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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

When this topic comes up, I feel "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[1] should be mandatory reading. Tolerance isn't about allowing dissent or including marginal groups. Tolerance is difficult, unpleasant, and uncomfortable. If you don't feel those particular traits for any given groups opinions, then it isn't tolerance.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

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Tolerance is "easy" only when you live in a walled-up garden and your only encounter with the marginal groups is through the media and newspapers. Once it becomes an issue of sharing scarce resources together with these groups, tolerance becomes an entirely different matter.

I live in a country where the people promoting "tolerance against the minorities" live in ivory towers and have no contact whatsoever with them. On the other hand, people who live side by side with the minorities are being accused of not being "tolerant enough".

I'll second the "mandatory reading" suggestion. The SCC post has considerably better analysis of these tribal disagreements than most anything else I've read on the subject, particularly the NYT column.

The article is almost cute. Like, "Did you know people are tribal? And did you ever think that might be a bad thing?" It's not a profound new idea, and it's one that's been better discussed elsewhere, from the SCC posts on the subject (see also the recent one on Albion's Seed[1]) to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind[2] to Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes[3] to the many, many articles[4][5] that have already been written about partisan polarization in the U.S. (and probably globally, if Europe is any indication).

I mean I'm glad that a random NYT column is provoking further discussion about an important subject, but there's so much more and better stuff that has been said about it than just what this touches on.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religi...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp...

[4] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-divided-are-...

[5] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/why-are-stat...

Exactly.

Personal anecdote; I am not a religious person but I live in a Muslim country. A Facebook friend who is an atheist keeps making obnoxious posts about religion; calling religious people stupid and atheists intellectuals etc. I was really tempted to honestly tell him to zip it as all of this was cringeworthy and served only to annoy people. But as I was typing a long reply I realized that this is what "tolerance" or more likely "freedom if speech" is all about; it's not "believing people can say what they want" as much as "not pointing out how annoyed they make you feel".

Maybe, although I'm not sure it's clear cut in your case. I don't think that tolerance necessariy requires pretending to agree. Sometimes (although not necessarily in this case) an uncomfortable private conversation is more appropriate. There's a large difference between pointing out to someone one-on-one that you don't agree, versus pointing out to "the group", who you expect to agree with you, that the individual is in the wrong.

I have a sort of similar situation, but about politics.

Does tolerance require that one subject themselves to this sort of thing? For example, I finally discovered I can ignore the shared item on facebook instead of the person sharing it. It's great, like improving the signal to noise ratio.

But is that intolerant? I mean, I'm not doing anything to prevent this friend from sharing this stuff that I consider crap, so is that enough, or am I expect by tolerant society to not ignore things?

You can still tell your friend to zip it and that he's being an arse, and not making things better. In the same vein, if someone else is lobbying the local council for something that you don't like, you don't have to stay quiet just because "freedom of speech".

This was a good read; must have missed it the first time it came around. Thanks for sharing

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