[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.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

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.

Why do you disagree with it? That is very much a relevant question...

Because it privileges our -scale- in something the same way we used to privilege our planet and then our sun, as having some special place in the universe, is one answer, and the reason I started looking for alternatives. (Hey, I noticed a trend.)

It's hard to communicate the why - essentially, however, I found a brilliant physicist who was contemporary to the development of the theory who had been working on an alternative explanation which drew on his subject expertise (Johannes Rhydberg). I found him because I had independently came to the same alterna... (read more)

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