xigoi

Paradox of Tolerance

Tolerance is a great thing, but it has one big problem: if you tolerate everyone's views, this necessarily includes people who don't tolerate everyone's views (unless such people don't exist, which they do for any large group of people). In turn, this can easily cause intolerant views to prevail, which defeats the point of universal tolerance. The phenomenon is known as the Paradox of Tolerance.

Many people seem to give up as soon as they encounter this paradox and assert that the concept of universal tolerance is fundamentally flawed, so any good society must necessarily include censorship of speech. (Unfortunately, such people tend to have incompatible ideas about what kinds of speech are to be censored.)

But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Is it possible to fix the problem with mathematics, specifically graph theory? Let's find out.