"Once you become intolerant yourself in opposition, you lose the basis for your argument."
Ah, that's the Achilles' heel of liberalism right there, isn't it? Actually, I think we must make an exception for intolerance. The goal is not just to promote tolerance at the level of the single person. It's to maximise it society-wide. With that perspective, intolerance is identifiable as a cancer in the system, and must be excised.
"taking positions that were far afield of what I wanted"
Ha. Sounds familiar! There's a fine art to maintaining one's argument, even in the face of in extremis counterargument pushing one further and further away from one's core position. It's an art I have not yet mastered. Elsewhere on this site you'll find plenty of examples of my being suckered into making spirited defences of unsavoury things while trying to defend some much more noble principle. Perhaps the format of this site's discussion is simply unsuitable to making complex arguments with deep roots, especially given the expedited timeframes for making a response anyone is likely to read.
A fews years ago I tried starting to write a book which would describe all my beliefs, and why I believed them, derived from as close as I could get to first principles. I abandoned the project when it became an organisational nightmare; trying to justify what I thought in one area turned out to have links to 10 other areas and after a while I didn't know whether I was trying to enumerate and codify my answers to moral questions or writing a blueprint for "my perfect society". Anyway it was completely unmanageable and I gave up.
I've given some concepts in graph theory and structured data a lot of thought since then and I should probably try again. Most of my beliefs can, I believe, be encoded in a directed acyclic graph. I should attack the problem again not as a book but as a web site, so I can just post a link to the appropriate section here and save a lot of time, while also keeping the discussion formal and free of scope-creep.
That would also satisfy your requirement for belief self-scrutiny. What could be more rigorous than explicitly enumerating and justifying - and thus throwing open to public scrutiny - every founding element of every belief you hold?
> given the expedited timeframes for making a response anyone is likely to read.
I think that you just need to not be so concerned with this... Unless, of course, you're talking about taking a week to write something out. If you're talking about "if it's still on the frontpage," I tend to use the 'threads' link at the top to frequently check on any responses to my posts.
Ah, that's the Achilles' heel of liberalism right there, isn't it? Actually, I think we must make an exception for intolerance. The goal is not just to promote tolerance at the level of the single person. It's to maximise it society-wide. With that perspective, intolerance is identifiable as a cancer in the system, and must be excised.
"taking positions that were far afield of what I wanted"
Ha. Sounds familiar! There's a fine art to maintaining one's argument, even in the face of in extremis counterargument pushing one further and further away from one's core position. It's an art I have not yet mastered. Elsewhere on this site you'll find plenty of examples of my being suckered into making spirited defences of unsavoury things while trying to defend some much more noble principle. Perhaps the format of this site's discussion is simply unsuitable to making complex arguments with deep roots, especially given the expedited timeframes for making a response anyone is likely to read.
A fews years ago I tried starting to write a book which would describe all my beliefs, and why I believed them, derived from as close as I could get to first principles. I abandoned the project when it became an organisational nightmare; trying to justify what I thought in one area turned out to have links to 10 other areas and after a while I didn't know whether I was trying to enumerate and codify my answers to moral questions or writing a blueprint for "my perfect society". Anyway it was completely unmanageable and I gave up.
I've given some concepts in graph theory and structured data a lot of thought since then and I should probably try again. Most of my beliefs can, I believe, be encoded in a directed acyclic graph. I should attack the problem again not as a book but as a web site, so I can just post a link to the appropriate section here and save a lot of time, while also keeping the discussion formal and free of scope-creep.
That would also satisfy your requirement for belief self-scrutiny. What could be more rigorous than explicitly enumerating and justifying - and thus throwing open to public scrutiny - every founding element of every belief you hold?
Damn, I really should get started on that ..