Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon.

If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or not.

As a corollary if you agree with all of the mainstream positions of your (aspirational or actual) social group, whether you realize it or not, you've probably arrived there via social pressure rather than an open, honest, rational method.

So I don't hold an accusation of extremism as an insult, but more a prerequisite of someone capable of independent thought.

That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom, and they tend to be right or wrong in interesting ways. Which is valuable.

View on HN

At pretty much every point in time prior to today, in essentially every field, a large portion of the broad academic consensus was either flat-out wrong or missing a large amount of vital nuance, and eventually a fringe idea developed prominence and replaced it to make academic consensus closer to the truth (we hope).

We'd be daft to think the same is not true today. It is very likely that there is some fringe position right now that is far more accurate than whatever passes as consensus, but we may not find that out for some time still.

Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still. Ideally, we should have fringe positions branching out from consensus in every direction, serving as the filopodia of academic thought.

> Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still.

Which goes to a real problem that is easy to overlook - using a rational method to make decisions is extremely risky. If you get any of your assumptions wrong, it will cause a cascade of stupid-but-logical decisions and conclusions. And basically everyone believes something that is untrue in some sense, so it seems almost pot luck whether the untrue things are relevant or irrelevant in practice. There are a lot of geniuses in history who also believed some clearly stupid things.

Decisions made via social pressure are very tolerant of bad assumptions. If people don't understand why they are doing things but follow the crowd, they probably aren't going to end up anywhere too scary. If they try and make rational decisions from bad assumptions they could end up doing things that are profoundly foolish.

But every other method of reaching conclusions has the same flaw: reaching entirely false concliusions.

Rationality paired with empiricism offers not a foolproof alternative, but at. least one with verifiable checks at evert stage of observation and reason along the way. If it's been found that either (evidence or reasoning) are flawed, then the entire derived chain of conclusions is called into question.

And we cannot dispense entirely with reason, observation, or trust in participants and process. Reason allows leaps beyond (but hopefully eventually validated by) observation, and trust enables a provisional belief to be extended to that which our eyes or minds have not, or can not, seen or grasped.

Groupthink's many failures are merely proof that truth is not a popularity contest.

Just because you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream population, doesn't mean your are incapable of independent thought.

"That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom"

Conventional wisdom usually is a result of many generations passing down wisdom and knowledge down to the next generation. It's not always correct, but I will give it more credibility than extremist views, which are almost always incorrect and based more on emotion than facts.

Extremest views are also usually held by younger people, which immediately should be put up to more scrutiny, simple based on a lack of knowledge and life experience.

Responding to your first paragraph.

If you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream on every issue, it almost certainly means you're incapable of independent thought. Not just one issue.

I still disagree. Many issues usually fall into 2 or a few sides (abortion, taxes, gun control, etc), so statistically, it's fairly easy to come up with your own opinion on any one issue and match the mainstream.

There are also many people that go to the extremist views because they want to be different. They are guided by the mainstream and choose a different side, just so they can feel like a rebel. I don't really consider this independent thought.

Issues are almost never binary, even if political parties love for people to think that way.

Seemingly binary choices like abortion always have the third option of not caring. But again that’s the headline stance policy deals with complexity. If someone feels very late term abortion is an abomination but the morning after pill is fine they need to define where that border exists. The extreme end is something like banning condom usage. Side issues like aborting for genetic issues or birth defects further split the issue.

Taxes are about as far from a binary issue as it gets. Unless you abolish government they need to collect some money, so the real question is exactly how much money they want to collect and from whom. Hand all the different numbers to every American and there is a reasonable chance none of them would pick the same budget as was past last year.

Fourth option, and one that may seriously be advocated by Anti-natalists, is a "pro-death" view which would advocate for as many abortions as possible because all life invokes harm and on balance the ethical harm of even a small amount of suffering outweighs the ethical good of the pleasure of enjoyment - leading to the attempt to create a "benevolent end of the world" through not having children.

The only reason that the person before you didn't include this view is because its outside of their overton window.

Nearly no issues fall on 2 sides. Is there a time of pregnancy where abortion is ok? What guns do you want to control, and what kind of control do you want to have? Are your taxes progressive or proportional? How progressive? Where does progressiveness stop? Do you create product-specific taxes?

