There’s a difference between 5 percent of sincere disagreement and Lizardman’s constant. The “lizardman” concept is about what people will say on surveys, and it’s probably almost entirely created by people making mistakes or intentionally wanting to screw up the survey results, with a common form of the latter being, “If you’re going to waste my time with a stupid question, I am going to waste your time by saying yes”.
I’m old enough that a whole lot of things that are mainstream now were “settled against” with less than 5 percent support when I was a kid. I doubt you’d have gotten 5 percent for gay marriage in the 60s, at least not if you’d excluded the actual lizardman people and only gone by sincere opinions.
… and you would definitely have been shut down without discussion if you’d suggested drag queen story hour down at the library. Probably tossed out of the building just for mentioning the possibility.
Personally, I kind of like gay marriage and drag queen story hour, and would rather not live in a world where those ideas had been suppressed.
EVERYTHING new starts out with small support. Also, pretty much everybody is in the 5 percent on some issue that’s actually important to them.
And I think that thinking even partially in terms of the number of people who support something ends up being a way to excuse yourself for not thinking. And frankly I would like people to be able to say “No, your argument is stupid and we’re not doing that” to things that have much, much more than 5 percent support.
So, no, how about if we don’t do that, and instead actually look at the content of ideas. I believe there’s a strong consensus for that already, maybe even 95 percent. There probably used to be.
So, no, how about if we don’t do that, and instead actually look at the content of ideas.
You’re missing the part where this is an exploit/hack; lizardman can throw up bullshit whose content you feel obligated to actually look at WAY faster than you can actually vet it. You have to be willing to say “no, not worth investigating further” at a first glance, at some cutoff level.
There’s a difference between 5 percent of sincere disagreement and Lizardman’s constant. The “lizardman” concept is about what people will say on surveys, and it’s probably almost entirely created by people making mistakes or intentionally wanting to screw up the survey results, with a common form of the latter being, “If you’re going to waste my time with a stupid question, I am going to waste your time by saying yes”.
I’m old enough that a whole lot of things that are mainstream now were “settled against” with less than 5 percent support when I was a kid. I doubt you’d have gotten 5 percent for gay marriage in the 60s, at least not if you’d excluded the actual lizardman people and only gone by sincere opinions.
… and you would definitely have been shut down without discussion if you’d suggested drag queen story hour down at the library. Probably tossed out of the building just for mentioning the possibility.
Personally, I kind of like gay marriage and drag queen story hour, and would rather not live in a world where those ideas had been suppressed.
EVERYTHING new starts out with small support. Also, pretty much everybody is in the 5 percent on some issue that’s actually important to them.
And I think that thinking even partially in terms of the number of people who support something ends up being a way to excuse yourself for not thinking. And frankly I would like people to be able to say “No, your argument is stupid and we’re not doing that” to things that have much, much more than 5 percent support.
So, no, how about if we don’t do that, and instead actually look at the content of ideas. I believe there’s a strong consensus for that already, maybe even 95 percent. There probably used to be.
You’re missing the part where this is an exploit/hack; lizardman can throw up bullshit whose content you feel obligated to actually look at WAY faster than you can actually vet it. You have to be willing to say “no, not worth investigating further” at a first glance, at some cutoff level.
c.f. Privileging the Hypothesis, which is another way of getting at this thesis.