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Edge.org, the philosopher's funhouse, has a fascinating stack of little articles by various Big Thinkers entitled What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why? It's refreshing to see people's positions changing due to evidence, experience or contemplation; the internet is too full of dogmatic blowhards reflexively defending their positions.
I've changed my mind about ideas. I used to think that people could evaluate ideas: that given a commonsense idea and a daft one, the daft one would always lose, because people can see and weigh the merit of both and make an informed choice. But what I've come to realise is that some ideas are persuasive regardless of their merit. Setting fire to your neighbours is destructive and dumb, but it's happening right now in Kenya; the BNP are silly racists, but they get voted in right here in the UK. No, I've reached the position where I think that some ideas are deeply virulent - they spread from mind to mind like wildfire - and that this makes them dangerous, because they're junk compared to what is already there. The popularity of anything is absolutely no judge of its merit, which, for me at least, puts the final nail in democracy's coffin: not only are the masses uneducated but they're also voting on the virulence of ideas, not their merit. Give me think-tanks and committees of calm expert heads, any time.
I've also started to move towards a fence-sitting position on, of all things, nuclear power. The balance of threats feels like it has shifted now that climate change is showing its teeth; people are clearly never going to reduce their energy consumption (and thinking that they will is dangerously delusional); Chernobyl isn't the luminous mutant-infested horror-show it could have been. I'm still far from convinced: I do not believe a private company should ever operate anything so potentially-dangerous when private companies answer to their Board, and I need to be convinced that a state organisation would do it better. I still think that renewables will be comfortably adequate and I'm big on wind power. And of course I have a hardon for space lasers. But I'm open to persuasion either way. Maybe it's just because it has been a while since the last big disaster (!)
I've changed my mind about ideas. I used to think that people could evaluate ideas: that given a commonsense idea and a daft one, the daft one would always lose, because people can see and weigh the merit of both and make an informed choice. But what I've come to realise is that some ideas are persuasive regardless of their merit. Setting fire to your neighbours is destructive and dumb, but it's happening right now in Kenya; the BNP are silly racists, but they get voted in right here in the UK. No, I've reached the position where I think that some ideas are deeply virulent - they spread from mind to mind like wildfire - and that this makes them dangerous, because they're junk compared to what is already there. The popularity of anything is absolutely no judge of its merit, which, for me at least, puts the final nail in democracy's coffin: not only are the masses uneducated but they're also voting on the virulence of ideas, not their merit. Give me think-tanks and committees of calm expert heads, any time.
I've also started to move towards a fence-sitting position on, of all things, nuclear power. The balance of threats feels like it has shifted now that climate change is showing its teeth; people are clearly never going to reduce their energy consumption (and thinking that they will is dangerously delusional); Chernobyl isn't the luminous mutant-infested horror-show it could have been. I'm still far from convinced: I do not believe a private company should ever operate anything so potentially-dangerous when private companies answer to their Board, and I need to be convinced that a state organisation would do it better. I still think that renewables will be comfortably adequate and I'm big on wind power. And of course I have a hardon for space lasers. But I'm open to persuasion either way. Maybe it's just because it has been a while since the last big disaster (!)