Anyway, take 10 issues that fall on exactly 2 sides, and you should never meet two people that agree with them all.

Does the pigeonhole principle not apply anymore? Surely you will find at least 2 people who agree on 10 binary issues in any group of 1025 people, unless this is some roundabout way of saying there are no binary issues.

Do you know how 1024 people stand on 10 issues?

I don’t have to. That’s the point: there are only 1024 possible positions on any 10 binary issues. Therefore, in a group of 1025 individuals, two must hold the same position.

These issues are framed as binaries because it serves the political goals of a two party system. It couldn't be further from the truth.

Actually, this right here is a stellar example of how political concerns and the vying of organizations for power warps the way we think about nuanced concepts on a fundamental level. It ends up the detailed, even-handed treatments make for poor slogans.

People outside the mainstream on a topic who are not deeply experienced specialists in that field have almost certainly fallen prey to well-crafted arguments that advance a falsehood. These arguments are far more common than novel ideas that are both correct and dominated by an incorrect mainstream idea. So when you encounter any argument against a mainstream position you need to be deeply skeptical of it, and if you don't have dozens of hours to research it all yourself you should fall back to the mainstream position.

>People outside the mainstream on a topic who are not deeply experienced specialists in that field have almost certainly fallen prey to well-crafted arguments that advance a falsehood.

First off, these are not mutually exclusive stances. Both you and GP can be right at the same time.

Second, I'd leave it at "well-crafted" and omit the claim that they are falsehoods. Whether they are true or false is the source of endless debate, which is rather the point.

Having said that, my experience is that while you say is often true (I'd argue about "almost certainly"), it's even more true when you find someone who almost entirely espouses mainstream views. They don't believe what they do because they spent much time musing over it and studying it. They believe it because they bought into a prevailing narrative without much thought.

> They believe it because they bought into a prevailing narrative without much thought.

And I'm arguing that this is the most rational thing to do in most cases. If you are outside your field, you should just accept the mainstream position unless you have devoted a great deal of (well-spent) time to the study of the topic. For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods, and many of the falsehoods will have well-crafted arguments supporting them with lots of adherents. Its possible one of those could be the mainstream view but I believe that over time truths become mainstream.

>For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods

Local maxima and global maxima may not align. In any system assembled from smaller systems and interacting with variable components no one truth may cover all outcomes.

Also this neglects that when it comes to profit motivations, there are intests that will sell a mainstream view that is categorically false for their own financial gain.

>For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods

For simple things, yes. For most debated things in society, no. Or at least, not in any knowable fashion. Whether a single payer system is better than a private insurance system is not something you'll ever reduce to a fact, because of the sheer number of variables, and even more importantly, because the notion of "better" is nebulous.

And as someone else has already commented, mainstream opinions on the same topic can differ widely from society to society (healthcare, public vs private services, etc). As someone who has lived in fairly disparate societies, that alone is reason enough for me not to put too high a value on mainstream positions in any society, since I know that if I did, I will often be "wrong".

And then there is the reality that there have always been mainstream views that conflict with science.

Not to take away from your wider point. Yes, I agree that one needs to have fairly good analytical abilities, and the average person often goes wrong when straying from the mainstream because it's easy to fall into "local" logical traps. However, I do think that at times one recognizes the mainstream to be one of those logical traps. In my experience, both elegant and simple ideas have a way of gaining hold in society - particularly in philosophy (think Kant's Categorical Imperative, or the Golden Rule), but reality rarely yields to simplicity and elegance.

> it's even more true when you find someone who almost entirely espouses mainstream views

I've never met this straw man. Please present one so I can try to understand.

Also, I'd love for you to define mainstream which is such a fluid term as to be useless.

> Extremest views are also usually held by younger people, which immediately should be put up to more scrutiny, simple based on a lack of knowledge and life experience.

On the other hand, as people get older they start to lose fluid intelligence and deliberative capacity and instead more regularly fall back on gut feelings and intuitions that might no longer apply in the present the same way they did in the past without thorough examination. There's also simply the fact that things we believed and people may have internalized from the past are often extremely questionable in light of the scientific and social progress that we've made today.

https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/three-behavioral-insight...

