From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 20:02:58 MDT
On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 09:11:28AM +0200, Amara Graps wrote:
> I wonder why you think that people's strong expressions are not useful
> information from which you can learn. The people on this mailing list
> are not very representative of humanity as a whole and this is a
> text-base medium which can be very limiting. Don't you think that it
> would be useful to know that some ideas are repugnant.. and why?
I thought it was a consensus among Extropians that the so called Wisdom of
Repugnance is in fact not a reliable guide to complex policy issues (such
as the laws against child abuse that we were discussing). If you think
about it, feelings like nausea were "designed" to prevent us from doing
immediate harm to ourselves or people we care about, not to help us
analyze social problems, whose complexities could not possibly have been
anticipated by evolution. The fact that someone feels repugnant about some
social policy really gives very little useful information about whether
the policy actually does more good than harm.
Also, emotional arousal makes unbiased reasoning even more difficult than
it already is and does not help in effective communication of ideas--it
causes people who disagree with you to take your ideas less seriously
rather than more seriously. At least that has been my experience. If your
experiences have been different, I would be interested in learning about
them.
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