10 ms·

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to kee

• moomin 8y ago
  There are an infinite number of bad ideas in the world. No-one’s life would be improved by hearing them all.
  • devtul 8y ago
    In Saudi Arabia letting women drive was/is deemed a bad idea. Some cultures think it is a bad idea to not cut off the clit of girls. There are Islamic scholars that will go at length on how you should discipline physically your wife, for her own good. In those places/societies opinions against all of it would be considered wrong ideas. If you stiffen speech, you don't just stop the society from regressing, you also rob it from progress.
    • anigbrowl 8y ago
      Yes, proposing that a group have more rights that they don't currently enjoy is just like saying a group should be suppressed and have their rights curtailed.
      • 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
        People don’t get more rights than others. All individuals get the same unalienable rights, and that is a universal truth which is self-evident.
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          I disagree, but in any case you seem to be disregarding the context of my comment above, without which it is empty of meaning.
        • zaarn 8y ago
          How is this "universal truth self-evident"? I'd love you to show me that there is a repeatable and measurable experiment that determines that as a fundamental function of the universe, people should have equal rights. Personally, I don't believe that (the fact it's a universal truth) to be true, morals and ethics are a subjective topic and stuff like "everyone should have equal right" is something that most people including me can agree on fairly easily. Other people might not agree.
        • yontherubicon 8y ago
          This doesn't work without a universal moral law, an assumption now deprecated in many circles.
        • jazzyjackson 8y ago
          The founders held those truths to be self-evident, but in some contexts (say , outside of educated 18th century gentry) they must be argued.
      • lmm 8y ago
        It is. The only point where "rights" matter is when two groups of people are in conflict, and each side will always be able to express what they want as a "right" (e.g. making it illegal for other people to describe you in their own terms is your "right to exist").
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          That doesn't follow. If group A enjoys a right and group B does not, and that right is extended to group B, Group A no longer enjoys the same advantage over Group B but hasn't suffered any limitation of rights. To use the supplied example, if you're a male driver in Saudi Arabia your driving privileges are unimpaired by the novel legality of female drivers.
          • lmm 8y ago
            Group A will always find some way to define the change as them losing a "right". E.g. in the US if you propose to extend the right to life that born people currently enjoy to the unborn, many born people will claim this is a violation of their rights.
          • webmaven 8y ago
            > if you're a male driver in Saudi Arabia your driving privileges are unimpaired by the novel legality of female drivers. Your right to drive is unimpaired, but the privilege of driving that you enjoy most definitely is. Most movements to expand rights to new groups are opposed by those who would thereby experience a diminution of their privelege (which is always relative). This is also why you have the wealthy so often opposing policies that will create more wealth for everyone including themselves, because those same policies reduce their relative advantages.
  • 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
    Maybe not. But is one’s life diminished by hearing bad ideas? I don’t think so. For instance, the idea that the Earth is flat is laughable. But my life doesn’t deteriorate nor improve based on that idea. We can all agree it’s a stupid idea, laugh at it, and move on.
    • foxylad 8y ago
      Bad ideas certainly can diminish quality of life. Firstly because we can't all agree that they are stupid and move on - the flat earth trolls are actually gaining momentum, and we've been re-litigating creationism for over a hundred years. This re-arguing ties up an enormous amount of energy that we could spend far more productively. And secondly, when the masses weary of arguing nonsense ideas, there is a danger of them becoming acceptable. If we all stop arguing when the trolls repeat yet again that jews/immigrants/women/gays are sub-human and should be removed, some people will take that silence as assent and the violence begins. So what we need is some kind of snopes for ideas, where our brightest and best could weigh good and bad ideas, and the rest of us could just point to their results. But wait - that's what a university* is! And it's no coincidence that the trolls direct their fiercest fury at academics. *Trump University excepted.
      • toasterlovin 8y ago
        Is there any evidence that there are more people who believe crazy things than before? It seems way more likely to me that there is a portion of the population who are nuts and basically cycle through various conspiracy theories.
    • snowwrestler 8y ago
      Depends on the bad idea. If the bad idea was that you and your family should be killed or forcibly expelled from your jobs and homes, and you heard it discussed seriously and frequently by your neighbors, police officers, and elected officials--yeah, I think that might diminish your quality of life in some ways.
      • CaptainZapp 8y ago
• cptskippy 8y ago
  I think the problem is that small groups no longer exist. The internet is a vast and deep public space just line our planet. You could never hope to explore every part of the internet just as you'd never expect to explore every inch of our planet. So just as it's possible for there to be vast parts of our earth that millions of people will see except for you, it's also possible for there to be vast public forums on the internet that rational thought won't ever reach. * Typo
• mxfh 8y ago
  It's too easy to come up with, spam and spread bad ideas, but actual work to refute them. As long as people are not paid to refute bad actors with an agenda, bad views will eventually stand unchallenged and make life worse for everyone for the profit an amusement of a view. As said refuting partially worked in small communities, but not on a global audience scale where the is no effective way of social sanctions, that would happen in smaller knit ones. So, in the light of this spreading provenly bad ideas shouldn't be made as cheap of a process that it is now.
  • mirimir 8y ago
    Yes. Also, you can refute all you want, but if the bad ideas are better clickbait than your refutations, they will spread faster.
    • reader5000 8y ago
      Maybe there's a reason a "bad idea" is clickbait.
      • true_religion 8y ago
        Hatred simply feels good. Unless you are saying that is something defensible or praiseworthy, then I am not sure where you are going with this thread of thought.