> more regularly fall back on gut feelings and intuitions

also known as heuristics. And let's not pretend that younger people approach every problem through some kind of rigorous logical analysis. Young people round here look less prepared than ever for what awaits them (yes, I know we've been saying this since Roman times etc etc.)

> And let's not pretend that younger people approach every problem through some kind of rigorous logical analysis. Young people round here look less prepared than ever for what awaits them (yes, I know we've been saying this since Roman times etc etc.)

I won't argue that, but it would be good to engage with them on the level of rigorous logical analysis, just as it's good for young people to try to understand the underlying reasoning behind older generation's heuristics.

In general, the more time and power we have to devote towards thinking critically about issues, the more we should use it. Heuristics are only valuable when time and resources are short. In a world of overwhelming technological advancement, opting not to look past the heuristic is simply covering your ears.

Certain personality types are more likely to ignore social pressure and pursue logical conclusions of ideals. It's probably no accident that such personality profiles only account for a small percentage of our population as logical conclusions based off of faulty models can lead to huge disasters.

The great mass of people who don't do much deep thinking act as a dampener and probably prevent our society from shaking itself apart as it whips to and fro across the space of all possible ideologies.

This is an argument against teaching critical thinking skills, which in the current zeitgeist is an extremist position. By thinking independently like this you weaken the dampener and risk the disintegration of society.

If that's followed by an adaptive reintegration, it's a feature not a bug.

I don't think that's so much an adaptive aspect of human societies as it is a result of the sort of memes that are effective at propagating themselves. If you are a meme that is facing selective pressures towards persisting for as long as possible, you'll fare best if you exploit human psychology such that you're very hard to get rid of and invoke behavior in the people that carry you that is oppressively dogmatic and ideally prevents the sort of exploratory behavior that might see you replaced by another meme.

That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy - just because it is selected for doesn't mean it is ideal. Legacy is perfectly capable of leaving maladaption. The inertia can and has worked against them too.

For instance it could have been from the history of human group hunting, warfare that sort of cohesion served better than intellectual ability in the short term.

But under modern conditions the utility would invert - muscle power is basically worthless compared to machines for labor for one. Not falling for the stupid delusions of the day can give a lead of centuries.

Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies? The unthinking masses would continue along with disaster while critical thinkere would say "stop!".

> That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy

When we see things in nature, it's always possible that they serve a purpose. Adaptive traits are selected for. It's also possible they aren't.

It seems there are three possibilities:

  - Trait is useful.

  - Trait was useful (no longer is).

  - Trait is neutral.

> Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies?

Shouldn't a good programmer be able to look at a program and its input and determine with 100% certainty whether or not the program will halt?

It might seem so but of course we know from computer science that they [in the general case] cannot. Deep thinking and intelligence alone aren't enough to predict all of the possible routes through a complex problem space.

Some things just have to be tried in order to be understood. And because of that it's probably safe to stick with things that have been tried before over things that seem reasonable to some smart but not all knowing person but that haven't been tried before.

Aren't most mutations harmful afterall?

"Adaptive" is not a Boolean. Contradictory, even mutually hostile, traits can develop because the ecosystem switches between different modes for various physical reasons [1] and different survival skills are optimal in each.

By the time you get to humans you have an incoherent patchwork of mutually exclusive behaviour modes and cognitive approaches - not just between individuals, but within individuals.

[1] Seasonal changes, population cycles, and so on.

The easiest way for an aspiring rationalist to talk himself into supporting a faulty conclusion is to start with a feeling of rightness or wrongness, examine those feelings and pluck out some rationalisations, then mistake them for principles and follow them to extremes.

Which is why highly educated folks have some of most flagrant biases.

If you change 'extremist' to 'unconventional', then we're in full agreement.

Extreme positions for an independent thinker make sense if you're in your 20s or 30s because you form ideas in contrast to status quo, often by swinging in the opposite direction.

