What To Do With Bad Ideas From People Who Also Have Good Ideas

On consuming valuable ideas from people whose other beliefs you find repugnant, and why avoidance is the choice to be passive.

2026-04-20

I own and regularly lend out a book by someone who believes a carnivore diet cures depression, amplifies climate change denial, and has repeated Russian talking points about the invasion of Ukraine.

He opposes the death penalty, doesn’t think you can stop smoking without divine intervention, and believed at least for a moment - that China was “milking” the genitalia of its male citizens to remedy its population issues.

If you haven’t gathered by now, I am referring to Jordan B. Peterson, and the book on my shelf is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos.

My curiosity about things that outrage people made me purchase a copy some time in 2019. I knew nothing about Peterson at the time, other than that someone on Twitter had posted a photo of a young man across from them on the New York subway who was reading the book, with a caption that expressed disapproval at the man’s choice of reading material.

It’s been years since I saw it so I have no links to share, but I have no need to fabricate a story to support the idea that many women have poor opinions of Peterson and his fans, even around the time of the book’s publishing. A little Googling will show you as much.

Now, I had never seen someone express such distaste for someone reading something written in my lifetime. Perhaps if the man had been reading Mein Kampf, assuming that he’s not reading it for historical education (there are people who have done so without being Nazis, mind you), I could understand her negative feelings.

But I knew nothing about this book, so I looked into it, and found that it was written by a Canadian professor as a self-help book, and that it was based on his rather popular response to a question on the website Quora about “valuable things everyone should know”.

Reading through the lines in the post, I couldn’t find a single “valuable thing” that was even remotely controversial. Naturally, I had to buy the book to find out what the uproar was about.

What I found was useful. What I also found was that usefulness and moral cleanliness aren’t always packaged together, and that refusing to acknowledge the former because of the latter is a choice with real consequences.

Now, I don’t think the book needed to be a book. Many of the books written these days could really be blog posts, in my opinion, but they tend to make the authors a lot of money, so they can do what they want. While I got less out of it than others based on the reviews, I would say the “rules” are generally good pieces of advice that anyone would do well to incorporate into their way of conducting their own lives. At worst, they’re harmless aphorisms that one can ignore and go about their day.

But together, they were nothing close to the sort of material that should draw the ire of strangers.

Ultimately, I keep the book for a few reasons:

  1. I like to lend books to people that I think they’ll benefit from, and some of my close friends (especially the ones who make fun of Peterson the most) could really get something out of rules like “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie”, or, “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.”
  2. When other people visit my house who read, they inevitably wander over to my bookshelf and a good conversation starts based on something they see.
  3. It is now a monument to my carefully honed ability to appreciate good ideas put forth by people who also have some really bad ideas.

Tolerance Thresholds Are Arbitrary

The other day, a friend of mine messaged me out of the blue and said:

“I am so unsure of how to proceed when I read something I enjoy on a topic and then realize the author has deeply problematic views on other topics”

This is like drugs for me. I thrive on this sort of dilemma, and few things matter more to me than discussing them, hopefully leaving with a better understanding of my own thoughts as well as others’. My friend followed up with:

“…if I read a piece of info on something totally random…then I start following that person and a few days later they post something totally unhinged about how climate change is a hoax or something…”

I sat on it just long enough to trust my first thought. Fortunately, I had dealt with this feeling myself many times. Years ago, I developed an interest in document typesetting with LaTeX, but found most of the documentation difficult to follow. Then came Luke Smith’s tutorial playlist to the rescue, taking me in a single afternoon from clueless to compiling the majority of my data science university paper into a gorgeous, academically pleasing format.

Slowly, I discovered many of his videos touched on more things I liked, such as extending Vim with plugins and running free software in place of proprietary software. What I didn’t know until a bit later was that, despite agreeing with him about things like Docker being excessive and overkill and older ThinkPads being amazing laptops, we were not standing on common ground on things like COVID-19 precautions and anthropogenic climate change.

