Or with people who may have wildly different views from you, but whom you trust to disagree amicably and remain tolerant of those views.

I started a private discussion board a few years ago for just this purpose: it became impossible to have a good-faith discussion of almost anything on the open web. Within the boundaries of a private community, you can have some expectation of safety that you can't have if the audience is the entire world, as it is on Twitter (or even HN). With that safety you can disagree more with less fear of consequences, which is how it should be (and was, before all this shit).

Just friendly advice: you're never going to have a meaningful discussion or a productive debate if that's how you treat a differing opinion.

Yes, you certainly can.

Looking through the thread I see a lot of what appears to me to be honest discussion, and I would also consider it of reasonable intellectual level. Those common "unspeakable" opinions you allude to tend to drag the quality of discussions down, rather than lift them up.

But if it helps, everyone is aware of those opinions, it's just that most people just don't find them interesting or worth discussing.

On the contrary, I love having these discussions.

That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..

This sort of works, but it also disproportionately empowers psychopaths who are not vulnerable to social moderation and in fact can abuse it against other people.

The people who are good at winning debates in real life mostly constitute the politician class, who are A) usually pretty psychopathic B) seemingly pretty unconstrained by moral censure.

The internet is cool because it kind of makes everyone into a psychopath (because there’s no emotional connection), so actual psychopathic political types don’t have any advantage over normal people.

It would be better if you could create a community where no one was a psychopath but I’m not sure this is possible at scale, or even at all.

You and I have a right to not do anything with those people. But for the sake of discussion, I'm willing to do that with people where we disagree on reasonable things. I'm not willing to have a civil discourse with people that adamantly refuse to believe facts and think I'm a part of a larger conspiracy.

Does that mean censorship of all of these people / ideas is the answer? I don't think so. But I know that if I ran a platform where people were discussing holocaust denial I would ban them. I'm willing to admit I might be a hypocrite on that front, but alas I am a human.

Isn't that a restriction you are putting on yourself? As I see it, it is your requirement that someone has to share your point of view, and to get it to be so has to be your cost, not theirs.

Everyone things something someone else is doing or thinking is immoral all the time. It even has the composition problem: I think its immoral to sabotage people because you think its immoral! Thus who is the immoral!

> It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.

I agree. There is a price you pay when you have a contrarian view point. You must. However today that is not vocal disagreement, its firing people and exile. Some twitter mob victims have become unemployable. Thats not reasonable to me.

Others will definitely have views on topics which aren't always going to agree with your own.

The more you know somebody, the more likely you'll find a difference of opinions that annoys you somewhat. This is highly likely to happen with views on politics or religion.

The average person, however, can live with having differences just fine. Only those with severe mental issues such as narcissism will make it an actual problem, for themselves and others.

Well how the fuck are you supposed to be able to do this if all wrongthink is banned? Because things like "women are equal to men", "race doesn't matter", "slavery is wrong", etc were most certainly wrongthink to begin with.

This is how every open and critically minded person feels nowadays.

There is a clear line between two groups:

1. People who think the best way to learn, educate and explore other people's views is by having an open discussion, saying uncomfortable things and having an ear to be corrected and showing mutual respect.

2. People who think that saying something uncomfortable during a discussion is an act of offence itself and therefore must be muted even if it takes some form of aggression by one or many people in order to mute that person. A discourse is only allowed if people immediately subscribe to a specific ideological idea and people are not allowed to get to that point through saying or asking the wrong things but must somehow be born with those views or otherwise need to be extinguished by the mob.

Unfortunately the 2. group is getting increasingly more violent and aggressive in their approach which makes the 1. group increasingly more aware that they are in fact in danger to just be themselves and learn about life through sometimes tough discourse or mistakes.

And it's especially hard if people discussing delete their discussion.

When civil political discourse is a valid option, then sure, I agree. The point is that people exist in this world who:

1. Want to do evil things. 2. Cannot be reasoned with. 3. Are smart enough to take advantage of the goodwill of people who think they can be reasoned with, and use it against them.

It's hard for me to take seriously any position that doesn't acknowledge these facts. You can't just close your eyes and pretend that everyone is basically good, does evil only because evil has been done to them, and can be brought around to see reason.

What does make you think that? Have you seen or experienced something like this before?

Your thought/ idea makes perfect sense to me and there surely is more potential to transfer ideas/ ideologies/ etc more compact than we do most of the time. I too, don't believe in good and evil humans but that everyone is capable of everything (decision-, not skill-wise). But 1000 words would be quite frustrating, because if I (a random on the internet/ on a party/ or elsewhere) am able to 'flip' you, what's gonna stop the next random dude from flipping you back over. If it's that easy to make you change your opinion, it is not sustainable. As I'm writing this, I realized, this is the very reason I stopped discussing with anyone with whom I don't get value out of myself as well. It's just not worth it - at least for people that aren't close to me.

This isn't really why people are awful. The truth is people want something to say, but most of the time their actual opinions are kind of boring and mainstream. So they end up roleplaying as individuals who have some heinous opinion, and revel in the attention they receive.

Some people are awful in different ways, by supporting someone who is regarded as terrible for instance. Eventually, little cliques form, and toxicity brews.

I don't think this is correct - this is an extremely common view, in several senses of the word. It's especially popular among people who have never tried to use an unmoderated forum with more than a few members, and the sort of people who make moderation a necessity in the first place.

>because it's a convenient lesser evil

This is the true in the sense that pretty much all of society is a convenient lesser evil than "everybody agrees generally what the right thing is and does that all the time without exception".

Though we won't be able to make good on the bet, I would confidently wager a supermajority of people who fit that criteria are not particularly interesting to you, or any given individual for that matter.

In my experience, most people who spend a long time thinking about their controversial beliefs aren't especially insightful or interesting to those who disagree with them. For low hanging fruit we can just look at politics. But even beyond that, the universe of controversial ideas is so vast that it's unlikely a person's given muse will be compelling or insightful to other people.

Participation in a discussion usually implies an interest and a willingness to spend your time considering various arguments. If you only limit your exposure to arguments made by people who agree with you in other domains then I have to conclude your interest in this space is not very high.

This is depressingly true. Tolerance of only the ideas that the group agrees with, otherwise it's [insert something dumb here] and it needs to be stopped!