Followup to:  Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate

One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flaws in reasoning.  This doesn't strictly follow.  You could end up, say, rejecting your religion, just because you spotted more or deeper flaws in the reasoning, not because you were, by your nature, more annoyed at a flaw of fixed size.  But realistically speaking, a lot of us probably have our level of "annoyance at all these flaws we're spotting" set a bit higher than average.

That's why it's so important for us to tolerate others' tolerance if we want to get anything done together.

For me, the poster case of tolerance I need to tolerate is Ben Goertzel, who among other things runs an annual AI conference, and who has something nice to say about everyone.  Ben even complimented the ideas of M*nt*f*x, the most legendary of all AI crackpots.  (M*nt*f*x apparently started adding a link to Ben's compliment in his email signatures, presumably because it was the only compliment he'd ever gotten from a bona fide AI academic.)  (Please do not pronounce his True Name correctly or he will be summoned here.)

But I've come to understand that this is one of Ben's strengths—that he's nice to lots of people that others might ignore, including, say, me—and every now and then this pays off for him.

And if I subtract points off Ben's reputation for finding something nice to say about people and projects that I think are hopeless—even M*nt*f*x—then what I'm doing is insisting that Ben dislike everyone I dislike before I can work with him.

Is that a realistic standard?  Especially if different people are annoyed in different amounts by different things?

But it's hard to remember that when Ben is being nice to so many idiots.

Cooperation is unstable, in both game theory and evolutionary biology, without some kind of punishment for defection.  So it's one thing to subtract points off someone's reputation for mistakes they make themselves, directly.  But if you also look askance at someone for refusing to castigate a person or idea, then that is punishment of non-punishers, a far more dangerous idiom that can lock an equilibrium in place even if it's harmful to everyone involved.