Open Thread June 2010, Part 4

Will_Newsome

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

This thread brought to you by quantum immortality.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

This thread brought to you by quantum immortality.

Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent? I'm not following this.

Blueberry:

Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent?

That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me. I have never seen anyone state clearly any political or ideological principles, of whatever sort and from whatever position, whose straightforward application wouldn't lead to positions that are utterly extremist by the standards of the present centrist opinion.

Getting people with regular respectable opinions to contradict themselves by asking a few Socratic questions is a trivial exercise (though not one that's likely to endear you to them!). The same is not necessarily true for certain extremist positions.

4LucasSloan16y

Typically, yes. People with extreme views typically don't fail to make inferences from their beliefs along the lines of "X is good, so doing Y, which creates even more of X's goodness, would be even better!" Y might in fact be utterly stupid and evil and wrong, and a moderate with less extreme views might be against it, but the moderate and the extremist might both agree with X, even though the failure of logic that leads the extremist to endorse the evil Y is the belief that X is good.