Those who dig up old messages with offensive content to expose to millions of people want to ruin reputations. We cannot empower these people to influence conversations about the future of humanity.
Likely the best solution would be for people to speak frankly under pseudonyms that maintain a separate reputation, that way you can have both a intellectually honest conversation and also reduce reputational damage with the hopes of having your less unpopular views influence the culture/policy or to clearly lie in such a way to achieve a pragmatic end without having to commit to such lies during discussion with your intellectual equals. This seems better than talking in private with your fingers crossed. As for the dangers of cognitive decline, you probably only need a small fraction of the population to be von Neumanns to maintain societal progress, since ideas have a marginal cost of 0, if anything assuming you can control the negative externalities of being low IQ like crime and such, having a low IQ population might be easier to manipulate and control, as such i think it really makes sense to focus more on making more von Neumanns and ensuring your the group in control of the populace instead of being worried about the decline of intelligence in the average person, its not as if it was all that impressive to begin with. I should also say im really sympathetic to people who make philosophically unsound or invalid arguments and instead rely on emotion and making things taboo and treating rational discussion with extreme hostility. The reason for this is because even though such a strategy isn't effective at coming to the truth of the matter, its probably the most effective pragmatic strategy independent of whether people realize it. Feminism is a pretty good example, perhaps in the near future we won't even need the label because we have all accepted roughly the same very extreme form of it.
Great post, endorsed.
What is the significance of the two other Substack posts excerpted at the bottom? Are they the equivalent of Wordpress "pingbacks"?
"A culture that stifles debate around difficult topics will fail to discover certain important ideas."
Such as: Cowardly rejection of truth ends your bloodline.
...Better luck next lifetime, a-holes!
Likely the best solution would be for people to speak frankly under pseudonyms that maintain a separate reputation, that way you can have both a intellectually honest conversation and also reduce reputational damage with the hopes of having your less unpopular views influence the culture/policy or to clearly lie in such a way to achieve a pragmatic end without having to commit to such lies during discussion with your intellectual equals. This seems better than talking in private with your fingers crossed. As for the dangers of cognitive decline, you probably only need a small fraction of the population to be von Neumanns to maintain societal progress, since ideas have a marginal cost of 0, if anything assuming you can control the negative externalities of being low IQ like crime and such, having a low IQ population might be easier to manipulate and control, as such i think it really makes sense to focus more on making more von Neumanns and ensuring your the group in control of the populace instead of being worried about the decline of intelligence in the average person, its not as if it was all that impressive to begin with. I should also say im really sympathetic to people who make philosophically unsound or invalid arguments and instead rely on emotion and making things taboo and treating rational discussion with extreme hostility. The reason for this is because even though such a strategy isn't effective at coming to the truth of the matter, its probably the most effective pragmatic strategy independent of whether people realize it. Feminism is a pretty good example, perhaps in the near future we won't even need the label because we have all accepted roughly the same very extreme form of it.