In the throes of 2020, the former disagreement took an emotional toll. I had no parasocial relationship with Luke Smith to speak of, but the mere presence of COVID-19 denialism in my field of consciousness, to any degree, was difficult to contend with. I had friends who had lost loved ones to COVID infection, and I knew people personally who had to be hospitalized, one of whom is still on a ventilator to this day.

I responded:

“One must dispel with the notion that valuable insight can only come from who we see eye to eye with above a predetermined threshold.”

You can’t only listen to people whose beliefs match yours to a maximum possible percentage.

Now, the next hypothetical dilemma my friend posed to me was of a blog feed consisting mostly of helpful and useful server hosting guides but also the occasional post full of support for Neo-Nazi ideas.

“At what point would you unsubscribe?”, they asked me.

The real question was this: where was my predetermined threshold, and how would I quantify it?

I realized the threshold is, in all cases, entirely arbitrary. We don’t walk around (or, at least, I don’t) with an inventory of current issues and our corresponding stances constantly at the fronts of our minds, ready to perform the necessary calculus on the fly to determine if someone else, either passing us on the street or sitting in our living room, is worth listening to based on some kind of acceptable agreement quotient.

If you do this, you have my sympathy because it sounds miserable and exhausting.

Given how arbitrary (read: emotional, and perhaps even instinctual) such a threshold felt to me, I would unsubscribe when the content I came for became too rare to be worth it.

“What if it’s a paid newsletter?”

Financial support of bad ideas was now part of the equation. As I said, I love this stuff. Starting with a 50/50 split:

Ignoring how unwise of a content marketing strategy it would be, if every other post from an individual to whom I send 10 dollars per month to support the publishing of content I like (server hosting guides and tips), is about something I don’t like (Neo-Nazi talking points), five of my dollars could be considered to be funding the Neo-Nazi bile.

But what if I think the server guides are worth the full ten dollars? Could someone reasonably accuse me of being a Neo-Nazi funder and enabler, or does it matter what I believe I’m paying for? Who gets to decide how much of my contribution may be immoral?

What if I follow the content creator specifically so I can stay up to date on Neo-Nazi talking points and movements, because like the wonderful Daryl Davis, I have a vested interest in being able to affect change through understanding of viewpoints that oppose my own?

Am I still financially enabling a Nazi to spread hateful ideas, or am I using those ideas in a way that allows me to counteract their spread?

Somewhere in the middle, now, what if I have no interest in the Nazi content and simply ignore it, while staying subscribed? Where does this place me ethically?

Approaching Our Guillotines

Outside of the law, we have to be careful not to make moral judgments for anyone other than ourselves lest we fall victim to hypocrisy.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: there are some very obvious moral positions that any reasonable person can be expected to take. I would agree with you, but I would also challenge you to come up with any that are not already prohibited by established laws of the land.

I’m not suggesting murder is acceptable. We have laws against murder that we enforce, and that’s good enough for me.

But there are no laws around reading someone’s opinions, nor supporting someone’s opinions, as long as those opinions are protected by the First Amendment.

The hypocrisy I’m referring to is more difficult to spot, especially in ourselves, as it is usually hidden behind one or more of what Albert Camus refers to as an “abstraction”, or the prioritizing of reason over human feeling, that is, the feelings of other humans. He describes the breaking down of one such abstraction held by his father in Reflections on the Guillotine, describing his father’s demeanor before and after witnessing a public execution.

In short, despite his father’s morning excitement about attending an execution, the visceral reality of actually watching another human’s life taken by beheading broke through any abstraction between his perception of a guillotine and the very real consequences of its operation. He came back home and proceeded to vomit, forever changed.

It is much easier for us to plant moral flags with things we have not witnessed ourselves, and this extends to the humans behind the ideas we reject, even justifiably.

Unsubscribing from a blog consisting of mixed content that we can see does not absolve us from complicity in other morally questionable situations, such as buying cheap items from Temu made with slave labor under a regime currently performing an ethnic cleansing on its own people that we cannot see.

Or, perhaps, you’ve already forgotten that Chinese workers building Apple’s iPhones were committing suicide so often that the factory had to install nets to catch those who jumped off the roof.

