Readings on Paradox of Tolerance?

Once someone explained tolerance vs philosophy of tolerance that made sense to me.

Tolerance is just a word that means that you are okay with things that you find annoying/repulsive. E.g. you were annoyed but tolerated flight delays.

Philosophy of tolerance is that you belief that all people deserve to live in peace even if you don't agree with their lifestyle, skin color, religion etc. AND if you really believe in it, you will fight against any ideas that disagree with this philosophy.

The tolerance as philosophy is not a logical problem. It is dealing with human behavior. It doesn't require that in order for you to adhere to it, you must also tolerate intolerance. Though in my view, sometimes it is okay to stay quiet when your racist uncle is whining about "others" at family dinner.

I think Popper's cred comes primarily from one of his acolytes getting very very rich, and using that money to amplify a low-information signal.

"If to argue like [Professor Popper] should ever become a frequent practice among writers on serious subjects, all cool and rational discussion would quickly come to an end. . . . His manner towards Aristotle is the sort that an unkind man sometimes adopts towards someone whom he believes to be his intellectual inferior; and, as is usual in such cases, it tells us more about the contemner than the object of his contempt. . . . There is here a failure of sympathy . . . on Professor Popper’s part; and he is the poorer for it."

- John Plamenatz

"Karl Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able to even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says"

- Leo Strauss

I decided to launch my big question: Is his falsification concept falsifiable? Popper glared at me. Then his expression softened, and he placed his hand on mine. “I don't want to hurt you,” he said gently, “but it is a silly question." Peering searchingly into my eyes, he asked if one of his critics had persuaded me to pose the question. Yes, I lied. “Exactly,” he said, looking pleased.

- John Horgan

In my view, the key thing to understand is what Popper actually meant. If you read the actual quote from Popper that is the origin of the idea, by "the intolerant" he didn't mean people whose ideas were intolerant. He meant people that answer ideas with fists or guns. That level of intolerance you cannot tolerate.

When you run into people who are X-ist (for a very large range of values of X), answer them with discourse. When they make a fist or reach for a gun, then you can't just talk any more.

Nassim Taleb wrote a great chapter about this topic and even some expanded some ideas Popper had.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

The interesting part of the paradox of tolerance is the nourishment of your own intolerance the moment you accept the paradox as truth. Maybe it's also a good direction to look into how people abandon their former believe and start radicalizing themselves at this point. Because in some aspects this is similar to the turning point of a gatekeeping-experience.

The Wikipedia article is probably a good start, it mentions the book in which the paradox is described and some sources[0]. And here's an article discussing it as well as common conservative criticisms[1].

Also, in general you should avoid asking HN anything having to do with politics or philosophy. You're not likely to find neutral or good faith responses here.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[1]https://medium.com/@parkermolloy/deconstructing-the-toleranc...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Kind of reminds me of something i read recently about the more tolerant you become, the less your brain may function or else you risk offending. That largely speaking the social media censorship is not about influencing politics but rather trying not to offend. The far left and far right agree with the paradox for the opposite reason.

In terms of the paradox... it's not a paradox at all. You have to consider the contemporary context of the assertion. 1945 was post-ww2 and tolerating the lutherans early on eventually evolved to something terrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism

At what point in your society do you no longer tolerate their intolerance and potentially stop a holocaust? If you do it too soon, you're going to be rife with censoring your political opponents and you have the new problem that they still overthrow your government. Every protest you end up in great fear of imminent revolution. If you do it too late, they are already in power.

This is the challenge and also why Jordan Peterson says you would have been a nazi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vknhe2CbvmI

The problem. Lutheran antisemitism had built up in germany over hundreds of years. Hitler was in party leadership for around 10 years before forming government. If Otto Wels had done anything to stop intolerance he would have only delayed the inevitable.

Coming back to the paradox, what exactly is the paradox? Being purely tolerant isn't in the books. No society is tolerant of murders or pedos. Being a free speech absolutist doesn't actually allow slander or fighting words. There are limits. So nobody is actually 'too tolerant without limit'. The paradox is null and void really.

Do we attack religion perhaps instead? Obviously Lutheranism is the source of the nazis. Hitler basically orchestrated Luther's plan.

If you read: http://bactra.org/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

But this isn't religion, Dawkins was misunderstood and later coined the word 'memes' which have nothing to do with religion. Psychology or social sciences found out about this later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

This is actively being studied right now. Nobody understands it, it seems to have some association with laughter. It's heavily influencing Covid responses and people freaking out irrationally over covid.

Did you know you can take a small community which statistically might be above the average on suicides. You can setup a suicide hotline and nothing will change. It doesn't actually reduce anything, nobody really calls. So you advertise the suicide hotline.

What do you expect happens? You're helping people right? Wrong.. suicides will climb like wildfire. The advertising for a suicide hotlines ends up getting more people to commit suicide than before there was the hotline... nobody truly understands it.

We are starting to see it with other tolerance issues. Antiracism efforts are actively creating racism more than they solve. So we are being intolerant of intolerance, actively trying to train people to not be racist and in turn creating more racism than there was before. In fact, saying not to say the N word is what gives the word it's power. If everyone simply stopped caring if someone says the N word or not. The word would die an immediate death. Flipside, if we made laws to say Cracker is now illegal to say. You would see a tremendous increase in using the word.

The "woke mind virus" is something that isn't fake. Elon musk isn't wrong about it despite significant criticism. But he's understanding there's a psychogenic impact going on. We can't target intolerance, but it's not that we must be tolerant of intolerance. Daryl Davis is a very smart guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw he understands the paradox of tolerance better than anyone else.