Re:We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
by scarcely on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @02:29PM
(#18545823)
Well, presumably the ideas we are talking about are political/social/moral views. To base your acceptance/rejection of them, even in part, on your knowledge of their genesis is already quite intellectually lazy. ("John made such and such claim about topic X. When I consider the claim's intrinsic merits I'm not complete sure what I should think, but given these biographical knowledge I have of John I accept/reject the claim" is only acceptable reasoning when X is an empirical topic (say about genetics) but not when it's a moral/political one)
Re:We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
by abecedarius on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @04:14PM
(#18546829)
If someone were to say to me, say, "Pot should be legal everywhere", and you tell me it's unacceptable when considering this claim to consider that the speaker is high, then I don't accept your bounds of acceptable reasoning. (Yes, knowing enough directly about pot would screen off this evidence. I think pot should be legal.)
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.