same problem.
Doesn't seem to be the case. Quote from the paper:
> Largely omitted from the conversation, by contrast, is cognitive ability—also called intelligence, and which reflects the individuals' maximal (rather than typical) performance when understanding and solving complex problems and ideas.
They are all either sociopaths or psycopaths, two conditions that have in common the the inability to understand and care about the consequences of their actions.
He flew interceptor aircraft in the US military, so obviously he had significant mental capacities. He also abused alcohol for a while in his early adult life, which would explain a lot of the symptoms we saw in his older years as president.
Oh please. He got the spoiled rich kid treatment (son of a congressman in this case). Joining the guard was a way to get out of Vietnam. His 'champagne unit' flew obsolete fighters that were never going overseas. At a time when it was very hard for blacks to get into the guard, his unit had two. (Why? They were Dallas Cowboys).
A smart man would take such a good deal and do nothing to screw up his free ride. GWB was not smart, so then...
You probably don't want to mess with someone who is both dumb and with low political tolerance. Now you can reduce this to avoiding people who are dumb...
Having a look at mentions of "political tolerance" in academic papers, it seems like there's been a great deal of discussion surrounding this since the 50s.
Let’s assume tolerance means tolerance of viewpoints which disagree with our own position.
From an evolutionary lens, if someone disagrees with us, then aren’t we predisposed not to tolerate since tolerating would be at odds with our own survival? That’s the sort of lazy evaluation approach.
A more nuanced take could be that being tolerant also encourages us to revisit our own position and improve it if need be enabling a greater likelihood of survival.
This approach seems to assume that there is one "correct" position that optimizes likelihood of survival. With biology, it's not like evolution approaches a "limit" of the perfect species, so the most valuable opinion for a decision making species is whatever is needed in the moment. In fact, we gain a lot of evolutionary advantage by outsourcing our opinions to other members of the species. Tolerance gives us mental capacity to worry about our immediate problems.
Also consider that disagreement takes psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical resources to act on properly. Disagreement can be expensive and won't always pay off. So that's probably why humans are evolutionary predisposed to agreement.
> Our Danish sample was selected using a registry of military draftees, which has been in operation since 2006. We drew our sample from the subset of the registry which had taken a cognitive ability test.
> For our American sample, 2,766 respondents completed our survey using MTurk in September and October 2014.
> The Danish Draftee Board administered the Børge Priens Prøve (BPP; Kousgaard, 2003) to the draftee sample. This 78- item test has a correlation of .82 with the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Mortensen et al., 1989). We have access only to the composite BPP score
> MTurk participants completed the 16-item International Cognitive Ability Resource measure (Condon & Revelle, 2014).
# What do they mean by "tolerance"?
> First, questions of tolerance concern whether one thinks a group's fundamental rights (particularly pertaining to expression) should or should not be protected. This is, conceptually, not the same as asking whether one likes or has a positive affect for the group in question, although some psychological studies appear to treat it as such.
> To say that questions of affect and tolerance are different is not to say they are entirely separable. The relationship between these domains in fact represents the second key element to operationalizing tolerance. Specifically, tolerance only meaningfully applies to groups that one might be motivated to restrict—that is, those one dislikes or otherwise opposes (Gibson, 2013; Sullivan et al., 1982).
> A third element related to assessing tolerance is that the frequently observed discrepancy between an individual's generalized commitments to tolerance and the tolerance they endorse for specific groups makes the assessment of tolerance a distinctively complicated task (Gibson, 2013)
# What groups did they ask about people's tolerance of?
The actual content of the article is underwhelming and mildly comical. Maybe the collective responses that can be gleaned from the comments here are as telling as the actual study.
Yeah absolutely agreed. This article is widely and wildly retweeted, but seems academically dubious. HN really has a problem with upvoting things that conform to it's worldview.
