I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held “correct”* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters.
*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.
Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).
I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.
I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.
A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.
We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible.
One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current ‘woke’ beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful.
Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.
I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held “correct”* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters.
*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.
Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).
I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.
I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.
A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.
We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible.
One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current ‘woke’ beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful.
Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.