Are you staunchly anti-Trump yet still buying Apple products?

If you’ve never bought anything from Temu, you need only look in your refrigerator for food that likely came from supply chains incorporating factory farming practices designed around the abuse of animals.

Do you dislike the concept of billionaires but can’t imagine cancelling your Prime subscription?

Does the idea of having to slaughter your own cow to continue eating beef, one of the most environmentally detrimental foods of all time, make you as viscerally uncomfortable as it makes me?

More than likely, you are already a supporter of something that would horrify you to witness. There are just miles between you and the inconvenient truth behind your luxuries and comforts.

Whataboutism For Me, But Not For Thee

This may seem like “whataboutism”, or responding to an accusation with an accusation of your own. However, my goal in mentioning Apple products and factory farming isn’t to elevate myself to a position of superior morality. I’m not here to interrogate the areas in your life where you feel cognitive dissonance.

We must be aware of our own dissonances before we hold anyone else to standards we’ve established in our minds, whether we’ve done so on the fly or years prior. By engaging in counter-accusations with ourselves, we can begin to take inventory of our own ethical shortcomings.

With this comes a sense of inferiority, and as has happened with some of my friends, a particularly grating brand of fatalism.

I once overheard someone talking about some news that another celebrity had been accused of using exploitative labor for one of their personal clothing brands (I don’t remember who it was because I don’t care about celebrities), saying:

“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

Processing that statement in my mind was like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. It simply didn’t feel right. What, then, was the point of all the fair-trade commerce initiatives of recent years? Do brands like TOMS, Bombas, and Marine Layer really have no impact by donating or recycling clothing? What is this perfect “ethical” designation that, if they can’t secure for themselves, makes them as unethical as companies that sell fast fashion on the backs of children?

If a perfectly ethical business model isn’t realistic, what is the point of any of it? Is there truly nothing between perfectly ethical operation and absolute moral bankruptcy?

Is going vegetarian worth nothing in the shadow of veganism?

Is buying from B Corps with mostly good scores no better than from big box stores?

Is paying $5 per month for a blog subscription that is 50% regurgitated, asinine neo-Nazi bullshit worse than actively feeding a profit model that can only survive on slave labor?

Ethics is Not About Efficacy

Let’s use veganism as an example. For full disclosure, this is one of my personal cognitive dissonances that I am currently tracking and working through myself.

Perhaps one person - me, in this example - becoming vegan will have a nigh immeasurable impact on the atrocities of factory farming. However, if I see such treatment of animals as a horrific moral failing, should that not be enough for me to change?

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in 18th century in the United States of America. Slavery is an enormous enterprise and the basis for much of the economic power ready for the taking. Despite knowing that owning slaves is a horrific moral failing, you know that refusing to participate in the exploitation of slave labor won’t make much of a dent in the Atlantic slave trade.

The refusal to own slaves being the right thing to do seems self-evident, does it not?

Yet you participate in the system anyway, because not doing so won’t bring about the kind of change required to make a true difference.

To do so would be to abandon the non-ideal in favor of simply grieving the ideal. John Rawls discusses how ideal theories beget non-ideal theories that are more realistically applicable across disparate individuals and societies.

Choosing to own slaves in the 1700s simply because not doing so wouldn’t bring about the ideal state of society is a cop-out of massive proportion. If ethos itself is asymptotic, our best approaches still matter.

The calculus of moral action has never been the point. What we do with the ideas in front of us is.

Ideas and Words I Disagree With Cannot Hurt Me

Interesting. How does “if ideas and words I disagree with can’t hurt me” relate to the idea of bringing in low quality things into your “brain-attic”? For instance, when I open my RSS feed I’d rather not even see Nazi talking points even if they’re just words on the screen for 10 seconds…

By “brain-attic”, they were referring to the rather hilarious conversation between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, during which Holmes reveals that he wasn’t aware of the Solar System and had no intention of remembering it at all.

The mind is a finite space, and the conscious mind even more so. What we allow into it is up to our discretion. But the allowance or dismissal of ideas is not equivalent to their existence in our field of consciousness, which is not entirely up to our discretion.

