The elephant in the room in many current attempts to encourage "diversity" is that a genuinely diverse range of opinions and/or beliefs ends up being not welcome at all.
Maybe you think spaces would be better if we allowed unmoderated bigotry in the name of free speech, but a practical consequence is that when the bigots move in, the people that they are targeting go away. The end result isn’t “diversity of thought” and it was never intended to be- it just ends up being one more space where people get bullied into leaving.
- President Obama, complaining he can't be a bigot.
https://www.thefire.org/obamas-abc-news-interview-transcript...
If you a actually read the article you quoted, the main argument he’s making is essentially “well, they may be bigots, but you need to learn to argue with bigots if you want to make progress”. That may or may not be true on a college campus (and at a public college the argument is likely immaterial because a government run institution is, and should be, bound by free speech in ways that private forums are not and should not be).
Open source projects and technical communities are different- they have different goals, needs to operate under different constraints, and so should behave differently.
If anyone is radicalizing others it is those that treat everyone that does not 100% agree with them as radicals that must be pushed out instead of as people.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
> in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance
I have a lot more respect for people whose ethics are not conditional on the behavior of others.
Imagine you live in a society that allows personal gun ownership. Obviously, in such a society you still don't want people running around shooting each other willy-nilly, so you make a law: shoot someone, go to jail.
Now imagine someone pulls out a gun and shoots you. Result: you're dead, they go to jail.
However, you'd really prefer not to be dead. So imagine that someone pulls out their gun to shoot you, but then you pull out your gun and shoot them. Result: they're dead, you go to jail. It's what the law says, after all.
This is undesirable to most people because it looks like you've been punished for defending yourself. So we'll change the law: if someone is pointing a gun at you, you can shoot them without going to jail.
Now imagine that someone pulls a gun on you, then you pull a gun to defend yourself, but then they shoot you anyway. Result: you're dead, and they don't go to jail. It's what the law says, after all: you were pointing a gun at them. Oops, it's equivalent to having no law at all! This is the worst form of the law so far, and it's also the same thing as the paradox of tolerance.
The way you solve this is the same way you solve the paradox of tolerance: you say that the initial aggressor does not receive any protections if their own weapons are used against them. This produces a result that matches people's intuitions. This also creates a lesser problem, where people try to toe the line of aggression and goad someone else into making the first move so that they can justly retaliate, but it's still a vast improvement on the situation that intuitively matches how people expect things to work, which just so happens to involve ethics that are conditional on the behavior of others. The condition in this example: violence is acceptable, if it's in self-defense.
EDIT: I see this is being downvoted, would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
In historical context, it's seems squarely aimed at the paramilitary organizations of various movements popular around the 1930s or so who physically injured people for saying things they disliked.
It’s about not tolerating people who make it impossible to have debate, not declaring arbitrary sets of views intolerable or beyond the pale.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Note that Popper is not claiming that "fists or pistols" are a necessary condition for not tolerating intolerance: they're a final stage of said intolerance. Popper explicitly says that we might reserve the right to preempt intolerance before it reaches the point of its followers resorting to violence.
The problem with tolerance and intolerance is, that a few people (a loud minority) think they're the universal good guys, even in cases where their "good thing" is incompatible with itself.
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
As long as nobody is bringing pistols to tech conferences or starting fistfights in the hallways, Popper would not support excluding attendees for having intolerant ideas. Perhaps if contributors to your open-source repository are doxing and SWATting each other, putting lives at risk, then Popper would exclude them. But as long as they're just making offensive comments, Popper would not "claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force." (It might still be better to decline their patches so as to avoid being associated with them.)
I wouldn't go even as far as Popper, because his argument eats itself; as demonstrated in this thread, when people start applying his ideas, Popperism itself becomes an intolerant idea that, according to Popperism, we should suppress by violence. Moreover, any political position that advocates that the government take an action is advocating that some policy be imposed on the unwilling parts of the population by violence.
Much more sustainable is to suppress the violent actors and protect those who are merely calling for violence, while remonstrating with them to change their minds.
Wow, this ironically sounds exactly like the people spouting off about needing to "fight intolerance" in the past couple years.
It’s also interesting that the more extreme version of the “paradox of tolerance” is very close to the legal reasoning used during the Red Scare to justify bans on communist parties.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is widely misunderstood to be a licence to be intolerant yourself. For the last time : it is not.
Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.
Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance. You can perfectly tolerate people who hate women, who hate men, who hate gays, who hate the rich, who hate the poor, who hate any and every religion, ideology, way of life, identity, worldview or personality type. You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.
It's well known in software that a data structure can have infinite readers, but the presence of even a single writer either necessitates that the data structure is completely private to the writer, or an explicit and consistent writing policy needs to be devised to coordinate the writer with the readers and possibly other writers. Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is a restatement of this basic observation in the context of human societies. You can have infinite tolerance and diversity, as long as not a single ideology or group "writes" their conflicting views to society. If you have a group that does that, then you must choose whether you will cede all control of society to that group, or to set a strong writing policy that is much less permissive than infinite tolerance.
Stop using an argument for tolerance as an excuse for intolerance.
If you let them say whatever they want on an online forum without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat, or something similar. The intolerant views take over.
Argue all the philosophy you like, practical experience shows that every time someone tries an unmoderated forum in any medium it ends up a cesspit of intolerance.
Where they pose a danger of it.
If you let them do it before reacting, you've already lost, and that's the point.
Anyhow, it's not widely misunderstood, AFAICT, since when it is invoked it is invariably with the strong implication, and usually the explicit statement, that that is the threat being addressed. You might at times question the judgement behind the assessment of the risk, but that's not a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance.
