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Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Makes perfect sense to me. The free exchange of information is more appealing and less threatening when you have more information processing capability to begin with.

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That is why businesses routinely encourage their workers to exchange salary information amongst themselves.

Sure, but that’s not how science is made. Lots of things “make sense” and are ultimately proven wrong.

> The free exchange of information is more appealing and less threatening when you have more information processing capability to begin with.

I struggle to get this. "Dumb" people feel threatened when others can freely express themselves?

Yes. Just look at the "words are violence" alphabet people.

I've noticed that it's hard to feel threatened when someone you trust says something you don't understand. Can imagine the reverse to be true.

Well yes, why wouldn't they be? It's to their advantage that nobody talks if they are not very good at talking.

Lets imagine a workplace with two teams with two not very intelligent leaders, and two intelligent up and comer. One team leader goes "I'm open for suggestion, talk to other teams, talk to my boss" and he's replaced in a year. The other boss goes "We need to enforce a hierarchy, only juniors speak to seniors, only seniors speak to me, only I speak to other teams" he might have that job for YEARS as the other managers go "wow that guy suddenly started delivering results and I thought he was dumb, I guess I was wrong".

If you imagine both team leaders are smart, than the smart team leader who allowed open communication will probably outperform the one who didn't since they're not threatened by the junior regardless.

If you're not very smart, coming up with ways to make people less free to speak can show wisdom.

So how would you protect those with less information processing ability from the consequences of more free exchange of information?

Protect them from what? I assume you're presupposing that "free speech is dangerous" here?

Protection from their perception of threat.

Or from exploitation by people with more nimble minds.

The very last thread I was in somebody was expressing how unsympathetic they were to the scammed because they were stupid enough to get tricked. This wasn't a very popular notion, most people wanted to sanction scammers for their speech to protect the scammed.

Quite a lot of the laws around restriction of speech are specifically designed to stop smart people from exploiting less smart people. Smart people have to be censored or they will hurt less smart people.

I don’t think anyone needs protection from perception (unless clinical). I do think, however, that as a society we’re doing a terrible job of distinguishing relativism (personal perception) from reality (universal axioms).

The idea that someone has their “own truth” separate from the rest of the universe is one of the most absurd ideas in pop culture, imho. That a large portion of the population considers their perception universal reality makes it difficult to progress culturally.

Determining and disseminating truth is not straight forward but abdicating to relativism feels like devolving to the Middle Ages.

Usually people don't associate the Middle Ages with "relativism", it's more known for the crusades which were hardly an endeavour rooted in cultural relativism, although there were certainly relativists in the Middle Ages.

As you say, determining and disseminating truth is not straight forward and I think you really have to read between the lines when you hear people say things like "Hear her truth" is that these are often people who allege certain classes of people have long had their actual testimony ignored by society because of who they are. Also most of the time people say this, they're saying this regarding fundamentally uncertain situations where uninvolved parties can never be 100% sure of the truth. So there is a political/practical/contextual aspect to these epistemological statements.

There are actually things you can do such as making information more accessible, improving education, making ones ability to argue affect your resulting quality of life to a lesser degree through mechanisms like social welfare programs, etc.

You make people smarter, and you make the world easier to operate in if you're not smart.

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