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by smasuch 3159 days ago
whole lotta people on this "hacker news" website that love to say authority shouldn't be questioned
1 comments

It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: question an authority when you've learned how that authority works and what motivates it. For god's sake, if you want to be a contrarian, be intelligent about it.

Some freshman with a copy of Derrida and a bullshit social justice grievance does not know enough to question 4,000 years of civilization.

Do you? Anyone can question anything. That's how a free and fair society works.

The professor has a lot of detailed knowledge on the topics they cover, but maybe not a radical critique of the underlying assumptions of what they teach.

I'm not super familiar with this case, but glancing over the student's demands, many looked reasonable.

Of course we have a right to question anything. But pragmatism demands that we don't spend an arbitrarily large amount of time indulging arbitrarily unlikely scenarios. These protesters are attempting to use brute force to give their horrible ideas more salience than they'd get in a fair intellectual forum, and that's not fair to people who actually want to learn about the far more well-established ideas that we've honed over thousands of years.
I'll keep that in mind next time an non-economist posts something here about bitcoin