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submitted 1 year ago by Stamets@lemmy.world to c/tumblr@lemmy.world
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[-] kameecoding@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

there is no Paradox to disappear, nor there is a solution, a Paradox is a paradox, this is like trying to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma with some clever workaround.

just no.

Let's posit a society is totally tolerant, you have a tolerant society

if someone starts to act intolerant, you have to options:

  • If you tolerate it, then you now have intolerance in your society.

  • If you don't tolerate it, or put it another way you are intolerant towards there intolerance and remove them from your society, then you now have still have intolerance in your society.

that's it, that's the paradox, it has no solution or clever workarounds it's just what it is.

This also doesn't mean that not tolerating nazis and someone not tolerating the existence of PoCs for example is the same thing.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.

There is, and in mathematics we'd define it as Closure. We define a set such that operations on members of the set will always reproduce new members of the set. The problem with applying this logic to a sociological environment is that - in practice - what we're doing is defining "personhood" as membership in the closed "tolerant" set. Dehumanizing anyone outside the tolerant group is not - I suspect - what the OP was hoping to achieve.

That gets us to the "trivial" solution to the paradox of tolerance, which is to kill everyone. Alternatively, to kill everyone except yourself or to kill everyone who isn't in your tolerance set. Viola! Everyone can express perfect tolerance because the only people alive are the folks who share that same sense of perfect tolerance. We might call this a "Final Solution" to the problem of tolerance.

But like many strictly logical and mathematical approaches to resolving social contradictions, it isn't in any way practical or particularly ethical. It is a brute force approach to solving what is, at its heart, a problem of interpersonal perception, accrued bias, and political manipulation.

The real problem of intolerance comes down to the old Dunbar's Number, the upper limit that human brains can process additional individuals as people worthy of empathy. This is a biological limit, not a logical one. And it produces a whole host of knock-on effects that the simple logical paradox doesn't engage with.

this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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