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MatthewB comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong
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I am having a hard time parsing this passage. Particularly the beginning:
And, when you refer to "Both of these words," are you referring to *crazy and stupid?
It is kind of an awkward sentence. Here's a less concise translation:
You are probably tempted to call people "crazy" and "stupid" pretty frequently, with a fair number of people. Fewer people than that are completely worth writing off. Since you are imperfectly rational, using "crazy" and "stupid" to describe people will tend to make you write them off. But, as just explained, this will result in you writing off people you shouldn't.
Thank you. This is almost what I expected.
I have been trying to use this sort of method (not writing people off as stupid or crazy, when they have beliefs that are less than perfectly rational) for some time now, and it can be confoundedly difficult.
However, I have noticed that by not just writing people off, often I am capable of finding some crack in the wall between us with which to make some sort of communication possible.
I think the meaning is, that on reading something unpalatable, one may be tempted to write it off as "crazy" or "stupid" quickly, and then ignore it, and trying to see the good in it may be more useful; and calling the writer crazy or stupid will make further communication more difficult. So when someone uses those words too readily, that person is called "mean", and seen as not "nice".
Yes... This is the exact sort of problem of which I am trying to make people (the atheist faction) on the Richard Dawkins website aware. The site is obviously a haven for atheists, yet most of them are aggressively hostile to any theistic (or even deistic) beliefs, which in turn, makes communication almost impossible. In many cases, it even turns a person or two away who might have been teachable in terms of rationality (I advocate teaching of critical skills rather than the assault of their beliefs).
Although, even doing this (teaching critical/rational skills) can be incredibly hard when the core of a person's belief is based upon the very irrationality that one is trying to correct. This creates a very obvious Catch-22 situation.