Because there is no objective way to say whether something is a good idea or bad idea. It's always subjective.
In game theory and mechanism design, there exist dominant strategies. This is an objective truth, and exercising the dominant strategy is objectively better than not.
The earth orbits the sun. This is an objective idea. Fighting against the notion is objectively a bad idea.
Elephants shouldn't come in my house. I value it not destroying things in my home, etc.
You shouldn't deliberately reuse GUIDs as an IDs for things that are different.
Relativism is certainly something that exists, but it shouldn't be universally applied that all ideas are of equal value in all situations.
Socially, sure, use relativism when listening to ideas before coming to a consensus. That doesn't mean all ideas work, only that all ideas are given the same treatment. But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.
This is a subjective statement.
> I value it not destroying things in my home.
This is an objective statement. But other people are free to assign their own subjective value to it. Some people would would like you to suffer from your possessions destroyed e.g. by a trampling elephant. The previous statement was also an objective statement but it doesn't mean you have to acquiesce to it.
> But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.
Sure, but which of ideas are "bad" and which are "good" depends on the value system of the thing/person doing the appraisal. E.g. deliberately reusing GUIDs for different requests may allow bypass of authorization checks — which is a good thing for an attacker, but not so good for the system's owner.
From your POV people play to dominate and it's objective for you. But that's not the case for everyone. Some play to just play.
What good is that when you have to live with a tiger?
If at some point humans had articulated this into "an idea", they would have seen it as a good idea. Which it would have been, since it's unrelated to wolves attacking humans. It's not that humans said "hey, let's go pet a wolf pup, I'm sure their parents won't mind!".
But for who? That makes it inherently subjective. For your obvious bad idea, there are a bunch of contexts where that is a good idea, even though it might be hard to imagine from your own perspective.
Your example is bad for people who live in SF (most likely), but imagine there was a rival town that really hates SF, and wants them to be eaten by tigers. Then the idea of having one tiger per apartment makes a lot of sense, it would almost certainly lead to lots of people being eaten by tigers.
But this is silly. It's obviously a bad idea.
Here's another obviously bad idea: "vaccines are bad and cause autism". You could argue it was a good idea for the fraudster who started this notion, because it gained him fame, but nobody thinks in general about ideas like this. It's obviously false and detrimental to mankind, and therefore a bad idea.
The Heaven's Gate cult also had an obviously bad idea. Mass suicide didn't teleport them to the mothership. They killed themselves for nothing. Had they lived, maybe some of them could have been rehabilitated and found happiness in things that weren't falsehoods. Or not.
But that's a fruitless line of thought in this context.
It doesn't negate the fact there are bad ideas. Heaven's Gate mass suicide was a bad idea (and its justification was patently wrong: no soul was uploaded into the mothership). Bringing feral tigers into your apartment is another bad idea. They are only "subjective" in the most theoretical, I'm-having-an-internet-argument sense; in practice they are objectively bad ideas.
Some ideas -- maybe most -- are neither good nor bad. But again, this doesn't negate that some ideas are objectively bad or good.
Hardcore moral relativism (or is it "ideas relativism"?) is such a boring position to hold. I suspect it's also a dishonest position, in that deep down very few people actually hold it.
From your POV and mine yes.
From their POV no. Clearly that's why they did it.
I agree what they did was probably a bad calculation and incorrect interpretation of the world given what I and you know about the world.
So from our POV it was a bad idea.
And from their POV it was a good idea and that's why they did it.
If they can reflect on it now they would likely call it a bad again.
Again subjective based on what they know about the world now.
No. You're confusing what someone mistakenly believes with the quality of the idea.
In this case, the POV doesn't change that this was a bad idea. Someone can think at the time something was a good idea, but this doesn't make it so, especially if it was demonstrably a bad idea. Few cases are clearcut, but this was.
The Heaven's Gate cultists thought their souls would get uploaded, that's why they killed themselves. Their souls weren't uploaded; therefore by their own logic committing suicide turned out to be a bad idea. They just aren't here anymore to reconsider, which demonstrates it was worse than a bad idea: it was a terminally bad idea.
