Unpopular ideas about social norms | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular ideas about social norms

juliagalef.com

32 pointsimartin2k16 comments

Thoroughly agree that we should both encourage and train people to think more philosophically about societal questions and social norms - even if the outcome is just to say 'nope, I think the social norm is fine as is'.

One of the main reasons for this in my opinion is it drives empathy and understanding; by learning to genuinely consider an argument from an opposing viewpoint, one learns how another sees the world.

On a personal level, I've found it's been one of the most enduring and valuable skills from an undergrad degree in philosophy; it's much harder to hate someone, or even get annoyed or frustrated with them, when you're able to understand them.

I suspect that some of the ideas are just perceived to be unpopular, as opposed to be actually unpopular. People might like the idea but is afraid to say it out loud

I would love to see a survey where people are asked both "how much do you agree" and "how likely are you to say so publicly". Given enough questions, it'd also be interesting to find out if the Left or the Right generally feels more suppressed. (I'm obsessed with the possibility that Clinton lost because the Left pressured people to deny that they supported Trump.)

That wouldn't work like you're hoping. You're assuming a (representative) respondent pool that's all of these:

1. capable of switching off preference falsification for a survey

2. introspectively active (and accurately so) over a long enough period to notice that they behave differentially in public and private contexts

3. interested in exposing this degree of candor for a survey, i.e. motivated to "show the researchers" (show themselves, really) their belly after collapsing across all the reasons they'd rather not.

Humans are primitive. Questionnaires have to be designed around that.

Such as racism. I just made a "racist" posting that fit the theme of the article, and it got downvoted.

Yeah, the items on her list aren't that unpopular. Your item isn't on her list, or anything like it. Even an article listing unpopular opinions isn't going to dare list actually unpopular opinions.

Maybe those are the subjects that we should be exploring the most: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Are you saying that 12-14, 16-17 and 22 are popular opinions? I don't know too many people who would vocalize many of those ideas with confidence.

I think its really cute that an attempt was made to cite blog articles as references though, good job.

1. Create culture where anyone who steps outside the political or moral norm is fired/career limited.

2. Sneer about no "professional sources" for positions, since few people value ideas over employment/tenure. Only people with nothing to lose publically air those opinions, those with things to lose keep them to themselves.

3. Imply that anyone who thinks in the non-approved way must be like those people/undesirables with nothing to lose, despite the silent ones having a lot to lose.

You can say this is all tinfoil, but my engineering ethics professor told the entire class he's had to make choices between "speaking truth to power" and his career and that in the interest of full disclosure he chose his career + funding. 250+ people in that room at the time.

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