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That's all well and good, in the dreamy theoretical lands of academia. But when ideas turn into actions, and the actions have been seen before and we know the c

• xaa 10y ago
  Can we? Of course. Should we? I am not so sure. There are two possible kinds of ideas you could be talking about. One is ideas which have truly been tried before and have been actively and soundly rejected by the vast majority of the public. Let's call these "discredited" ideas and use as an example slavery, (some kinds of) eugenics, or flat-earthism. Then there are the ideas that you may feel have no good evidence behind them, but are still controversial in the public. Many economic ideas are in this category. For truly discredited ideas, I think the best response is to ignore these people, as they are usually not thinking clearly and it doesn't help anything to spend more time on the issue. For the ideas which are still controversial, the logic I stated above still holds. The ideas themselves should be vigorously attacked using evidence, but not the people. I think this principle goes far beyond academia. I just used it as an example of reductio ad absurdum: it seems obvious that we wouldn't want to penalize academics for doing their jobs, which is making up and testing new ideas that may be wrong. But the idea of tolerance for holders of diverse opinions -- and the reasoning for why it is important -- is a cornerstone of classical liberalism and played a key role in why the Founders set up the country in the way they did.