When the revolution comes, elevator operators will be the first against the wall.
When someone posts a clarification of their position, the place to start is not arguing with them about whether they have the right to clarify.
My example was specifically in terms of mysticism and heresy, not spreading widely accepted knowledge to the holdouts. It’s all in the OP. I’m sorry if it was not clear to you from the OP, but all I can do is clarify. I’m not going to argue about whether I have the right to clarify my position.
Isn’t fighting about heresies in mysticism really over exchanging one piece of arbitrary nonsense for another?
How am I supposed to respond to this? Do you expect some sort of objective answer to your subjective disdain? Remember, Heliocentric theory was at one point a ‘heresy’. Is it arbitrary nonsense compared to and Earth centric point of view? I mean, if you think about it the center is really whatever point you decide you want to use as a center point in order to define relative measures right? So I suppose it is all arbitrary? That of course doesn’t deny that the Earth does indeed orbit the Sun.
Oh, my disdain is entirely quantifiable. Isn’t the entire gist of whatever argument you’re trying to make (though I admit, much of it remains unclear to me) that ideas are dangerous and truth must be controlled to keep from offending people?
Considering that all progress relies on heresy, it’s not a position whose value I can discern. If knowledge is destructive, it’s creative destruction, replacing something workable but limited with something workable but less-limited.
No, that’s an incredible oversimplification that changes the meaning entirely. It’s about the personal responsibility of pioneers.
But that progress never happens unfettered. I would refer you to nanoethics.org if you want to see some debates about potentially paradigm altering technologies. Bioethics and the ethics of AI touch on some of the same issues. Creative destruction can be just plain destruction if it’s not controlled.
So what’s your point, ultimately? Don’t do bad things? It was possible to kill a child with a sword back in the bronze age and it’s possible to do it now with a daisy-cutter. Technology hasn’t changed the goals, just the methods.
Oh please, you haven’t clarified anything, unless by “clarification” you mean “obfuscated”. You posed some very specifically formed questions in your OP, several people answered them, you engaged those answers as if they were appropriate to the question. Now you’re claiming that you were asking something different, in addition to dealing with elevator operators, it has something to do with mystics, heresies and pioneers. And as of this post you still haven’t posted your actual question, choosing instead to bandy about these vague assertions. Do you have a question or don’t you? If so, what is it? If you choose to think we’re thick and have somehow missed your subtlety, please indulge us by framing your question in more obvious terms.