This is a long discussion but perhaps to keep it short, the alternative is “thought police”. But I have the feeling you’re not asking for an answer?

> This is a long discussion but perhaps to keep it short, the alternative is “thought police”.

Good point, agreed.

> But I have the feeling you’re not asking for an answer?

Why? :)

I believe people believing whatever they want is harmful. I believe you have no right to believe that the earth is flat. I'd love to know if there's a sensible option somewhere between "anyone is free to believe any untrue thing they want" and "thought police".

I think there is no final arbiter between good and bad, and change (for better of worse) starts at the fringes of society, the law, morality, political correctness. IMHO it is indeed unwise to go full thought police, but it is equally unwise to assign anything 100% true or false. Even Richard Dawkins is not 100% claiming there is no God (6.5/7 he calls it, don't ask someone to prove a negative). We all hold believes that are false. Some very obviously so to others.

So perhaps a Christian could convince me, perhaps even a flat earther. It’s just extremely unlikely and they’d better hit me with a good argument in their first sentence because I heard and dismissed many many arguments before.

But you are right, false believes are not harmless, see [0]. But, much like we can either have good encryption OR backdoors, you either have freedom OR you don’t, nothing may be “in between”, criminals using Signal and people thinking wrong stuff is just something that needs to be dealt with differently. (Because we want private communications and we want freedom.)

But I’m about 10% convinced I’ll have changed my mind on this in 5 years.

[0]: http://whatstheharm.net/

> I'd love to know if there's a sensible option somewhere between "anyone is free to believe any untrue thing they want" and "thought police".

i think that depends on two things - do you believe objective truths exist, and do you believe society should prefer objective truths over falsehoods? Or in a more abstract sense, should freedom of speech simply allow all speech (and by extension all beliefs) without question, or seek to discriminate truth from speech, as best it can?

"thought police" has a specific malevolent implication meant to equate the authoritative control of certain memes (in the original Dawkins sense) to fascistic thought control but does that implication apply to truth, or only minsinformation?

Again - because Hacker News loves this rabbithole - the assumption here is that truths exist and can be discovered. The infinite nihilistic regress of "but who decides what is is and who watches the watchers" is already discarded, if for no other reason than being uninteresting.

Maybe teaching people the earth is round isn't 'thought policing,' and if it is, maybe 'thought policing' isn't always harmful.

The obvious answer is many things now taken as truth were once considered heretical; and also many completely wrong ideas (ether, the humors, etc) still produced useful science and technology.

By all means demand falsifiability of any claims to truth, but don't insist that any one of us or all of us collectively are worthy arbiters of truth.