On the one hand, I think this highlights an important "blind spot" in human thought. Our ideas and creativity are hugely influenced by our environment and prevailing social conventions. It's strange he doesn't use the term "Overton Window", because that's exactly what he's talking about and it seems useful to place his thoughts in context with the existing body.
On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with the implicit assertion that any truth should be acceptable to give power. It's easy to filter, twist, and reassemble the truth to deceive and manipulate. Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected. In fact, the ideology of "free speech absolutism" is itself an orthodoxy specific to a relatively small cultural bubble, and it's objectively quite extreme.
> Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected.
Honest question: When is it ever advantageous to reject truths? I always remind myself of the Litany of Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Of course it is. Trump is a living example of how advantageous it can be for someone to reject almost obvious, self evident truths.
That's an egregious example. Consider another example I saw raised by an anthropologist. It was a tribe that had only bows and spears being being overrun another tribe armed with modern weapons. They survived courtesy of their shaman convincing the young men some complicated ritual made them immune to the bullets. This gave them the courage to take the interlopers on, and a lot of them dying in the process. Obviously the young men who died weren't better off, but their relatives got to continue the young mens blood line as a consequence. The ritual was complicated enough to make it plausible the men killed got it wrong.
Sorry no link (it was here on HN). But if you google "origins of religion war immune to bullets" you will find numerous other examples, and of course the search term hints at a popular theory about why it's sometimes advantageous to reject truths.
Okay, the anthropology example is convincing, if far-fetched. It seems this couldn't realistically happen in a modern society.
The Trump example is arguably beside the point because the previous poster talked about a truth being harmful for the whole society, not for an individual.
I.e. It becomes problematic when it involves human behavior at a stereotypical level. This isn't to say that stereotypes don't sometimes exist for preexisting (non-self-fulfilling) reasons, but even some people prone to sociopathy can leave good lives if properly treated.
Sure. The key is whether a statement is a genuine truth, or a policy based on a genuine truth plus various moral priors. Moral priors aren't genuine truths, they're predilections or rules of thumb.
And even baldly stating a genuine truth enough times will have effects outside of its truthfulness. People respond to truths, they don't just hear them.
On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with the implicit assertion that any truth should be acceptable to give power. It's easy to filter, twist, and reassemble the truth to deceive and manipulate. Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected. In fact, the ideology of "free speech absolutism" is itself an orthodoxy specific to a relatively small cultural bubble, and it's objectively quite extreme.