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Comment by kthejoker2 | Hacker News Reader

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If you don't provide a cogent counterargument to Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, I can't take an essay like this seriously. Simply throwing up your hands and saying, "hate exists, let it rain free on the marketplace of ideas" is ... well, not worth a lot.

Also, I love the absence of evidence = evidence of absence argument:

* Germans have stringent anti-hate speech laws * ... yet there are still German extremists!

... and what if the laws were not so stringent?

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> * Germans have stringent anti-hate speech laws * ... yet there are still German extremists!

Yeah I found that a bit of a strange point. I don't think the goal of Germany's anti-hate laws was to magically and completely eradicate extremism. It was to prevent them from getting powerful enough to take Germany back down the path to darkness that they did during the Third Reich.

Not to say that I think their model should replicated or exported, just that I don't think that's right lens to view it through. Just like saying, 'Well the Civil Rights Act didn't eradicate racism, what's the point?'

The "paradox of tolerance" states that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance or else it will become an intolerant society.

That idea is frequently abused by people who don't know what tolerance is. These people conflate "tolerance" and "approval". What they actually oppose is disapproval (they only disapprove of people who disaprove). For them, being "against homosexuality" is intolerant. "Preferring Christianity to Islam" is intolerant. "Making a distinction between trans women and biological women" is intolerant. But this is all wrong. Tolerance is only possible in the presence of disapproval. To tolerate something is to put up with it.

A devout Christian who considers homosexuality a sin but who works with, is friends with, is neighbors with a gay couple is an example of tolerance. He doesn't like homosexuality but he puts up with it.

An example of intolerance is someone who tries to "deplatform" other people for disapproving of this or that. People can approve or disapprove of whatever they like. The qustion is whether they put up with it. As long as they do, they are tolerant.

So hatred is only hatred if you act on it?

There's a distinction to be made between disapproval and hatred. But there's plenty of both to go around.

Neither of them are synonymous with intolerance.

hatred begets intolerance

While true, a source and its causal sinks are still not identical. To whit - in a large enough free society, some will choose to offer themselves up for enslavement. Since freedom begets slavery, freedom is slavery. All’s well that’s Orwell, right?

I keep running into "but who are the intolerant people these days?"

The J K Rowling mess as an example: clearly someone historically very tolerant. Writes some articles about some areas where she disagrees with the current thinking. Is immediately cancelled. I don't see much tolerance there? Who, exactly, is being intolerant here? Or is it just everyone? Maybe I should not tolerate this any more?

We've totally lost the ability to have a civil discussion about anything with anyone where the participants can disagree about the subject. Part of this, I'm convinced, is that social media doesn't actually allow a discussion. Everyone is screaming in the town square.

We haven’t totally lost the ability to have a civil discussion, we’ve just for some reason raised the stakes to mean that we should be able to have a civil discussion in a forum of hundreds of people, behind screens. Civil discussion exists plenty in smaller forums, like group chats and discords and slacks where people care about being civil.

[On the internet, people aren't afraid of getting punched in the mouth] - Mike Tyson

Is there any actual evidence that the paradox of tolerance is correct? I suspect people stopped taking it seriously (and mentioning it in discussions on speech) because it’s advocates always seem to expect everyone to take it on faith, instead of providing a real argument to support their claims.

To me it's like leaving cancer unchecked, and praying it'll go away. Just because you dislike it. There needs to be a point at which we collectively go, nope that's too far. You're done. And we prune back the cancer.

The irony of the paradox of intolerance is that Popper defines it in the context of physically violent and irrational intolerance:

"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."

Most citations of Popper's paradox are used, however, to justify suppression of "dangerous" ideas with very indirect and nebulous notions of harm on the level of social contagion. So the irony is that modern uses of the paradox is intolerance beyond acceptable limits for Popper.Or, in other words, in a society with a developed norm for tolerance, the intolerant can only resort to the paradox to censor ideas as long as people just believe the paradox naively and don't take a careful look at the potential harm caused.

> "Is there any actual evidence that the paradox of tolerance is correct?"

Nope, it's just a sound bite that people latched on to that supports their pre-existing beliefs, even though it's just one philosopher's opinion. Despite the fact that they're appealing to Popper's authority, most people using can't even name the book that Popper wrote that in, let alone any of his other philosophical stances.

That's why I say that there's a Meta-Paradox of Intolerance: "Those who quote Popper's Paradox of Intolerance are usually merely seeking to use it to justify their own intolerance, paradoxically identifying themselves as among those whom the Paradox of Intolerance warns us against."

Ironically, I could even cite Popper's Paradox of Tolerance as itself problematic: the more I tolerate the use of that philosophical argument, the more likely we are to lose the ability to freely express ourselves, therefore we ought to ban its use.

It's a circular argument that assumes its premise is correct a priori without any proof.

Popper's book is more philosophical than historical, and I'm as annoyed with people who only know one soundbite from it as the next guy, but over time I've come to believe that the paradox encodes an important truth: there's no reason for me to support freedom of speech for those who don't support mine. Maybe the way of the future is something like Substack, groups of people who say "we'll protect each other's right to speak freely, but if you want to enjoy our protection too, you must contribute materially". Without such coordination, there's no point playing the good soldier in favor of free speech for everyone. Freedom for those who care enough to coordinate is the only way freedom ever worked.

"there's no reason for me to support freedom of speech for those who don't support mine."

Tit for tat free speech. That's interesting. Reminds me a bit of the GPL, honestly.

Thanks for posting, I'm going to reflect on this idea and it's ramifications.

The paradox of tolerance is simply factually incorrect when it comes to speech. The existence of intolerant speech doesn't exclude anyone. People who are offended don't have to listen. The paradox of tolerance only exists when people or groups are taking action to exclude others. And we don't have blanket tolerance for actions, only for speech. Someone is free to talk the talk of intolerance, but the moment talk turns into action the law swoops in and takes them away.

In short, the paradox of tolerance doesn't hold true at all when we're talking about blanket freedom of speech. If we were talking about anarchy, blanket freedom not just of speech but of actions, then yes the paradox of tolerance comes into play. Some

I can't take your argument seriously. Simply throwing up your hands and saying, "This theory exists, but it wasn't addressed in the article!" is ... well, not worth a lot.

The Popper part is easy: In the 1970s, during the student revolts, many right leaning people (who would be called fascists these days) got platforms on talk shows and politely debated their left wing counterparts.

It did not lead to the Fourth Reich, on the contrary, public opinion has shifted to the left in and after the 70s.

The right wing backlash you see now is a direct result of the insanity and totalitarianism of today's "left", which is really a smoke screen for the corporate-directed suppression of the middle classes (both black and white).

This Popper statement, made in a completely different era, is overused to shut down opponents and justify censorship.

You can draw a line from rush limbaugh to tuker carlson, they built a legion of people who they encouraged not to think for themselves and now they are sicking them on the world

>insanity and totalitarianism

citation needed? Thats literally the same line limbaugh used in the 70s

Would you please stop perpetuating flamewar and posting low-quality ideological battle comments to HN? You've been doing a ton of it on HN, unfortunately, and it's not what this site is for. Regardless of how right your underlying positions are or you feel they are, discussion here needs to be better than this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"The existence of intolerant speech doesn't exclude anyone."

Except people who want to draw certain cartoons.

Do you even think through your statements?

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