There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago
bonald.wordpress.com
bonald.wordpress.com
Yep i'm 100% ok with the world shifting left from literal nazi germany. Left of nazi germany is still pretty far to the right.
Hell, a thousand years ago, maybe you could have hypothesized the existence of dragons. No, the space of hypotheses is massive, and we keep cutting into it, making small enclaves of things that resist falsification.
This necessarily reduces diversity. I'd be a fool today to believe in miasma theory.
The simple backpropogation approach is most common and IMO accounts for much less diversity in ideas. The idea that every choice was right/wrong based on the side that won ignores that with a different geography some of the choices and the winner would have been entirely different. It also tends to remove options that may have been superior but were not chosen by either the winner or loser of a historical conflict.
However I do think it's worth thinking about how the structure of online communication affects idea formation and the perception of consensus. The gamification and quantization of social interactions which exists on social media platforms does have an effect on which types of ideas are mainstreamed, and which ones are marginalized, and I think it can be argued that this has not always been for the better.
Look at the free software movement. By mainstream standards its very radical. Do you think it would have ever been able to take hold without the instant global communication of usenet and other computer networks?
Heck people are constantly talking about how social media is full of echo chambers where people are divided into groups that all have the same opinion and never get challenged.
Probably it's possible for both of these things to be true.
Did you learn anything new after reading this article? Where have you read the same argument? Is it even true that a 100 years ago there was more diversity of ideas? How would you even measure such a thing?
The best I can tell you is to stop thinking the old ideas if you want room for new ideas.
It reads like the writer is trying to say something, but isn't really concrete about what that is.
Without any concrete criticism of "Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism" it's hard to know what this is trying to say. As others have done in the comments, this vague language leads one to guess what they mean. The principle of charity should be used, but it's hard when the same complaints are often used as a dog whistle by the extreme right.
What exactly is the problem with de-nazification? Explicitly violent and genocidal isms like Nazism should not be tolerated in good faith discussions. They should not be "debated" as Equal viewpoints.
To call it brainwashing is a stretch. Nazism has lead directly to millions of deaths in the name of Nazism and not something else. If that's not something we can agree to fight, then what is?
My world view is not even remotely 'left wing', and yet I have no difficulty whatsoever in detecting neofascist propaganda. It's really not that hard, and yet it's prevalence seems to be driving us to the brink of chaos.
"German de-Nazification would be called an ideological tyranny if it were ever objectively described, and it brainwashed a generation of Germans."
That feeling when you’re so het up about the Modern World you conflate communism and “liberal democratic cosmopolitanism” as “tHE lEFt”.
The true travesty in intellectual diversity is the American right wing abandoning any semblance of intelligent debate. Cue Shapiro calling Andrew Neil a leftist, or almost anything written by Jordan Peterson.
Haven't reread recently, but it was interesting at the time, and sort of helpful for keeping me motivated to get myself out of a bit of a rut. What parts of his writing did you find to be indicative of abandoning intelligent debate?
It’s a set of truisms glossed up with some long words?
As much as I love metaphors ("Metaphors of Movement" concept and therapy by Andrew Austin or in general metaphors explained by Lakoff in "Metaphors We Live by") - Peterson is simply fantasizing. It might seem to be deeply thought out, but it's not. Would love to share with you great article about his book, but it's unfortunately in Polish. If you care to know then google translator might help https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&u=https:/...
It definitely is common among people who want to advocate for far right beliefs but run into the slight issue of the most famous of those groups being culturally synonymous with evil. Simply defining the Nazis to the other side of the spectrum is a very convenient solution to that, and probably pretty convincing to most people who are usually not familiar enough with the history and politics of Weimar Germany to point out how utterly ridiculous of a statement that is. (The NSDAP was helped into power by the royalty-aligned conservatives to prevent a left victory, while the left fought the forces that would become the SS in the streets to try to stop them, before they were put into the first concentration camps. Coincidentally, they also sat on the furthest right side of parliament, opposite of the communists.)