Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Well, I have to say, as someone who's not politically aligned with the sort of people who tend to be the loudest defenders of "controversial" ideas and the loudest opponents of deplatforming (because they somehow always come up with reasons that my controversial ideas don't count), that I am cautiously optimistic about what's being published here.

I was going to make some snarky comment about whether the "controversial" ideas here include the moral necessity of the proletariat revolution, the need to abolish and prosecute the police, a defense of open borders, etc. But in fact the articles in issue 1 (https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/volumes_issues/1... - click "Read more" -> "Full article" -> "View Full-text" on any of the articles to see them) include

- a defense of violent action to protect animals, as done by various animal-rights activists

- a rebuttal of a paper claiming that "women" are "adult human females" (by which I assume is meant "cis females"), which replies that the paper gives no reason to dispute that trans women are women

- a dive into the merits of blackface-ish traditions, which ends up concluding that the Dutch "Black Pete" character is not actually defensible (though others are)

- an argument in favor of "global enlightened despotism" to save the world from climate change

It isn't literally a call to guillotine every billionaire, but it's a whole lot closer than I expected it to be. Yes, there are also papers in here arguing that left-wing opponents of scientific racism are no better than young-earth creationists, that you shouldn't deplatform Steve Bannon, etc. But I came in expecting it to be only that and it isn't.

(I do agree with another commenter's point that, essentially, most of the ideas here - especially the counter-rebuttal by the original author of the "Are women adult human females" paper - are firmly within the Overton window of discourse, and so this journal is not strongly succeeding at widening the window.)

One of the things I’ve realized is that

- if you are in the habit of defending rights, you will necessarily spend a lot of time defending the worst kinds of people: Good, wholesome (non edge case) people typically do not behave in a way that conflicts with others, and if they do, they are unlikely to invoke “muh rights” as a defence.

- the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?

I felt the same sense of cautious optimism because this journal seems to be another manifestation of the two examples I just mentioned above. They are doing the grunt work of allowing people with coherent but unpopular arguments to air them, hopefully leading to a better society for the rest of us.

>> - the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?

Ehh, maybe there is something I'm not picking up, but there's plenty of bad things happened to people (and are happening right now) that were not justified by any 'disgusting behavior'. Ethnic cleansing for example - something that happened in my country, I do not think that people who lived somewhere for hundreds of years and killed due to some lofty ideas about the 'nation' really deserved that treatment.

I think you shouldn't read "considered disgusting" as "disgusting." If one religion in power starts exterminating a minority religion, that's at least hatred, if not disgust. And if you find yourself defending those minorities based on principle, it isn't because you think they deserved how they were treated.

Disgust was a motivation for things like sodomy laws and antimiscegation laws. Genocide's dehumanization phase frequently involves evoking disgust, calling the target vermin, parasites, or a disease.

What does it mean for something to be controversial? Basically, it means there is strong disagreement about the morally justified level of Type I versus Type II errors--how many false positives are worth one false negative, in the wages of morality?

This is of course complicated by the realization that across society, achieving "more" of one kind of justice often necessarily comes at the expense of another kind. In a stable society, the justice hierarchy is fairly well agreed-upon (at least by the "good, wholesome people" you refer to) but things can really go off the rails when profound disagreements develop.

This is how you get "good, wholesome people" to participate in xenophobic genocide or political extermination. The lesson of the 20th century is that these catastrophically tragic inversions of the justice hierarchy can come from extreme positions on either the right or the left of the ideological spectrum.

I think the space of "controversial" ideas is essentially created by the interplay between those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the right which might lead to tragedy, and those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the left which might lead to tragedy. These two groups will likely be mortal enemies for obvious reasons, but a well-functioning liberal society should be able to view both sides impartially and determine when one of them is on to something.

Accordingly, a dysfunctional society is one which starts swallowing the ideas of one side or the other... and I suppose the aim of this journal is to help slow our descent into an internally fractured society of two equally dysfunctional halves.

Indeed, it appears that much of the content is in fact focused on simply constructing fully-specified rhetorical arguments (as opposed to the hand-wavy self-inconsistent arguments that dominate popular media) which derive fairly controversial conclusions from relatively widely accepted premises.

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