The results remind me of the following passage from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People:
Shortly after the close of World War I, I learned an invaluable lesson one night in London. I was manager at the time for Sir Ross Smith. During the war, Sir Ross had been the Australian ace out in Palestine; and shortly after peace was declared, he astonished the world by flying halfway around it in thirty days. No such feat had ever been attempted before. It created a tremendous sensation. The Australian government awarded him fifty thousand dollars; the King of England knighted him; and, for a while, he was the most talked-about man under the Union Jack. I was attending a banquet one night given in Sir Ross’s honor; and during the dinner, the man sitting next to me told a humorous story which hinged on the quotation “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” The raconteur mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. He was wrong. I knew that. I knew it positively. There couldn’t be the slightest doubt about it. And so, to get a feeling of importance and display my superiority, I appointed myself as an unsolicited and unwelcome committee of one to correct him. He stuck to his guns. What? From Shakespeare? Impossible! Absurd! That quotation was from the Bible. And he knew it. The storyteller was sitting on my right; and Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, was seated at my left. Mr. Gammond had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare. So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr. Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and then said: “Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is from the Bible.” On our way home that night, I said to Mr. Gammond: “Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare.” “Yes, of course,” he replied, “Hamlet, Act Five, Scene Two. But we were guests at a festive occasion, my dear Dale. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn’t ask for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.” The man who said that taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. I not only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but had put my friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would have been had I not become argumentative.
An interesting and apropos passage, though it might be improved by a caveat that while the source of the Sir Ross' quote was an unimportant detail, falsehoods on Twitter are often both the primary content of a tweet and highly relevant to important social and political issues. Many tweets are outright slanderous.
You will win more friends with a "never correct others" policy. However, what if belief in the misinformation has deadly consequences? Steve Jobs died due to him seeking "alternative" cancer treatment. Had someone convincing spoken up when acupuncture was being discussed around him, someone who changed his mind into recognizing that acupuncture is a sham, Jobs might still be alive.
How To Win Friends and Influence People doesn't actually advocate never trying to convince people of an opposing viewpoint. Carnegie argues that you'll never be able to convince people of something by correcting them directly, but that you can persuade people if you express genuine interest in their opinion, listen well, ask questions, and allow the other person to save face by presenting the correction as something they came to on their own. Whereas, if you correct someone directly, no matter how solid your facts, they are more likely to feel attacked and double down.
> You will win more friends with a "never correct others" policy. However, what if belief in the misinformation has deadly consequences?
where do you think the line should be drawn? dying is pretty clearly terrible.
what if someone is going to invest all of their money in a ponzi scheme? or put 50% of their savings into GME? or invest in a high expense ratio index fund?
we've got to ignore some mistakes and errors on the part of others.
Great example. This is also an issue many doctors treating terminally ill patients. Of course, it is true that the patient will die in a month or two. What should a doctor do? Tell the truth to the patient to screw him emotionally? Or keep silent? Or lie to the patient?
Apples to oranges. You providing this as an equivalent example to the current state of politics-based censorship is a more telling embodiment of the situation.
The example here is demonstrably provable by pulling out a copy of Hamlet and flipping to Act Five, Scene Two. When Twitter shadow-bans accounts and hides hashtags of discussion they don't agree with politically, they aren't able to do this. Their thought process is clouded by the illusion that they're positively not-wrong...but when questioned or presented with counter-evidence, they defer to Hitchens's razor (a flawed methodology) and put wax in their ears.
Shortly after the close of World War I, I learned an invaluable lesson one night in London. I was manager at the time for Sir Ross Smith. During the war, Sir Ross had been the Australian ace out in Palestine; and shortly after peace was declared, he astonished the world by flying halfway around it in thirty days. No such feat had ever been attempted before. It created a tremendous sensation. The Australian government awarded him fifty thousand dollars; the King of England knighted him; and, for a while, he was the most talked-about man under the Union Jack. I was attending a banquet one night given in Sir Ross’s honor; and during the dinner, the man sitting next to me told a humorous story which hinged on the quotation “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” The raconteur mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. He was wrong. I knew that. I knew it positively. There couldn’t be the slightest doubt about it. And so, to get a feeling of importance and display my superiority, I appointed myself as an unsolicited and unwelcome committee of one to correct him. He stuck to his guns. What? From Shakespeare? Impossible! Absurd! That quotation was from the Bible. And he knew it. The storyteller was sitting on my right; and Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, was seated at my left. Mr. Gammond had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare. So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr. Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and then said: “Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is from the Bible.” On our way home that night, I said to Mr. Gammond: “Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare.” “Yes, of course,” he replied, “Hamlet, Act Five, Scene Two. But we were guests at a festive occasion, my dear Dale. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn’t ask for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.” The man who said that taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. I not only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but had put my friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would have been had I not become argumentative.