        • reader5000 8y ago
          Who gets to determine what is "hatred"? The natural upvote/downvote economy of the internet or a self-appointed anonymous class of bigtech mass-censors? When you go on the internet would you prefer to see reality or an artificial selection of on-canon content pre-approved by the priest-media class as in the age of television? In many ways it doesn't matter because infotech decentralization will slowly find a way, and forcible censorship will no longer be possible.
          • 8y ago
• ezoe 8y ago
  As much as I hate censorship, There always a bunch of idiots who believes the bad ideas. Those neo-nazis are the least evil compared to　the alternative medicines. Even if you don't believe your parents, you still got no vaccine, and other crazy medical treatments even the comic books can't imagine.
  • mikec3010 8y ago
    Isn't this very similar to what Tipper Gore's group tried in the 80s to censor rap and "hard rock" artists ? "Oh! We need to block this harmful speech. Think of the children! "
    • webmaven 8y ago
      There is a subtle but important difference between blocking speech because children encountering it will supposedly be harmed, and blocking speech because the adults that encounter it will then be more likely to harm children. A similar difference exists between preventing children from gambling, and preventing adults from gambling away the money required to feed their children. Even though the harm in the latter examples is actually easier to substantiate, curtailing spreech because of the harm adults might do (even to children) is rather difficult, so demagogues tend to focus on the former for their bombast.
    • snowwrestler 8y ago
      If a record store chooses to carry less than every album ever made, does that mean it's censoring the ones it doesn't carry? Because the subject of this thread is Microsoft deciding what they want host, not the government telling Microsoft what they are permitted to host.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  So tell me how the "refuting" of the idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax caused the harassment of parents of children murdered there to stop?
  • api 8y ago
    The people harassing Sandy Hook victims should be arrested for stalking and assault or sued for libel and slander. Letting them talk about it on the Internet just helps the idiots incriminate themselves.
    • s73v3r_ 8y ago
      And causes the parents to have to move several times, to the point where they can't even visit their child's grave anymore.
• eridius 8y ago
  I don't have a source for you but I'm pretty sure I've read studies in the past that actually directly contradict what you're saying, studies where people were exposed to refutations of incorrect ideas, and later actually remembered the bad ideas but forgot that they were refuted. Which is to say, if you already know about the bad idea, having it refuted is presumably a good thing, but if you don't know about the bad idea in the first place, learning about it in order to have it refuted may actually backfire.
• usefulcat 8y ago
  > People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. We humans have a strong preference for ideas that support our existing beliefs. This feature, when combined with the proliferation of sources of news and other information (who directly profit from this feature), means that the ones who are most in need of hearing the refutation of a bad idea are also the least likely to ever hear it.
• perl4ever 8y ago
  What if your parent is one of the Sandy Hook parents victimized by Alex Jones? And the thing they believe is that your sibling existed? I mean, at some point you realize that people have figured out repetition is the point and there can't be any refutation if they just do not acknowledge it. Your outlook recalls the way the internet was 20 years ago, when, for instance, holocaust deniers had their little group on Usenet, and idealists could spend eternity providing evidence they were wrong. It seems so quaint now.
• candu 8y ago
  It's not clear that this is true, though. Psychologically, your average human is likely to assign equal weight to the bad idea and its refutation, which is exactly what you don't want. Moreover, this assumes that people hear both the bad idea and its refutation, as opposed to one or the other from inside whatever cognitive echo chamber they happen to inhabit. In some cases (climate change denial, flat-earthers, geocentrism, Holocaust denial, etc.), the refutation may also presume a higher level of scientific, historical, or other general knowledge than the bad idea. Bad ideas that play upon our cognitive / perceptual biases have lasted for millenia, and they are very hard to dislodge from the public mind. To some extent, these are all bad ideas that people have to be educated and/or socialized out of. IMHO, this is one of those precepts that most people want to be true. Unfortunately, we're not yet in that perfectly educated rational utopia :s
• spicymaki 8y ago
  >People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. That seems like a bad idea. Can you prove that given historical data and current data? Show me where the spread of bad ideas on social networks has been a net positive in large populations. Show me where the refutation of bad ideas has been effective in those populations. Provide a time scale as well.
• intended 8y ago
  People keep making this technical argument Technically Sodium reacts with water, so if you keep them apart it should be fine. Does not translate to Carry sodium in your pocket, as long as your pocket is dry. ------ In non analogy terms - this is not how forums work anymore, at all. This was maybe how they worked back in the bbs days or slashdot era. Today - theyre just places to generate noise and saturate human attention. The battle has moved to another level entirely, and people who bring up incorrect information are literally predictable props, used to confuse the audience. Trolls KNOW how a comment is going to be refuted, and form statements which will either 1) dodge the filter, 2) be not vile, but will smuggle/trojan in arguments which are vile 3) overwhelm the ability of people to defend And if all of the above fail, they will harass or use other methods to "win". The objective is screen real estate, to be the dominant thought.
• deadbunny 8y ago
  I totally agree in principle but social media is a bubble, people don't befriend people with opposing views on Facebook, if someone posts something they disagree with they'll make a passive aggressive post and unfriend the person, further insulating them from ideas they don't like. This is one reason every issue has become so polarized these days, people don't hear the detractors they just get their own views amplified back to them.
• pjc50 8y ago
  A certain percentage of people ignore the refutation and end up believing the bad idea. For certain bad ideas (racism, anti-vax etc) this can result in people getting killed.