Full text is paywalled, and I’m not interested in paying to see it, but if I did, what I’d be looking at is the operationalization of “political tolerance” and “cognitive ability”, particularly the former. I’ve found that studies with the kind of conclusion this has often use very dubious methods of operationalizing complex variables, particularly the dependent variable, such that while the conclusion may be true with the given operational definitions, it is far from clear that it corresponds in any close way to what most people hearing the conclusion would understand it to mean without seeing the particular operationalization in use.
- Without access to the article and the author's definitions, I have some concern about the use of the word "ideals" in relation to tolerance as tolerance is less a matter of ideals and more a matter of being able to endure what we regard as disagreeable. It's something like patience. We can't show tolerance or patience for what we regard as good.
- Today, we often construe tolerance as an obligation to accept and agree with ideas you disagree with (or else risk being called a bigot). Those who seem to be more vocal about the need for tolerance are often some of the nastiest people you'll meet. To quote Marcuse, "What is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression."
- What, then, does this article say about our universities? Our culture? Where is the tolerance of people with political views other than those now practically sanctioned by the state?
- That cognitive ability should correlate highly with whatever is held to be an ideal in a culture is not especially surprising given that children who do well in school often do so because of how well they've conformed their thinking to what they've been taught. What is the difference between a child who receives high marks in a school following a curriculum laced with Nazi or Soviet propaganda versus one celebrating liberal or progressive values or something else? I am reminded of a story by Czeslaw Milosz in which he was addressing the problem of why so many intellectuals went along with the tyranny of the communist regime, and why he did not. His poetic answer was that it had less to do with reason and more to do with a "revolt of the stomach". What I take that to mean is that the "stomach" stands here for conscience (which is ultimately a matter of intellect, virtue, and rightly ordered will), and that intellectuals are great at rationalizing the hand that feeds them or threatens them if they do not possess properly formed consciences and virtue. If a certain understanding of tolerance is promoted in schools, then that's the version of tolerance I will expect most graduates to hold. You might even put on a show of considerate listening of the most absurd and obviously bad claims because you don't want to appear boorish and not because you're actually examining the claim seriously.
- While it's true that greater cognitive ability means a greater potential ability to examine claims, raw cognitive ability alone is worthless without virtue. You have to be honest, you have to have practice reasoning, you have to want to examine a belief fairly, you have to possess humility so you can know where your knowledge ends and therefore where your capacity to judge the truth of a claim ends, and you must not be swayed by ulterior motives like the desire for social approval or fear of disapproval. You should also have nothing to do with stupid, nonstarter ideas like skepticism or relativism or whatever else is used to justify false varieties of tolerance.
Now, what is the cognitive ability required to not only understand and be tolerant of other political points of view, but also recognize that this has limits, first and best highlighted by Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance [0].
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them..."
And managing this paradox of tolerance requires even higher cognitive load than simply being absolutely tolerant, but constant judgements, and maintaining stability on a very 'slippery slope'.
1. Scientific articles are almost like luxury clickbait these days. Let’s be frank: how many of us paid even the minimum of 12 USD for 48-hour access to the complete study and know what they even mean by the title?
2. This study in particular will likely engender the notion, that will now be taken as fact, that political intolerance is indicative of lack of “cognitive ability” (whatever that means). This point itself is an assumption, because the abstract consists of stanzas of loaded jargon.
You have betrayed the nature of the angle-bracketed blockquote. Granted my initial response was prior to reading the article, I feel the same independent of the study in question, if not…stronger even, in spite of my errors. Perhaps my error itself is a testament to what I was saying.
To entertain your intentional misquote, of course science has the capacity for danger. Is science some sort of monolithic and infallible structure that is incapable of being manipulated to inflict harm? Are you cognitively able to tolerate that?
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. We ban accounts that do that—as a matter of fact, I briefly just banned you—but then I took a look at your comment history and decided to warn you instead.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on? Among other things that means curious conversation, no personal attacks, and no swipes.
Politically and physically, it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts. Enjoy the ride. The whole thing is quite a spectacle.