Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The women don’t matter party.
This is a point I keep returning to: It is perfectly possible to reach the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. It might be tempting to think that the wrongness of the reasons doesn’t matter as long as people end up accepting the right facts and supporting the right causes. The problem with that intuition is that bad reasons rarely, if ever, have just one effect. The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism (supposedly a religion of total pacifism) also gave us Jihadism*. Aversion to technology, or anything perceived as unnatural, chemical**, artificial, manufactured, synthetic, or man-made, may seem benign enough when it leads people to reject fossil fuels (hardly unnatural, admittedly), not so much when it leads them to reject vaccines.
* Even if the wrong reasons lead you to embrace the most harmless and (in terms of consequences) benign conclusions imaginable it will be absolutely no thanks to you as long as the only thing keeping you from crashing planes into buildings or blowing yourself up on a bus is that the coin-toss of faith happened to come up heads rather than tails.
** I still haven managed to get any of these people to provide an example of a non-chemical substance. I guess technically dark matter qualifies, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what they have in mind.
Leave a Reply