As I mentioned before, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly ridiculous stances on wearing masks or conspiracy theories about Anthony Fauci were exhausting and stressful for me. But despite the difficulty of managing that reaction, how I felt was not out of my control. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this until much later.

I don’t blame myself for my reaction. The pandemic was a difficult time. Many people struggled as much or more than I did, and seeing myself as deficient for not being able to control my reactions to such new and enormous problems would be unfair.

But what is it about reading even the headline of a post full of pro-Nazi prose that would bother my friend so? I can think of several, quite fair reasons:

However, trauma, no matter how large or small, is inflicted upon us by our perceptions of things or events, not the things or events themselves. No matter how controversial such a statement may be to many, this is well established and understood among the psychological community.

To quote Alfred Adler, the father of individual psychology:

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.

Trauma is very real, but it is not inevitable. Things affect us because we allow them to affect us, a principle at the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Our allowance of things to affect us is not always conscious, nor can we be blamed for it.

No one should blame victims of rape for struggling with having healthy sexual encounters, no matter how safe they are in reality, and no matter how much trust they have in their partner, and this consideration extends to all forms of trauma from all sources.

Instead, we can choose to “critically ignore” information that is false, inflammatory, or personally distressing, similarly to what the authors of Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens mention in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 32. While that study doesn’t necessarily address our emotional responses to ideas that we don’t like, the function of choosing what to do with information presented to us is one worth acknowledging.

The idea that we have a measure of control over how things affect us is not new. Born into slavery in 50 CE, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said:

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Epictetus was touching on a very real science behind controlling our stress responses by consciously relocating our attention from our amygdala (the part of the brain where survival mechanisms sit) and the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain used for higher order cognitive functions).

Ideas we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable exist whether we are thinking about them or not.

Seeing a post from a neo-Nazi that isn’t the server maintenance expertise you sign up for doesn’t make them more of a neo-Nazi. It doesn’t create more neo-Nazis out of thin air if I read the entire post instead of ignoring it, just like it doesn’t make server administrators smarter or more plentiful when I read about how to efficiently migrate storage volumes.

Pretending the bad ideas don’t exist doesn’t make them go away, and reacting to them in any way at all only gives them power.

Avoidance of Information Is the Avoidance of Influence

Shielding oneself from Nazi blog titles (assuming you don’t click and open the full post) doesn’t make them cease to exist, it only exempts you from any opportunity to understand a contrary viewpoint, no matter how detestable, and therefore from making any difference in the direction or evolution of such ideas.

I then shared a picture of the bottom of my bookshelf, where I have a few different translations of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Koran.

Despite my previously monstrous amount of religious trauma from my Christian upbringing, I don’t throw the Bibles out because their contents bother me, no matter how many problems I fundamentally have with them. I keep them, and have gathered other religious texts, because I seek to understand.

I seek to effect change.

If one avoids bad ideas, it follows that one does not know much about them. Logically, not knowing about bad ideas limits one’s ability to change the minds of those who hold them.

The choice to avoid knowing is the choice to be passive.

There is a fashionable shorthand for the refusal to engage: the paradox of tolerance. The argument, borrowed selectively from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, goes roughly like this: a tolerant society is not obligated to tolerate intolerance, therefore you are absolved from having to sit across from it.

What the people deploying this argument rarely mention is that Popper’s prescribed response to intolerance was reasoned debate and public argument, not expulsion. Suppression without argument was his last resort, reserved for movements that had already abandoned reason and resorted to violence. The people invoking Popper to justify blocking and muting and no-platforming have not read the book they are citing. Daryl Davis has a better conversion rate.

And if Davis, a black man, can sit across from member after member of the Ku Klux Klan and other associated hate groups and have a civil discussion with them, why can’t you or I?

Until someone can show me a higher Klansman conversion count than Davis’ count (which, according to NPR, is at least 200) that resulted from such internet tough guy strategies as “punch Nazis”, I’m not going to close my mind off to ideologies simply because they are repugnant.

“If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.”

– Black Belt Bayesian