from Hacker News

There’s no good way to kill a bad idea

by spcelzrd on 5/1/17, 12:50 PM with 28 comments

• by carsongross on 5/1/17, 2:40 PM

  The article demonstrates a specific way that "bad" ideas can become more deeply ingrained.

  I am mildly agnostic towards the amount of contribution man is making towards temperature change, I've read reasonable people with various opinions on it. I consider myself an environmentalist, I think the clean air act was a good thing and I am fine with government regulations around the environment, since it is a commons towards which we have an intergenerational stewardship relationship.

  However, when I see skepticism towards man-caused climate change lumped in with believing in lizard people, I can feel myself physically becoming more dug in in my skepticism.

  This is not rational, of course: it's a "yeah, well fuck you" reaction. And perhaps it reflects poorly on me. Certainly it will earn me no karma here, nor among the people I usually associate with. But, nonetheless, it is a phenomenological reality, pushing me more deeply into what the author considers a bad idea.

  > Once a view is popular with the general public, or just within your own ‘tribe,’ it takes a lot of courage even to question it to yourself

  Indeed. One wishes this criticism was raised more frequently to self-criticism.

• by DonbunEf7 on 5/1/17, 1:53 PM

  Edit: My point is that killing an idea is necessarily hard, because ideas automatically have moral superiority over humans. We as humans must intentionally choose to endorse certain ideas which serve our interests, and we must do so knowing that we are indelibly influenced by those same ideas.

  Pirsig, from Lila:

  "Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for society to kill an idea."

  Persig elaborates, explaining how e.g. civil rights in the USA are an example of an idea coming to kill off a societal practice (racism) in favor of an idealized society (post-racist egalitarianism).

  Hofstadter, from GEB:

  "It is not such a bad image, the brain as an ant colony! ... It is not such a bad image, the brain as an ATN-colony!"

  In this section, Hofstadter explains that the brain could be viewed analogistically to symbol networks, and explores how individual symbols could exist in many different contexts but are nonetheless coalesced in meaning when doing actual computation.

  Similarly, ideas are like symbols in the network of humans, and the computation carried out by humans communicating in their daily lives automatically gives rise to higher-level idea networks which use humanity as a substrate, not unlike how Hofstadter's anteater perceives the intelligence of an ant colony on top of the individual ants in the colony.

  A final tweet [0]:

  "Nobody likes hearing that they are merely an idea-forge, a virus-hold for memetic mutation, a propagator of the idea-marketplace, do they?"

  [0] https://twitter.com/corbinsimpson/status/733424172651581441

• by nemacol on 5/1/17, 2:04 PM

  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect

  https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/

  What should be evident from the studies on the backfire effect is you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate. As they match your fervor, the same thing happens in your skull. The backfire effect pushes both of you deeper into your original beliefs.

• by interfixus on 5/1/17, 3:00 PM

  “Once a view is popular with the general public, or just within your own ‘tribe,’ it takes a lot of courage even to question it to yourself,” says Blackford. For example, just 50 years ago, homosexuality was banned in many western countries. “It would have been a very brave person to put their hand up and say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay.’”

  And there you have it. The absolutes slither and shift. One generation's unquestioned truth is another's indisputable anathema. Today, it would take a very brave person to put his or her hand up and say, "There's something wrong with being gay".

• by programminggeek on 5/1/17, 3:35 PM

  Here is the funny part. This article is a bad idea and it now can't be killed.

  Turtles all the way down.

  P.S. If you believe you are the rational one and that other people are irrational, you are acting irrationally.

• by YCode on 5/1/17, 2:08 PM

  I suppose it's in the title, but I was disappointed the article doesn't even attempt to provide some solutions.

  The one proposal the article makes is poorly thought out.

  It's become clear that in today's political culture ignoring or dismissing bad ideas without properly addressing them with at least feigned respect pushes the on the fence population into echo chambers where the idea can be confirmed as good, e.g. anti-vaxxers, flat world believers, etc...

• by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 5/1/17, 2:03 PM

  Yep, we still believe in the humors theory of medicine. In fact, there is a popular app to help remind people to get their blood drained regularly. There are also billboards reminding everyone that washing your hands is a waste of water. We also believe that the sun rotates around the Earth. As such, since we are the center of the universe, everyone laughs at the crackpots who suggest that we would ever want to travel to other planets or even the moon. /s

  Of course, there has been a good way to kill ideas - evidence with real world effect and patient engagement of naysayers over time. It makes me sad as from the 1500s - 1900s we had so much invention and progress and revolutionized people's thinking about the world, and we the heirs of all of that despair that we can't get rid of bad ideas. If so, the fault lies with us, and this fatalistic view is a bad idea that needs to be killed.