Another example that POV doesn't necessarily change the quality of an idea: a toddler finding and handling their parent's loaded gun is objectively a bad idea (as is the parents leaving loaded guns within reach of toddlers, if they did it on purpose out of carelessness). The toddler may not know, from their POV, that this is dangerous; but this doesn't make it a good idea.
Some ideas can change with the POV, but you're mistaken in believing every idea does.
Moral orientations fall neatly on two spectra. One is empathy to narcissism. The other is practicality, which can be counterintuitive, vs emotion, which has no concept of consequences beyond the present moment.
Both are "subjective" in the sense that you can't usually argue people from one to the other.
The rest is execution and PR.
There's some social conditioning which teaches people that empathy is good, and rather more that suggests practicality is valued and emotional regulation should be a thing.
But in the real world - and especially in the US - narcissism is far more valued in practice, and emotionality is far more profitable.
Which is why it's a culture of opportunists, corporate criminals, scammers, and manipulators.
Meanwhile, in a very real, literal, sense Wall St is just Heaven's Gate with quarterly reports. The outcome - mass suicide - shows every sign of being identical in the medium term.
The machinery is far more abstracted and indirect, which makes it harder to see when you're inside it. But there's only a difference of scale between a lone nutjob scamming a handful of followers to death and a collection of systems and institutions that are objectively likely to leave most of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century.
I don't think I can buy into this argument. If nothing else, Heaven's Gate did NOT inoculate other people from joining cults.
But it's a patently bad idea anyway, "this can kill people but it's good because it will teach other people not to die".
Capitalism is neck-deep in bad ideas: “buy THIS product, it will add years to your life expectancy!”
To the people selling the product it’s a good idea even if it’s a load of garbage—a quick buck to be made; to the person buying it, terrible idea in fact. :)
Little white lies are objectively okay.
They are subjectively ok. Some people believe lying is always bad.
I think the "true idea" (or let's call it "reasonable idea") when fully spelled out is "sometimes a white lie will be beneficial, will cause less harm, will inspire confidence in the receiver; and conversely, the harsh truth may harm them or be counterproductive". It's not the white lie itself that is the "good idea that is untrue"; the good idea is the reasoning behind the white lie, which is true.
Simply because someone believes something does not move the phenomenon to the subjective realm.
The Earth is not flat.
Some may argue a case for why they believe lying is always bad and would never engage in it. Yet experience proves those most vociferously against little white lies are often lying to themselves on a variety of topics. "Honey, does this make me look fat" is a no-win situation for these individuals.
From your POV yes. From their POV no.
I'm sorry, you cannot use this argument. It's not even in the same category.
Whether telling a white lie is ok is as subjective as it gets. You can pick better examples if you want to make the case that some ideas are objectively good or bad; this one is not it.
You are welcome to test the opposite hypothesis, please send postcards from after the jump.
For example, legalizing sports gambling. It's a good idea in that it makes obscene amounts of money. It's a bad idea in that it exploits a known pathway to addiction, moving money from being spent productively to an exclusively extractive endeavor. Not to mention the other secondary effects of how sports are presented to benefit the sports gambling apps.
Generally it's a net loss except for the company that operates the apps.
This can be applied across a lot of "products" in the tech sphere. app-based payday loans, AI "art" that exploits a common denominator of critical thinking and reduces the quality of art across the board.
Sure the live action Lilo and Stitch made tons of money, but the color grading is dogshit, they removed several important pieces of cultural commentary that was central to the plot, etc all to cash in on children who literally don't know any better.
It's literally more profitable to push slop than it is to put any effort into creating anything. So if "good idea" means it makes money, what incentive is there to create anything above the low "slop" bar? Why do we have to see everything degrade for the sake of profit?
That's what a bad idea going viral is. It doesn't have to be good to get attention. Kids running through people's fences gets attention.
Whether that a religion espouses an alternative worldview in order for its leaders to justify actions that would normally not be justifiable is a big part of how we got into this anti-pluralist mess to begin with.