Paradox of Tolerance | Hacker News Reader

Paradox of Tolerance

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25 pointsvermilingua21 comments

The best essay I've seen on this "paradox" is by Yonatan Zunger: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...

An excerpt:

> Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats.

Note the full essay is well worth reading.

Citing this "paradox" is a great way to shut down discussion by claiming the other person is being intolerant. Basically the only time I've ever seen this invoked is on Reddit in a dishonest way.

That’s because when you eject a disruptive patron from a bar or stadium, nobody claims you’re violating their free speech rights.

I’ve only ever invoked it against neo-neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists demanding to be taken seriously.

Would you call that dishonest?

Yes, in a good-faith discussion between two parties, not taking them seriously is a quick way to lose ground with lots of smart people and further fringing the people already outside of the normal "accepted" thoughts.

Yes, because the dishonest part is the how often those labels are thrown around with no real basis.

I've seen it used against people spouting QAnon, Big Pharma mind control vaccine theories and support for fascist elements of various governments like USA, China, Turkey, Russia, and Poland. Seems appropriate to me. It's not healthy to tolerate these folks, especially the fascists.

I’ve only seen it being invoked on people who support the freedom of speech. The people who invoke it obviously missed the irony that based on the paradox of tolerance the way to keep our freedom of speech is to pull a GPL and silence these that disagree with it.

Yeah, that's clearly not what was meant with the authors writing. One concrete example would be "should you allow a political party who promises to get rid of democracy and replace it with a dictatorship if they win?" which if you take democracy to its extreme, you should allow, but if you allow it, democracy might disappear, so you should not be accepting it.

How would you propose to stop them? If they're popular enough to win in a national election, they're popular enough to win in a violent overthrow, too. Kicking them off of Twitter would be sticking your finger in the dam at that point.

in a first past the post election system it isn't sure that someone who wins 51% of the vote would win in a civil war, as other factors than sheer numbers apply there.

The word "intolerant" has an implied "of [x]" — when progressives use the term the implied bit is usually "of minorities," or "of trans people," "of women in tech" or something like that. When I call Trump "intolerant," that's generally what I mean, for example.

But of course one can try to be very tolerant about those things and still be "intolerant." I'm intolerant of poison. Just don't like it! I'm intolerant of manipulative assholes. I'm intolerant of people who greedily ignore the health and safety of those around them. Etc.

Some people are very invested in everyone forgetting the "of [x]" bit that comes after "intolerant" because it allows them to make the argument that society has to accept them no matter how horribly they behave. It does not.

Society is defined to similar values where they can drive progress towards a common goal, when values diverge completely where some say family construct is no more valid and should be abolished and others see it as central construct for a healthy society to exist and 'tolerance/intolerance' there is no society anymore.

Open minds and progress forward(in minds) what defines a healthy society, delineation a thin line between tolerance/intolerance - where war is already lost, openness and freedom to discuss any ideas is where progress is made.

This is what it was in soviet russia and politburo dispensing viewpoints anyone having any other ideas was to be force-reeducated. Anyone doing too well etc. etc.

The only time I've seen someone bring this up in real life is to shut down someone else they disagree with.

Tolerance is not a good thing. If you see something which you think isn’t right you should speak up and not just tolerate it. It’s weird that tolerance is connected with the peaceful coexistence of two groups of people. As if this was the only way. People coexist peacefully because it’s the reasonable thing to do, not because they exercise tolerance.

Sometimes people coexist peacefully despite thinking the other person is wrong. Sometimes speaking up about things you think are wrong precludes peaceful coexistence, and in those cases, peaceful coexistence is indeed the exercise of tolerance.

I think the latter case is not a solution to the problem, but rather a form of procrastination. Instead of trying figure out how to resolve the issues in a peaceful way, you declare peace and hope for the best. Doesn’t work in the long run. Of course you can buy time by declaring peace to figure things out and for that tolerance is useful, but it is certainly not the most important thing that assures peaceful coexistence. Any peace it would bring is too fragile. Reason gives you permanent peace.

Generally speaking groups of people that disagree so fundamentally on things should have borders between them. Within the borders there are degrees of tolerance.

Tolerance can be good and it can be bad. Tolerance is not inherently good and its not inherently bad.

> Generally speaking groups of people that disagree so fundamentally on things should have borders between them.

I think disagreeing is not the issue here. I can happily disagree with you on a fundamental level and we live side by side peacefully without you tolerating anything I say or me tolerating anything you say. The problem starts once the disagreement is not just about ideas, but about actions. In this case, we have to sit together and figure out a set of rules that govern our actions. I can safely ignore/tolerate your ideas, because you have a mind where your ideas can exist and I have a mind where my ideas can exist. The problem is that we share the same outside world. And there I cannot just ignore what you are doing, because it is part of my world, too. So, I would argue as long tolerance is about ideas it is not harmful, but also not really beneficial and if it is about actions it is automatically harmful, because it means harm to me if I just tolerate your actions without talking with you about potential resolutions.

In practice, people generally tend to act on their beliefs so the distinction you're drawing is kind of moot. For sure it is possible to argue things from a purely intellectual or academic perspective.

Not entirely, people act according to the law as well. I’m sure there was a situation where you were thinking that a law didn’t make sense, but you acted accordingly anyways. And this law was put in place because two people had a problem with each other which had to be resolved. I’m just arguing we don’t need tolerance, because we have a mechanism in place, called the state, or the law, which resolves issues and not just ignores them, as tolerance does.

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