>share their thoughts and react to a news, pretty much exactly like you are doing.
While it's somewhat 'natural' to share a thought, I never share it because I want to share it. I'm way too conscious about my time to merely share a topic.
>1. I think diversity is a completely useless metric. 2. I am in favor legalizing discrimination. 3. I believe we should not help people who want to commit suicide.
>I don't consider any of these opinions to be controversial.
Isn't the 'hard' opinion ( Or the opinion that they generally pander to?)of the majority by definition 'controversial' ?
Side note on 1): people who insist on diversity (or play along with the diversity card), will never do well in the long run in an area where competence is important. So it's one of the traits (among many others) that I use to size people up and decide who to associate with. Often when there is one fundamental difference, there are likely to be many other fundamental differences.
This may be unintentional, but I find there’s a meaningful difference between having/making controversial opinions/ideas/statements and being controversial.
The former is (IMO) an important part of a tolerant and thinking society. The latter feels to me like attention seeking.
I didn't make it very clear, that was exactly my point. Any view will be controversial to _someone_ regardless of the view. Which is why I posit that it is impossible to have a community leader posses non-controversial views. Unless of course the community is an echo-chamber, rejecting all who do not assimilate.
> I just read an article the other day saying that the majority of Americans don't feel comfortable stating their opinions in public.
Sure but I am not necessarily concerned about all of those people. For example, I think the majority of Americans still don't believe in systemic racism. Like they don't believe it exists. If they're afraid to share such anti-scientific beliefs in public, then I consider that a good start.
>Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion.
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..
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
You may want to read this comment of mine I put in a thread that probably won't get seen much because it's not intellectually stimulating enough, or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
I'll add a quote from a White Rose leaflet:
> Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness!
> Its easy to think you're right when you assume the other side is racist.
The crux of my experience is that when the thing people disagree with you on _isn’t_ racist/homophobic/misogynistic/etc. then they tend to directly name and openly discuss the subject of their disagreement. The general and innocuous sounding term “diversity of thought” tends to get brought out when the opinions themselves are one of those opinions that people don’t want to admit to so openly.
If people are going to disagree about a choice of software license, or technical architecture, or copyright assignment, or even about moderation standards and free speech, they tend to just directly name the thing they are disagreeing about (as we are now).
I’ll give some ground here and say that in some cases “diversity of thought” isn’t raised because the particular person raising the thought wants to say bigoted things, but at the very least it tends to get trotted out to defend speech that ends up driving people away because of either direct overt bigotry or, more often, a pervasive use of dog whistles.
>All in all, I think it's up to us (as a society) to just be accepting of differing opinions. Everything is polarizing now and anyone outside the collective groupthink is ostracized
When has a society ever been accepting of different opinions, past a certain threshold? I can't think of any examples to be honest.
In the pre-internet past, it wasn't that much of a problem, because there wasn't much diversity, and highly differing opinions were isolated from each other because of geography. People only talked with other local people, who usually didn't travel much, and wider dissemination of ideas came from the press, which was controlled by a relatively small group of people and didn't just publish every person's opinion willy-nilly.
Now we're exposed to opinions from people all around the globe. We've never had to deal with this before.
> If you have opinions you're reluctant to share among peers without wording it carefully, and you've spent a lot of time thinking very carefully about the topic, then there's a pretty good chance you're an interesting person to know.
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.
> Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
Would you mind sharing. The HN hive-mind has started getting to me lately. If I wanted to see well-intentioned, well-reasoned but fairly unpopular conversations being flagged and shut down, and illogical popular opinions up-voted to the top, I'd rather go to FB or some other place.
>I had a negative opinion of it because someone out there believed that you could just shout out your controversial beliefs in a group email and expect something positive to come from it.
