[SEQ RERUN] Tolerate Tolerance

MinibearRex

Today's post, Tolerate Tolerance was originally published on 21 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flawed thinking. This makes it very important to tolerate other people's tolerance - to avoid rejecting them because they tolerate people you wouldn't - since otherwise we must all have exactly the same standards of tolerance in order to work together, which is unlikely. Even if someone has a nice word to say about complete lunatics and crackpots - so long as they don't literally believe the same ideas themselves - try to be nice to them? Intolerance of tolerance corresponds to punishment of non-punishers, a very dangerous game-theoretic idiom that can lock completely arbitrary systems in place even when they benefit no one at all.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Tolerate Tolerance was originally published on 21 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flawed thinking. This makes it very important to tolerate other people's tolerance - to avoid rejecting them because they tolerate people you wouldn't - since otherwise we must all have exactly the same standards of tolerance in order to work together, which is unlikely. Even if someone has a nice word to say about complete lunatics and crackpots - so long as they don't literally believe the same ideas themselves - try to be nice to them? Intolerance of tolerance corresponds to punishment of non-punishers, a very dangerous game-theoretic idiom that can lock completely arbitrary systems in place even when they benefit no one at all.

Had the epithet existed then, Galileo surely would have qualified even by the most conservative use of the term.

I guess Galileo had read and understood Aristotle, he just disagreed with him. Conversely, the cranks who infest Usenet and similar places usually have at most a very vague idea of what Einstein said. So I don't think the two are analogous. (See also)

I understand quantum theory (the specific theory of quantized energy, not the catch-all way it's used to commonly encapsulate modern physics), I just disagree with it. Yes, it's been pretty much a million for a million out of its predictions. I still disagree with it.

Am I or am I not a crackpot?

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