You understand that one of the most important aspects of things like that is that it’s dangerous to publicly question them, right?
Think of 10 commonly accepted truths that you’d be afraid to question in public, preferably ones that you would feel uncomfortable even questioning in your own mind. Things where if you did question them, you’d expect to hear either a two-sentence “argument for” treated as obviously overcoming all possible objections, or a vehement, impassioned refusal to even talk about it because “the question is Settled”. Extra points if it’s been Settled by Science(TM).
Probably at least one or two of them will be false, or only sometimes or partly true, or have far less ironclad support than you initially feel they do. Maybe more than that. Of course, some of them will also be 100 percent true, but you’ll have generated some candidates.
Take, for example, your own example of eugenics. Forced sterilization is discredited. Mass extermination is discredited. But those are means, not ends. They are not what the word “eugenics” meant to the people advocating for it. “Eugenics” just means any change in reproductive actions made based on the obvious truth that some human heritable characteristics are more desirable than others.
If you know that 25 percent of your offspring will definitely die after short lives of horrible pain, and you therefore personally choose not to have any children, then you are absolutely practicing eugenics. The fact that that sort of choice is, in fact, sometimes looked askance at, and treated as somehow equivalent to rounding other people up and putting them into camps, or even seen as a dangerous step on the path to rounding people up and putting them in camps, is a harmful orthodoxy of the kind you are looking for. And it does affect the medical advice that people get.
If you want a guess as to something that’s already started to change, and that may in the future be anathema, one real possibility would be the idea that it’s OK to eat meat.
Yes, I think my focus is ideally less on “debate specific examples” (I can easily think of many that I think would be extremely controversial, some of which have been brought up in the comments) and more on what sort of meta-rules would be appropriate to use in order to try and protect ourselves more generally and be the type of community that doesn’t fall for this stuff.
OK, then I’d suggest trying to nip them in the bud, because once they get momentum behind them I suspect they’re almost impossible to stop until they’ve sort of run their natural course. And the only thing I can think of to do that is to apply the same old rules of evidence and argumentation that we all know and love.
On edit: And after they’ve become hard to challenge, I guess it couldn’t hurt to just not feed them, and perhaps subtly bringing up issues and ways of thinking that might not be obviously related on the surface, but might lead people to think twice. I don’t think attacking those things head on usually works; it just hardens opinions and makes you a pariah. If there are physical actions associated with the problem, you can also find ways not to contribute to those or even to sabotage them.
You understand that one of the most important aspects of things like that is that it’s dangerous to publicly question them, right?
Think of 10 commonly accepted truths that you’d be afraid to question in public, preferably ones that you would feel uncomfortable even questioning in your own mind. Things where if you did question them, you’d expect to hear either a two-sentence “argument for” treated as obviously overcoming all possible objections, or a vehement, impassioned refusal to even talk about it because “the question is Settled”. Extra points if it’s been Settled by Science(TM).
Probably at least one or two of them will be false, or only sometimes or partly true, or have far less ironclad support than you initially feel they do. Maybe more than that. Of course, some of them will also be 100 percent true, but you’ll have generated some candidates.
Take, for example, your own example of eugenics. Forced sterilization is discredited. Mass extermination is discredited. But those are means, not ends. They are not what the word “eugenics” meant to the people advocating for it. “Eugenics” just means any change in reproductive actions made based on the obvious truth that some human heritable characteristics are more desirable than others.
If you know that 25 percent of your offspring will definitely die after short lives of horrible pain, and you therefore personally choose not to have any children, then you are absolutely practicing eugenics. The fact that that sort of choice is, in fact, sometimes looked askance at, and treated as somehow equivalent to rounding other people up and putting them into camps, or even seen as a dangerous step on the path to rounding people up and putting them in camps, is a harmful orthodoxy of the kind you are looking for. And it does affect the medical advice that people get.
If you want a guess as to something that’s already started to change, and that may in the future be anathema, one real possibility would be the idea that it’s OK to eat meat.
Yes, I think my focus is ideally less on “debate specific examples” (I can easily think of many that I think would be extremely controversial, some of which have been brought up in the comments) and more on what sort of meta-rules would be appropriate to use in order to try and protect ourselves more generally and be the type of community that doesn’t fall for this stuff.
OK, then I’d suggest trying to nip them in the bud, because once they get momentum behind them I suspect they’re almost impossible to stop until they’ve sort of run their natural course. And the only thing I can think of to do that is to apply the same old rules of evidence and argumentation that we all know and love.
On edit: And after they’ve become hard to challenge, I guess it couldn’t hurt to just not feed them, and perhaps subtly bringing up issues and ways of thinking that might not be obviously related on the surface, but might lead people to think twice. I don’t think attacking those things head on usually works; it just hardens opinions and makes you a pariah. If there are physical actions associated with the problem, you can also find ways not to contribute to those or even to sabotage them.