By the time you've had a decade or two to test your ideas in the real world, the extremism fades away into either 'things are far more complex than I thought' or 'I'd need to change many minds to make this work and I see no clear path to get there' - which are not extreme positions as far as I can tell.

I think the crux of what you're saying is that if you're a member of group A and you do some "critical thinking", you might find yourself associating with the ideas of group B instead. But you're still a member of group A, so some members of group A will find your new ideas to be incongruent... Of course if you leave group A and hang out in group B instead, nobody will disagree with your "extreme" ideas.

> This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or not.

This seems rather self indulgent when you've set the criteria so vaguely.

Perhaps an example of an extemist view would be beneficial.

The tax system is incredibly poorly designed everywhere. Rather than the hodgepodge of different races, levied at different places and times for different reasons by different levels of government a single tax is best. I’m partial to either a Georgist Land value tax or a consumption tax but I’m sure there are other good options.

Large scale immigration is incompatible with a welfare state unless immigrants are highly selected, as in Canada or Australia. If the US continues its march to open borders the welfare state will be dismantled or citizenship law will change to have multiple categories of rights for different types of citizens and residents.

Civic nationalism is incoherent unless people can be expelled from the community. Ethnic nations make sense, because people are loyal to their kin or cultural group. A group where people had to sign on to an explicit statement of values makes sense because then there’d be a very clear signal of whether you were in or out. Liberalism only works with a huge majority in favour of its values and without that huge majority that agree on most things it will slide towards political violence and likely civil war without vicious political repression.

> The tax system is incredibly poorly designed everywhere. Rather than the hodgepodge of different races, levied at different places and times for different reasons by different levels of government a single tax is best. I’m partial to either a Georgist Land value tax or a consumption tax but I’m sure there are other good options.

So you don't agree with how taxes work and think you could do better? I challenge you to find someone who DOESN'T think that.

>If the US continues its march to open borders the welfare state will be dismantled or citizenship law will change to have multiple categories of rights for different types of citizens and residents.

This is already the case. There are many services open to only US citizens, and others open only to citizens and lawful permanent residents.

>Civic nationalism is incoherent unless people can be expelled from the community.

In the US we refer to this as "jail".

>A group where people had to sign on to an explicit statement of values makes sense because then there’d be a very clear signal of whether you were in or out.

Many Protestant Christian denominations refer to this as "confirmation". I believe there is an equivalent concept in Catholicism; Bar/Bat mitzvah serves this purpose in Judaism.

...

My point being, all of these views are completely mainstream.

> So you don't agree with how taxes work and think you could do better? I challenge you to find someone who DOESN'T think that.

If you can point to a country that has only one tax or a party that has that position I’d be much obliged.

> This is already the case. There are many services open to only US citizens, and others open only to citizens and lawful permanent residents.

The US has different classes of citizenship, with different rights?

>> Civic nationalism is incoherent unless people can be expelled from the community.

> In the US we refer to this as "jail".

Timeout is not the same thing as being told you’re no longer part of the family. US citizens can’t be deported. Plenty of states allow ex-convicts to vote.

> Many Protestant Christian denominations refer to this as "confirmation". I believe there is an equivalent concept in Catholicism; Bar/Bat mitzvah serves this purpose in Judaism.

The context in which I was saying this was membership in a national community. I am unaware of any country that demands citizens affirm a statement of shared values to partake in political life. The closest any country has is conscription for male citizens and it’s not that close.

> The US has different classes of citizenship, with different rights?

The US has citizens, many different classes of lawful residents, and unlawful residents, each group having different rights and different levels of access to government services.

So, not really extremist, just boring, nationalist fear mongering that is nearly old as time. You are entitled to your opinions and I mine. You probably think I am incapable of independent thought and I think you're a narcissist for thinking that.

I’d be surprised if you were incapable of independent thought. If your political views all fit neatly within a single party’s mainstream it could be true but there’s enough that isn’t subject to political shibboleths that you likely hold some unconventional views. Just being the kind of person who takes part on a discussion board like this is (weak) evidence of the kind of engagement with ideas that renders taking a party line unlikely.

