> The way to get the most value out of flawed people is to find the best version of their argument and then argue with that. The person isn't all that relevant.
I disagree. Human beings want to have their views recognized. Dismissing their views because there's a better position they could take is extremely presumptuous and doesn't generally make the conversation constructive. Because the other person will recognize their views aren't being heard, and won't necessarily care whether it's because of a misguided altruistic sense of bettering their argument for them.
> The ultimate goal of society should not be to seek out objective truth! It should be to minimize harm to human beings.
I disagree with this statement as I think objective truth is much more useful and important than minimizing harm.
I don’t think humans should be sacrificed, but I think in 1000 years objective truth in science, math, art will be more important than whether my air conditioning was always pleasantly at 74.
It can be and is measured objectively, and certainly we can reason about it: Saving lives is more valuable than scoring goals.
> You have a fundamentally flawed
People can disagree with you without being wrong or flawed or whatever. Maybe you are missing something. The way to knowledge is curiosity about people who disagree with you - otherwise, you are stuck in a cage of your own making.
> it can happily expose people to content that makes them a worse person.
I'll just assume you meant "most people" here, because otherwise it's not an useful argument.
Then this would only be true if one of the following applies:
a. The position you consider "better" can't withstand criticism. (Which I'll just assume you don't believe.)
b. Most people don't want to be a good person. (Probably untrue.)
c. What constitutes a good person is not consistent in your circles and most people have a different understanding. (Unlikely?)
d. Most people can't think for themselves.
Assuming you believe d., let me tell you that most people are probably smarter than you think and are indeed able to think critically. Don't extrapolate from a few noisy but bad examples of humanity.
I think people are suggesting not perfection, but a higher standard and thus increased likelihood of it being correct and requiring a higher standard for proving it incorrect or biased.
Do you have an organization that, if they publish something even if it runs counter to your own opinions, you assume that it is fair and likely to be correct?
Oh, please. You may have some rationale that makes a certain kind of sense, but clearly a lot of others don't care, or value other things. So ... subjective.
> Unless someone's seen a study on this, neither of you is more right than the other.
Well, if one person makes a blanket statement about all individuals in a group, and the other disproves that with a single individual to which the statement does not apply, one of them clearly is more right than the other.
>Different groups are trying to optimise for different things.
While this is true, there is an objective truth about the directionality and magnitude of the cause-and-effect relationships involved, and contradictory statements about these relationships (some of which are necessarily false) dominate the discourse.
> Telling people how everyone in a group of people does xyz is the exact problem you are complaining about.
No, in this case it is actually the opposite. The problem I am complaining about is people ascribing negative aspects (extreme opinions) to people uttering snappy slogans. What I did was ascribe a positive aspects to these same people, namely that they can all describe their opinion as being nuanced. (Obviously the words “every” and “all” do not literally mean “every” and “all” in the mathematical sense, but that’s just how language works.)
> What makes this opinion better than the opposition?
Nothing about the opinion is better than any other. But the only thing we have to achieve is that it is a majority opinion, which frankly doesn’t seem all that hard to me.
“Better” is always subjective, so this is false.
> The issue of course is who gets to decide that
This is an issue exactly because better is always subjective.
reply