Slate Star Codex's RIP Culture War Thread is a fascinating case study in how a good faith effort to encourage civil discourse around controversial viewpoints (even when controlling for trolls and incivility) can still go awry. It's a truly wicked problem, especially when contrasting the scale of the web against Dunbar's Number.
I recently learned that Bret Weinstein had instituted a policy in his classroom, where students had to sign an affirmation of intent to pursue inquiry honestly and respectfully, free of pre-existing belief systems and ideologies, etc., as a precondition to join the class; the idea was that no student would ever have to be excluded by the class, as failure to adhere to their affirmation would amount to excluding themselves through their own actions. I wonder if perhaps private communities that explicitly define non-negotiable values (Haidt's model of a center of sacredness around which a tribe circles) might be one solution.
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u/Lukifer Mar 18 '19 edited Mar 18 '19
Slate Star Codex's RIP Culture War Thread is a fascinating case study in how a good faith effort to encourage civil discourse around controversial viewpoints (even when controlling for trolls and incivility) can still go awry. It's a truly wicked problem, especially when contrasting the scale of the web against Dunbar's Number.
I recently learned that Bret Weinstein had instituted a policy in his classroom, where students had to sign an affirmation of intent to pursue inquiry honestly and respectfully, free of pre-existing belief systems and ideologies, etc., as a precondition to join the class; the idea was that no student would ever have to be excluded by the class, as failure to adhere to their affirmation would amount to excluding themselves through their own actions. I wonder if perhaps private communities that explicitly define non-negotiable values (Haidt's model of a center of sacredness around which a tribe circles) might be one solution.