I'm honestly struggling to understand your perspective. Would you prefer a world where nobody says anything "controversial", everyone just rolls with the status quo, and nothing ever changes? Why is espousing "controversial ideals" offensive to you? I treat ideas that clash with my own internal logical understanding of the world as challenges that can only improve my understanding of the world. If I run these "controversial ideas" through my logic and reasoning faculties, there's really only two possible outcomes:
- I reject the idea and now have arguments against them that I can share with others
- I end up embracing the idea because I realize that my implicit rejection of it lacked a sturdy logical foundation
Either way, I win—I get a better understanding of the world I live in.
Why would you choose to shield yourself from improving yourself mentally?
> They are arguing that not having a public position on issues means you are siding with the status quo
No, they are assuming that everyone must have an opinion. It seems outside of their reality to accept that people don't care about the things they care about.
Just because I don't voice my opinion on which days I prefer the garbage collection truck to arrive doesn't mean I am a big fan of them arriving on Monday. I just have other things in life going on.
> if someone was a ___ or a ___ I would be really uninterested in their opinions on pretty much anything because they're obviously ___
Dismissing one’s ideas based on group membership is a terrible strategy for truth-seeking. It’s a root of all kinds of problems we see with team-based politics where both sides have turned their brain off and largely accept the entire slate of talking points their side serves up.
> What if someone disagreed with you on one of the issues you bring up?
What if someone disagreed with the assertion that Jews or Black people should be societally accepted? Would you really just say "Kudos to you for daring to voice a dissenting opinion!" and relish the opportunity to have an "interesting discussion" about it?
Some opinions are just dumb and/or hateful and do not need to be politely debated online at every opportunity. It doesn't mean they should be censored, but it doesn't mean they should be treated with respect either.
> Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight?
This. I don't find it difficult - in the same way that I wouldn't walk into an office or a bar and shout something divisive, I just avoid talking about those kinds of things. I just steer clear of politics, really.
> I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those views. What would that world look like?
It would be a much less divided and angry place.
One of my most important life lessons was to learn how to argue in support of positions that I strongly oppose or dislike.
If I only seek to deeply understand things that I support or agree with, then I will struggle to communicate with people from different cultures, or from people that have backgrounds that differ to my own.
This does not require that I agree with things that I oppose or dislike, but it does require that I understand why people disagree with me. Never have I found the answer to be "they are ignorant idiots and/or outright horrible people"
Making it a point to do this has helped me to develop a more nuanced view of the world, and has been essential as a manager, as I can not effectively communicate with the people that work with me unless I am willing to try and deeply understand them.
Effective management requires dealing with all manner of politics, and it helps build bridges and find mutually acceptable solutions when you can speak to both sides in their own language.
>So you see that many people clearly disagree with your opinion and also with your framing.
Yes. But that's not an argument.
Are you content with "other people disagee with my opinion" as a measure of its worth? It doesn't even matter that some judges have disagreed with my opinion.
Some people disagree with things like "not being racist". And judges have also made bad decisions, that now everybody derides, for ages.
If we are to have a valid conversation, it would have be with arguments about the intristic value of what we are discussing. What's good and what should people be doing is not merely a matter of "some people are OK with it".
Even democracy doens't justify things merely by "some people wanting X". It raises this bar, asking for the majority (or the plurality) or people wanting it -- and it even adds other procedures and safeguards in too.
While it's somewhat 'natural' to share a thought, I never share it because I want to share it. I'm way too conscious about my time to merely share a topic.
>1. I think diversity is a completely useless metric. 2. I am in favor legalizing discrimination. 3. I believe we should not help people who want to commit suicide.
>I don't consider any of these opinions to be controversial.
Isn't the 'hard' opinion ( Or the opinion that they generally pander to?)of the majority by definition 'controversial' ?
Side note on 1): people who insist on diversity (or play along with the diversity card), will never do well in the long run in an area where competence is important. So it's one of the traits (among many others) that I use to size people up and decide who to associate with. Often when there is one fundamental difference, there are likely to be many other fundamental differences.
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