From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 16:14:39 MDT
On Thursday, July 04, 2002 5:10 PM Robert J. Bradbury
bradbury@aeiveos.com wrote:
>> This whole controversy is an interesting question of individual
>> freedom. [snip]
>> Should we hide the truth from them because their fear
>> is unjustified?
>
> Hmmm... should our choice to allow "individual freedom" outweigh
> our desire to promote "rational thought"? We know that "irrational
> thought" can cause all kinds of problems (its presumably unextropic
> since it probably leads to chaos much more often than greater order).
Rationality and freedom go together. You can't be sure you're being
rational if someone else decides your evidence and arguments for you.
The real problem here is requiring food labels is coercive. Eliminate
that. If consumers insist on knowing what's in the food, then, chances
are, they will provided with such information. However, having the
government call the tune is not freedom in action. Nor, given what we
know about politics and history, is it rational.
> Can someone who is terribly ill-informed about the "current best
> known scientific facts" even be capable of "rational thought"?
> Or do we need to invent an entirely new category of "false-premise
> based 'rational thought'?". E.g. "your thinking pattern is completely
> reasonable but you don't know what the f*** you are talking about".
No need to invent a new category. Reasoning from false premises is
basically what most logical fallacies have in common. The cure for it
is to help people to see the error of their ways -- not try to prevent
the errors from happening.
> How about requiring that allowing people to make their own decision
> requires that they must make an *informed* decision? We try not to
> allow children to make their own decisions in situations where
> they may be ill-informed about the information needed to make
> such decisions. Parents generally act as proxy-agents until
> informedness can be demonstrated. (In fact we short-cut this
> principle royally in society by allowing, in most cases,
> age to serve as a surrogate for demonstration of informedness.)
Are you willing to give up your autonomy in areas you think you can make
a choice, but Harvey or someone else thinks you can't?
> U.S. born individuals get to vote when you are 18, but you get
> to drive a car (a potential weapon of destruction) only when you
> demonstrate some "reasonable" competency. I'd propose that immigrants
> who actually have to pass the exams for citizenship may be more
> qualified to vote than the average individual graduating from the
> average American school. (But I digress....)
This might be true, but that's more an argument against democracy than
for stricter requirments -- to me. The problem with voting is you get
to make choices that affect you very little, so there's little incentive
to make the right choice -- or to think long range.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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