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Comment by sayonaraman | Hacker News Reader

> words cause pain

more often than not it's the pain of hearing a different opinion. The "hate speech" label turned into "speech I hate" long time ago.

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How would you attempt objectively measure something like this? The experiences we, as individuals have, is such a small slice of reality. In order to make broad statements, it's crucial to have a lot of perspective - do you feel your experience is sufficiently representative to make such statements?

Honest question: why do I need more perspective than mine to make statements about my experience of the universe? Regardless of how broad or limited a statement I wish to make, the experience I have as an individual is the sum total of my reality. Unless I already value mitigating the pitfalls of undue generalization, why shouldn't I measure the universe by the yard stick of myself?

I'm not defending the original statement. I happen to agree with you, but for different reasons. If it isn't already crucial to me that I have a lot of perspective, then why is it crucial?

The old story where 8 blind people, who have never heard of an elephant, are asked to touch it and describe what they feel. One describes the trunk, and thinks it's like a snake. Another touches the side, and thinks it's a hippo. And so forth.

Our own experiences are so limited, and our brains really like to generalize from very limited data. We are also blind to what we don't see.

Perspective is one way to deal with these limitations.

I disagree that this is a representative parable. Putting eight blind men in a room to touch an elephant is a very controlled, very well-defined, problem; the insinuation is that if the blind people could merely collect the correct data, they'd arrive at the correct solution. Very few things in life exhibit these niceties, and the parable absolutely fails to generalize.

What about for the actual day-to-day of our lives? If I do not already value perspective, then why should I?

If you study decision making, it is prettt clear in the researchers that diverse viewpoints are connected with better decisions. There also an issue of fairness or representativeness: if you don’t have perspective in your inputs, you are going to leave a lot of people out.

The fact is that we are all wrong about almost everything. Perspective helps you be less wrong, in a way that is not possible to do on your own because we are blind to our biases.

Beyond that explanation, you’re probably going to have to form your own researched opinion - I’m not all that interested in trying to convince you. In fact, I actually don’t mind people being unconvinced of this issue! It’s to my advantage if other people don’t have as good of a decision making process.

I'm not asking you to convince me. I do study decision making. Your contention that it's to your advantage for others to not have as good of a decision making process seems like a pretty strikingly perspectiveless position; if you study game theory, it's pretty clear that being in a coalition with sub-optimal players reduces your ability to perform.

If you don't already value other people making good decisions, I can only say: perhaps you should.

This is a great way to capture my view on the topic. How do we draw the line between hate speech that should be controlled, vs somebody's personal problem? If we call a rich white guy a cracker and he has a breakdown, I don't expect many anti-hate-speech people would mobilize a twitter army to defend him. That to me looks like an issue with "speech I hate" vs "hate speech", as you said.

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