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Comment by rhexs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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