I take the point but remain doubtful for two reasons.
Reason 1:
Engaging with Very Bad Ideas can give them credibility by two somewhat different mechanisms. The first is the one described here: there’s a social convention that you’re not supposed to dignify the very worst ideas with a response. The second is the fact that, whatever the social conventions, merely hearing some idea being aired makes you more inclined to believe it.
The second of these won’t go away even if you manage to shift the social conventions, and I suspect it won’t be helped much by saying “This is an incredibly bad idea and by debating it I don’t mean to imply that it’s any good”.
Reason 2:
(This is related to Benquo’s point about people arguing in bad faith.) If an idea is Very Bad, then its adherents are unusually likely to be stupid, crazy, evil, trolling, or in some other way unlikely to be persuaded by reasoned debate. This is less true in the scenario described in the OP where the Very Bad Idea is largely abandoned and many of its adherents are smart contrarians, but in general my guess is that creationists are more than averagely likely to be stupid, Nazis are more than averagely likely to be evil, believers in alien abductions are more than averagely likely to be crazy, etc. (Obviously “stupid”, “crazy”, etc., should be understood as abbreviations for more nuanced descriptions of severe cognitive weaknesses.)
I think we would be better served by keeping the general convention that Very Bad Ideas don’t deserve a response, but finding some way to carve out occasional exceptions. (I don’t know what that way might be. Probably a difficult problem.)
I take the point but remain doubtful for two reasons.
Reason 1:
Engaging with Very Bad Ideas can give them credibility by two somewhat different mechanisms. The first is the one described here: there’s a social convention that you’re not supposed to dignify the very worst ideas with a response. The second is the fact that, whatever the social conventions, merely hearing some idea being aired makes you more inclined to believe it.
The second of these won’t go away even if you manage to shift the social conventions, and I suspect it won’t be helped much by saying “This is an incredibly bad idea and by debating it I don’t mean to imply that it’s any good”.
Reason 2:
(This is related to Benquo’s point about people arguing in bad faith.) If an idea is Very Bad, then its adherents are unusually likely to be stupid, crazy, evil, trolling, or in some other way unlikely to be persuaded by reasoned debate. This is less true in the scenario described in the OP where the Very Bad Idea is largely abandoned and many of its adherents are smart contrarians, but in general my guess is that creationists are more than averagely likely to be stupid, Nazis are more than averagely likely to be evil, believers in alien abductions are more than averagely likely to be crazy, etc. (Obviously “stupid”, “crazy”, etc., should be understood as abbreviations for more nuanced descriptions of severe cognitive weaknesses.)
I think we would be better served by keeping the general convention that Very Bad Ideas don’t deserve a response, but finding some way to carve out occasional exceptions. (I don’t know what that way might be. Probably a difficult problem.)