Over the years, I updated away from the position I once strongly held that anyone who makes “racist” remarks should be given “a taste of their own medicine”, i.e. squashed like a righteous paladin squashes a goblin.
Example, although a tainted one: I’ve been looking at the HBD Chick’s blog and the only distasteful thing for me was her (honestly expressed) indifference for the Babyeater children, even if those Babyeaters diverged from her own descendants less than a million years away.
All her scientific stuff—picked for its determinist bent, of course—is fine and very curious to me, it’s just the totally defeatist, barren (not “selfish”—selfishness can be so much more beautiful and constructive) attitude that I dislike so much.
Conclusion: I’m quite open-minded about statements of fact, but very narrow-minded about values I perceive as hostile. I support more or less polite agrument on them, but realize what such core disagreement implies: in the physical universe, one system must give way for the other to prosper. Not because of the words, statements and tactics they use, but because their CEVs end up shaping the universe in ways abhorrent to the other.
The average for the mainstream? But one of the key points often either stated or implied by contrarians in threads like this is that when it comes to taboo topics such-and-such, our society is narrow-minded indeed and behaves depressingly like a bunch of religious fundamentalists in its handling of dissent, except that it shuns physical violence. If that assertion were true, clearly I’ve shown that I’m more open-minded than that! (Which is not a great compliment by itself, of course)
I took a quick test of those, here are the results.
(88% openness sounds pretty high to me, and in general I would appear to have quite an outlying personality compared to a guy from the street; probably perfectly ordinary for LW though. Also, I might be motivated in picking answers here, of course.)
Over the years, I updated away from the position I once strongly held that anyone who makes “racist” remarks should be given “a taste of their own medicine”, i.e. squashed like a righteous paladin squashes a goblin.
Example, although a tainted one: I’ve been looking at the HBD Chick’s blog and the only distasteful thing for me was her (honestly expressed) indifference for the Babyeater children, even if those Babyeaters diverged from her own descendants less than a million years away.
Ironically, she’s also signaling proud, righteous, oh-so-contrarian resignation to the ugly results of Azatoth’s blind meddling instead of even dreaming about fixing them in a real way (uplifting). http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/pew-pew-pew/#comment-1300
All her scientific stuff—picked for its determinist bent, of course—is fine and very curious to me, it’s just the totally defeatist, barren (not “selfish”—selfishness can be so much more beautiful and constructive) attitude that I dislike so much.
Conclusion: I’m quite open-minded about statements of fact, but very narrow-minded about values I perceive as hostile. I support more or less polite agrument on them, but realize what such core disagreement implies: in the physical universe, one system must give way for the other to prosper. Not because of the words, statements and tactics they use, but because their CEVs end up shaping the universe in ways abhorrent to the other.
I guess most people could say that they’re more open-minded than they were before, but that doesn’t make them more open-minded than average...
The average for the mainstream? But one of the key points often either stated or implied by contrarians in threads like this is that when it comes to taboo topics such-and-such, our society is narrow-minded indeed and behaves depressingly like a bunch of religious fundamentalists in its handling of dissent, except that it shuns physical violence. If that assertion were true, clearly I’ve shown that I’m more open-minded than that! (Which is not a great compliment by itself, of course)
We already know that most political discussions on LW fail, so maybe the relevant metric is “more open-minded than average for LW”.
Would you like to see Multiheaded’s Big Five scores? Other than that, I fail to see how we could test for openness.
I took a quick test of those, here are the results.
(88% openness sounds pretty high to me, and in general I would appear to have quite an outlying personality compared to a guy from the street; probably perfectly ordinary for LW though. Also, I might be motivated in picking answers here, of course.)