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Salemicus comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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Just think about how much more persuasive fighting dirty sounds if the whole fate of the human race hangs in the balance. As is, there is an underlying assumption that we have infinite time to grind down our opposition with passive logical superiority.
If the fate of the whole human race hangs in the balance, then it is particularly important that the correct decision is taken, not just the one most driven by tribal feeling, loose rhetoric, etc. Therefore it is particularly important that we are able to evaluate all ideas as accurately as we can, and particularly important not to spread lies, etc.
Of course, if you assume going in that your ideas are infallible, then fighting dirty can look appealing. But if the fate of the human race hangs in the balance, then you can afford the luxury of that assumption.
Okay, so, we don't know what the right answer is. But we know what the right answer ISN'T, right? We know that Westboro Baptist Church isn't going to lead the human race into a new golden age. Why not try to limit their influence?
And even if there were some seemingly bad ideas that could, through some twist, actually be good ideas, there are still nonzero costs to considering them. Like if there is a 0.00001% chance it is "the answer", but a 99.99999% chance to waste everyone's time and making some people angry, we should probably discard it. Why waste time when we can pursue that handful of ideas that have a much higher chance of improving the world?
I'm going to assume you meant that you can't afford the luxury of that assumption, and actually yes I can. In fact, I have no choice. I have a finite amount of computational power and if I go through all possible permutations of ideas then the probability of me coming out with The Right Answer becomes vanishingly small. Instead, I can apply some very defensible heuristics to write off huge sections of thought wholesale. I should focus my efforts on ideas that are not obviously wrong.
See Yvain's post on Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes.
You do realize that most people have the same opinion about the Singularity?
In the case of the Singularity, I'd say that most people don't consider probability and very largepayoffs.
This is not a blanket reason to defend all ideologies against censorship. The analysis of many religions also implicitly assumes that there is no cost to tolerating competing religions, whereas there is a definite cost to hearing out many of the worst political ideologies.
It's almost as if the slippery slope works both ways. If you can't filter anything, your energy is drained by a thousand paper cuts.
I wasn't aware that the general public was angry about Singularity nerds. I was talking more about like teenage neo-nazis. Extremely high probability to contribute nothing, piss a bunch of people off, and waste all our time.