[dornan]

This isn't much of an issue when competing ideas are available. If your ideology is so crappy you have to "indoctrinate" people then in an open venue like a library your books aren't much more than a curiosity.

Step 1 of teaching people to uncritically accept crappy ideas is to remove all references to anything that contradicts them. Maybe it's time to revise your stance?

[notarobot123]

Our information ecologies aren't so straightforward as to always ensure the most rational ideas will always out-compete the irrational.

I agree that it's hard to see your own ideological commitments without seeing alternatives. Yet allowing any and all ideologies the same opportunities to compete for public attention is clearly problematic. You don't want to wait until flat-earth theories and holocaust denial go fully mainstream to start to nuance your no-standards policy.

[vintermann]

> Our information ecologies aren't so straightforward as to always ensure the most rational ideas will always out-compete the irrational.

In that case, how do you know the rational ones won out in you?

It's always other people getting brainwashed we worry about, right?

[notarobot123]

I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our perspective. Humility is necessary if we know that our own knowledge is only based on the best information available.

That said, we shouldn't then count all our present knowledge as worthless and any and all kinds of information as equally valid and worthy of dissemination.

I do get your fear - censorship is a dangerous tool that is not always used responsibly. Yet abandoning any kind of social self-regulation in what information circulates publicly sounds a lot more dangerous.

[vintermann]

> I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our perspective

That's not what I said.

[vacuity]

It's much easier to see flaws in others than ourselves. Introspection is a habit that must be developed, and it has layers. The average person is not rational (I would say no one is); it's because of education that we have "rational thinking". It's basically "right place, right time" but with the luck being systematized. Just hope that the people being sorta-rational are on the right track and elevate the tide.