[extropy-chat] ETHICS: What You Can't Say

[Christian Weisgerber]

I picked this up on Slashdot.  Recommended.

----

Paul Graham
What You Can't Say

(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what
to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small
elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made
us all publishers.)

[...]

Full Article:
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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It ties in with a thought I have been entertaining for a while now:
that many things we believe to be true must be crap.  Just pick up
some old non-fiction books or encyclopedias.

"It is of utmost importance that the woman enters marriage as a
virgin."  From the sex section of some 1950s marriage advice book.
It didn't even bother to give a reason, it merely stressed what
apparently was a self-evident truth at the time.

I have a German encyclopedia from 1939.  As you can imagine, the
entries on topics such as "race" or "Jews" are considered to be
evilly wrong today.  Back then they were socio-scientific consensus.

So what ideas do we entertain today that will be considered ridiculous
or even despicable in the future?  Do you really think we are the
first perfect generation to be free from such flaws?  Not likely.

Representational democracy is a holy cow.  It is the pinnacle of
political systems, the best one possible.  Just why do I have this
nagging suspicion that every other political system received the
same judgment at the time when it happened to be in vogue?

Alas, it seems I'm much too conformist a person.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de