> Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.
It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.
People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.
Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.
And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".
> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad
Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.
It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.
People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.
Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.
And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".
> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad
Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.