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And comments on Tolerate Tolerance - Less Wrong
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The communities that I've been a part of which I liked the best, which seemed to have the most interesting people, were also the nastiest and least tolerant.
If you can't call a retard a retard, you end up with a bunch of retards, and then the other people leave. When eventually someone nice came to power, this is invariably what happened.
Eliezer isn't suggesting that you refrain from calling fools "fools". He's suggesting you tolerate people who are otherwise non-foolish except that they don't call fools "fools".
Tolerating fools might not be a good idea. Tolerating non-fools who themselves tolerate fools is, AFAICT, a glaringly good idea. If you create an atmosphere where everyone has to hate the same people... we run into some of the failure modes of objectivism.
...I think this post might be over the meta threshold where some people lack the reflective gear and simply can't process the intended meaning! Really, I went to some lengths to spell it out here!
"If you create an atmosphere where everyone has to hate the same people... "
Again: it's why those people have to be hated that's important.
If standards reflect real properties of reality, people who're seeking the truth will tend to generate similar standards. If people have similar standards, they'll tend to reach the same sorts of judgments.
What matters is that our judgments arise from accurate standards, not from merely imitating others. Error leads to condition X, but it doesn't follow that ~X is therefore correct.
If you never feel the need to say "Damn X for not damning Y" then good for you, but I think that is at least sometimes felt, and leads to judgements not being as you describe independent.
Only if the judgers care what others think of them.
There are some very real advantages to being a sociopath if you want to be a rationalist... and some very real advantages to societies that have a sufficiently great concentration of sociopaths.
I steer clear of such communities, unless I need to extract some specific bit of information out of them (and I leave immediately when I'm done). Perhaps that's because in my upbringing calling someone a fool (let alone a retard) was considered extremely rude.
Do you know the person you're calling a retard well enough, our you're judging by a couple of their posts? Would you say "you are a retard" to their face in real life? When you call someone a retard, what do you imply, "your mental abilities in general are very poor" or "you are incompetent at activity X which we discuss here"?
In my experience, actually ejecting disruptive people from an online community can have a powerful positive effect, but replying to them with insults only encourages them and achieves nothing.