Guybrush

The meat of your post is basically you arguing against some strawmen. Couple that with your "vapid as ****" comment and it's pretty good signalling of the tedium that it can be to engage with you in anything like a serious discussion.

You don't know what my european perspective is. Your description of the free market of ideas is not representative of any deeply held beliefs that I have. Neither do I think I'm blathering on about echo chambers and cancel culture without considering anything else. Am I blaming radicalization on itself? I didn't know that. You assume I dismiss "material conditions" as explanations. Do I? Thanks for letting me know.

It's like you're railing against some manifesto you think I wrote, but it's mostly from your own brain.


Please don't make strawmen. You spend some time on the market of ideas, so against my better judgment, I'll clarify a little some things that I believe. What I actually believe is that ideas are much like genes. Ideas can spread from brain to brain and they sometimes mutate, creating altered or new ideas that are either more or less competitive. There's a natural selection of ideas like there is for organisms so that ideas that are not well adapted to the environment tend to become fewer or die out while those that are better adapted become more numerous.

Sometimes, ideas clump together for mutual benefit to form complexes, like the idea of God and the idea of hell are both more successful when they work together. Complexes may form religions, conspiracy theories, political beliefs or just narratives about the world. For many ideas and complexes, most brains hold one of each type and so variants of a type are in direct conflict (ex. "trickle down economics work" competes directly with "trickle down economics is a lie").

The environment that ideas have to adapt to or die out is part human nature and part human culture. We generally remember and care more about things that make us happy, scared or angry. And then we make cultures that affect how we feel about certain things.

For myself, I am very anti religions. I think they're a stain on humanity and that we'd be better off without. I could want to cancel them, but to me that's a bit like treating a symptom and not the cause. The things that make people religious might still be there. A better way, if a little idealistic, would be to better the quality of education, an education based on empirically evidenced knowledge about the universe that also included the philosophy of critical thinking. Instead of attacking religious ideas, you would instead change the environment so that religious ideas do worse and lose the competition against rational ideas. Instead of combating a negative (religions), you promote a positive (education) which would change the environment and help tip the balance in rationality's favour.

Something that may happen if you instead aggressively attack ideas and shame people or whatever is you mobilize their defenses. They identify you as an enemy (it's probably plain to see), so your ideas can't penetrate them. They hunker down in their own echo chambers and the environments of those echo chambers is one where the ideas you oppose or even despise actually thrive.

This is why I asked you about Trump and if you saw it coming. When you cancel something you think is bad, someone else may be cancelling something you think is good. You think you're all woke and then the other echo chambers are actually bigger than you thought possible and they get to decide on the next fascist president.

I can't say for sure that cancel culture isn't good, because I'm not 100% sure. It could be that cancelling Dave Chapelle is the best thing for the world. But Dave is a guy who has brought a lot of joy to so many people and who also has spoken on some issues in a positive way. I still don't know what he's said this time around, but it seems sad to define the man entirely by a bad take during a stand up routine. I also don't think people like John Cleese and Richard Dawkins should be barred from speaking at unis and I wanna watch Harry Potter with my kid, even if Rowling has some bad ideas.

I'd rather help change the environment than cancel artists. We tend to focus a lot of attention on combating negatives, but it may actually be better to spend that time promoting the positives. It's a better way of influencing the "free market of ideas". You stand a better chance of getting your ideas under the radar and past the defenses of your would-be opponents. Before I get accused/strawmanned for it, I am not saying we can't still disagree. Do so, loudly if you want.

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