Today's post, Tolerate Tolerance was originally published on 21 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flawed thinking. This makes it very important to tolerate other people's tolerance - to avoid rejecting them because they tolerate people you wouldn't - since otherwise we must all have exactly the same standards of tolerance in order to work together, which is unlikely. Even if someone has a nice word to say about complete lunatics and crackpots - so long as they don't literally believe the same ideas themselves - try to be nice to them? Intolerance of tolerance corresponds to punishment of non-punishers, a very dangerous game-theoretic idiom that can lock completely arbitrary systems in place even when they benefit no one at all.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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