Nationalist views are not as old as time. They postdate imperial views substantially. If supporting open borders or massively increased immigration to developed nations makes me a nationalist the label rests easy. I don’t think open borders is compatible with the current constitutional settlement in the US. If that makes me a nationalist so be it.

> your political views all fit neatly within a single party’s mainstream

That wasn't the claim I was addressing.

Second option bias is a real thing. People are often quick to criticize the mainstream but then fail to apply the same skepticism to the ideas that follow. There is tremendous risk in unexamined skepticism.

"Social pressure" comes in many varieties. Many, perhaps even most, extremist positions aren't sustained by truth seeking based on perceived evidence, but by 'evaporative cooling' of fringe social groups, pushing the group away from reasonable stances and towards more distinctive and extreme ones.

This is exactly why the term for what this article is criticising is "Critical Theory".

Leftist postmodernists are damn good at critiquing things, and calling out why one should reject a mainstream position.

Of course, they forgot that the seductive belief in rationalism - specifically in the claim that some human recognize reality more correctly than others (and education is what separates the wrong from the correct) - is most likely the beginning of every from of hierarchy and oppression that they critique.

Why is it that Foucault - an author who writes all about how shitty schools are - is required reading in many undergraduate classes? If he saw people being graded for regurgitating his ideas, he'd be spinning in his grave!

The Academy is where critical theory goes to be neutered. And it must be, as it would be too subversive without tenured academics to keep the proles from direct action.

Well, you have to master the language of critique before being able to critique the language itself.

No you don't. Lay-people offer great criticism against "language" without knowing the "language of critique".

I don't need to say "Your epistemology is built upon a reductionist and totalizing conception of the self". I can say "There is no all-knowable truth in the world if there is no directly identifiable self"

The language of critique itself is designed to reach certain conclusions and be blind to others. It's like a calculator with no odd numbers.

> If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another.

This is a big claim. Evidence?

What sort of evidence would convince you?

Here is an easy example through history - republicanism vs monarchy. Previously advocating for self governance was radical. Now advocating for a return to ruling monarchies is extremist.

John Brown was also an extremist but now not being an abolitionist is extremist.

>> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. >If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another.

Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much?

That said when talking about society, critical thinking is easy, coming up with credible proposals is hard.

> Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much?

The unity of views on many, many different topics among followers of a single political party would be vanishingly unlikely unless they were taking their beliefs and talking points from their fellow party members rather than thinking for themselves. This is not a US specific thing. Normal people don’t reason from principle, they reason coalitionally, based on the two most important questions in politics

Who, Whom?

They're not unified by their views so much as by the "other" that they share. A common enemy helps them overlook their ideological differences, so those differences are not often discussed. This gives a stronger appearance of groupthink.

This is mostly wrong, because there is only one reality. As trivial as this may sound, if you're interested in reality, then you will invariably get to the same conclusion as many other people. Of course, there will always be some shifts in knowledge and at that time a fringe position can be the right one, but these are rare - very rare, indeed. Generally, the fact that there is one reality means that scientific opinions will converge and they do so fairly quickly. The majority of the work in science is adding a little bit here and there and refining theories, not coming up with radically new theories that contradict existing opinions in a radical way.

I'd be wary about areas in which this is not the case. There are such areas, particularly in the humanities, but these are the ones with major methodological problems.

But most of what people care about are not "mere facts" of reality. What is the correct answer to the questions of morality, politics, etc?

There's entire books written which contradict every point you've brought up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own (his stuff on epistemology not the rest)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I know most of these books and issues, I'm a philosopher myself. Most of them do not contradict anything I've said, so you'd need to be a bit more specific. You will not get me very warm with Feyerabend and Kuhn, though.

On a side note, what you're doing is appeal to authority. Not every successful author in philosophy is really an authority, philosophy doesn't work that way.

>because there is only one reality

Mostly, yet this view also has significant problems. The biggest issue is that as complexly increases, ability to completely traverse the problem space decreases. Combinatorial explosions commonly happen. The more variables you add to the equation, the larger effect local variables will have on the answer people arrive at.

Claim is not about the ideas but people. It is like a fudge who build a website completely from scratch vs one who did it in Wordpress.

