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Jiro comments on Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 01 June 2015 12:45AM

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Comment author: gjm 05 June 2015 04:25:37PM -1 points [-]

then you should consider disengaging the concepts of "idea" and "offensive".

I dunno. I think it's pretty reasonable to consider ideas like these offensive:

  • "We should just kill all the Jews."
  • "People with black hair are less than human and we needn't care about hurting them."
  • "If your net worth is less than $10M, who cares what you want?"
  • "Everyone should have to affirm that everything in the Bible is 100% literal truth, or be executed."

What's actually offensive is endorsing these ideas, not their mere existence, but I'm pretty sure that's the kind of offensiveness wadavis has in mind.

(Perhaps there are better responses than offence to someone who seriously endorses this sort of thing. If so, I bet it's because getting offended at all is unhelpful, not because getting offended at ideas is specially unhelpful.)

Comment author: Lumifer 05 June 2015 05:01:24PM 1 point [-]

'm pretty sure that's the kind of offensiveness wadavis has in mind

I don't know -- if "endorsing" is the problem, then the target of your starve-of-attention campaign should be the person (people, organizations, etc.) who had endorsed, not the idea itself. But my impression was that wadavis was talking about ignoring ideas.

because getting offended at all is unhelpful, not because getting offended at ideas is specially unhelpful

Well, both :-)

Comment author: gjm 05 June 2015 08:26:08PM 1 point [-]

if "endorsing" is the problem, then the target of your starve-of-attention campaign should be the person [...] But my impression was that wadavis was talking about ignoring ideas.

If the problem is that people endorse the idea then starving the idea of attention might be a reasonable approach. The aim would be to reduce the number of other people getting persuaded to endorse the idea, rather than to change the minds (or destroy the credibility) of the people already persuaded.

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