| > Somehow considering or even listening to a different idea has become viewed
as weakness and something to be avoided. Important distinction: This is not about weakness and avoiding harm to the
self. It's about caring for and preventing harm to the society we live in. Relevantly, framing things with a language of personal weakness (both "this thing I want you to stop doing is weakness" and also "this thing I want you to start doing is not
weakness") is a common indoctrination tactic for manipulating people. IMO, you should worry about its relation to how you said what you
just said and where the idea came from. When those "different ideas" are flat out lies, malice, greed, and anti-science peddling, then
it is something to be _prevented_ not avoided. Because we've learned from
centuries of directly observing how regular people respond to them even when
those people are strong and capable. Ignoring everything we know
from historians about human behavior causes real problems over and over again,
so it's probably best not to. > I personally do not consider all 'sides' of an issue to be equal, and am
capable of considering an argument without normalizing it. Even if this is true, history has shown repeatedly that it's not a sound model for preserving civic wellness. > I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea
is resonating, especially if it is harmful. We already understand why. Indoctrination works. That case was solved a very
very long time ago and there is literally no mystery left. Giving malicious
indoctrinators a credible and far reaching platform where the respected host jovially
nods along always proves to further their agenda no matter how much we wish
it weren't the case. On the other side, we have evidence and research on deplatforming now, and we see that it works. > Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were
initially considered antisocial and selfish. You should be aware that this subtly invokes any number of informal fallacies:
equivocation, relativist fallacy, false equivalence, questionable cause, texas
sharpshooter, probably others (that is the problem with the informal ones). A person who says that women and black people should not have equal rights is
the opposite of a pro-social narrator. Trying to represent it as otherwise is
bad news. |
I very much favor the platforms that allow an open exchange of ideas and allow participants to make up their own mind. I've generally learned much more from those that disagree with me than those that agree.