Talking to first one is interesting, second one not so much. The second website is most likely much better then first though

I also believe there is only one reality.

But thinking that we currently understand it in its totality is complete arrogance. (I even doubt we can achieve it)

An subjectivity shows us that that understanding is way harder than it seems.

extremism /ɪkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m,ɛkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m/ noun the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism.

Update: My point is that you are redefining what "extremism" means. e.g. The far-right is extremism. To think that you can create colonies in Mars in the next 10 years is "unorthodox".

If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

The word extremism has nothing to do with right or wrong itself.

If I live in an area that has had a stable climate for 1000 years, but i had at least some evidence that an 'extreme' change was going to occur, most people would consider that extremism. Especially since people will radically have to alter their behavior to survive.

In general extremist are incorrect, yet due to black swans, not always.

>If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extremist political groups live by isolating their membership from mainstream society. Mainstream society's way to reduce the reach of the far-right and far-left is to reach out to their low-level rank-and-file members to sooth their fears and invite them back to mainstream society.

This simply doesn't work in a bipolar system. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposite party's extremists is directly counter to either party's political goals, as it encourages mainstream opinion to shift in the opposite direction of where they want it to. The only winning play is to demand that extremists be ejected from the dialog altogether.

Are you against freedom of speech?

Actually, I support the opposite, which is aggressive initiatives for education to inoculate people against lies and manipulation.

However, until our resources are actually devoted towards that, there are political statements that can be made on a mass scale that are the functional equivalent of yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater. I don't begrudge people for doing what they can to prevent this kind of public manipulation from getting amplified.

I think everyone should be allowed to say whatever they want, but I think they should have to face responsibility for the results of that speech once it echoes across the world.

This ignores the existence of a world outside a single country's political system. Opinions that are labeled "extremist" by the political class in one country, but which are held by leaders in other countries that don't suck, are about as easy to exterminate as cockroaches.

The Chinese government uses a massive Internet censorship apparatus to prevent organized challenges to its preferred ways of doing things. This has worked, but its necessity reflects the fact that key Chinese-government ideas are memetically uncompetitive on the world stage; China is severely handicapped when it comes to winning foreign hearts and minds, and it also isn't great at persuading its own talented citizens to stay when they have the means to emigrate to the West (though it is now benefiting from Western infighting).

Both sides of the US political class agreed to define "extremism" in 2015-16 to encompass sensible opinions that ran contrary to the political class's common interests. However, they did not have the Chinese government's Internet censorship capabilities at the time, so there was a winning play that ran contrary to your claim, and somebody executed it effectively.

Extremism isn't an understanding it's a way of doing things.

I don't imagine that people are getting called extremists for jumping on the communism bandwagon, as an example. They're getting called extremists for how they're behaving, how they're promoting their ideas.

>There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns - trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws - with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt.

You can think of the marketplace of ideas as a sort of dominance contest. The academic extremists I've encountered don't keep their claws sheathed, they're willing to do whatever it takes to make sure their ideas are the winner. And that's a problem because it poisons the discourse for everyone and promotes anti-intellectual sentiment.

If you're being called an extremist just for having some out-there ideas, well I don't know what's up with your social group but I don't think that's normal. Extremism is about tactics, it's about the fanaticism that keeps you from being able to co-exist with other ideas.

Well call both "extremism". What is bad, because they are very different.

Like the GP says, extremist ideas are the very natural consequence of thinking by oneself. But extremist actions are the consequence of the very misguided arrogance of thinking that you are correct just because your ideas leaded you there.

The thing is, there are two different things meant by the word "extremism", and the word itself serves to conflate the two.

One is what you discuss -- object-level positions that are extreme in some way. This is, as you say, no vice.

The other thing that is meant by "extremism" is what one might call "meta-level extremism"; it includes such things as trying to silence one's opponents rather than argue with them, the use of violence, etc. This, obviously, is a bad thing. (And while I called it "meta-level extremism" above, what it really is, I'd say, is illiberalism.)

For this reason, I don't like the word "extremism", as it conflates the two. Of course, it's possible that the reason the same word is used for both is because, for pyschological reasons, in humans these tend to go together. But they are logically separate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com