E Pur Si Muove
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious about the thought of a Trump presidency, but I'm pretty far along the open-minded scale, so we chatted about it privately a bit.
My co-worker asked me to not speak about his position and to not let anyone else know about it, because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.'
Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.
You know what? I agreed with his concern at the time, and I still agree with it. Consciously and otherwise, I think that quite a few of the fine progressive folk that we find ourselves surrounded by here in the bay area would hold such an opinion against him in important ways.
I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
At this point, I can't imagine a path forward that has much of a chance of bearing fruit.
"Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion.
That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power.
Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing, and that climate change will kill us all if we don't act.
That is objectively false - Trump won because white voters in the rust belt swung 25 points from Obama to Trump. If you were right that they voted only Republican out of tribalism then Obama would never have won those states.
Trump may have won michigan by only 10k votes, but Obama had a margin of half a million in 2012.
From G.K. Chesterton: "A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, “If you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects.” I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all.
... The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the pulpits. Or, better still, let him drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men are solemn — more solemn than I am. And even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous — more frivolous than I am. Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can think that paradox and jesting stop the way? It is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own favourite “serious methods;” it is his own favourite “momentousness;” it is his own favourite “judgment” which stops the way everywhere." - from Heretics, 1905
That said what I've always been told is to start with myself: maybe my "opponents" are dumb.
That doesn't help anything but my ego.
Instead I'd recommend looking into common ground or another way to present my arguments.
I disagree deeply with a good number of you but still I think most of you don’t realize most of the time since I either shut up or at least present my views somewhat carefully in the hope that someone might get some inspiration.
I've also changed my own, long held opinions on certain topics (e.g. drug policy) not because anyone here ridiculed me but because somebody took the time to explain instead of shouting troll, downvoting and flagging.
I wish more people here would opt for that solution.
1) Mass shootings are horrific, and it seems insane that anyone can own an assault rifle with such low barriers, but at the same time, death from gun violence is statistically low compared to, say, auto accidents. If being in favour of stricter gun regulation to save a few tens of thousand of lives (in a country of hundreds of millions) means alienating a huge percentage of the population, then why not let that one slide. Things will be no worse than they are now.
2) Many people (certainly me) would say that abortion is a woman's right but even if abortion is illegal, back street abortions will still take place. They may be in unsanitory and dangerous conditions, and some deaths will result. But again, statistically speaking, that will only impact a small percentage of the population.
3) Climate change however, seems like it presents an existential danger that could wipe us out as a species. Our growth driven economies seem unequipped to deal with this ultimate tragedy of the commons. Statistically, it will kill 100% of us, or severely degrade our grandchildren's lives, unless we somehow get our shit together on a global scale.
To use a crappy analogy, imagine we're all locked inside a giant container with limited air. There's a blocked air vent at the top, which we can only reach of we all stand on each other's shoulders - i.e. cooperate.
In such circumstances, why continue bickering over what music we should play while we wait for suffocation? Surely it would be better to listen to the other guys music, if it got him onside, and allowed us to move away from our tribal stances and work together on some action against the common threat.
The effects of mass shootings isn't just about the amount of people killed. It's about the anxiety it creates nationally or globally. That's basically what makes terrorism so powerful, but it's not as easy to measure those effects and what they can lead to.
And a highly cited study from 2013 addressing Damore's topic directly: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.
Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).
The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...
The second link is about the advantage men have in mechanical reasoning and how it likely contributes to their representation in STEM fields. It's the title of the paper.
From the Stanford article (which is not peer reviewed):
>Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
Yet again, Damore's paper wasn't making the argument that observational biological differences exist, the point of which you've missed because you're eagerly still trying to prove it right now. Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong, and he cherry picked specific data and stretched evidence to falsely support his viewpoint. Which, in context to this thread, is still neither progressive nor conservative and continuing to be proven vague.
No, it wasn't. In fact, the exact opposite: he literally says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that ... we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases".
Your [2] doesn't even cite [1], and in any case, [1] has almost 800 citations, while [2] is only cited by the author herself in her other papers. Seems like a stretch to call [1] "discredited".
Number of citations is terrible metric to defend a paper because the reason [2] has less citations is because [2] was published 3 years ago, while [1] was published almost a decade ago.
Appeals to popularity are logic fallacies for a reason.
You have the base for a really good argument that could sway people who are on the fence about the issue but when you say things like "vagueness of his diatribe" you alienate the people you want to change the most.
Doing something out of spite like that is a pretty miserable experience...
No, that's not what I said nor is it what I implied. He voted for Trump because, among other reasons, he thought Mrs. Clinton was a terrible candidate and would make a terrible president, and he personally weighed that more heavily than what he knew of Trumps disadvantages.
I don't agree with that assessment, but it is reasonable.
I read that as "we wouldn't vote for Trump, but did anyways because of how progressives see us". Maybe I misread this.
Yep. I know a great many people who voted for that reason. They felt marginalized, and their vote was the only way they could strike back - because talking could ruin their lives.
I know a lot of people that have moderate views that are simply shut down by liberals. As a response, they hide and vote for Trump.
I see it as their way to elect someone that is not afraid to go against the accepted view of the elites and therefore going against all that political correctness nonsense.
Cancelling events and boycotting sponsors because their speaker line up isn't sufficiently in line with imaginary industry demographics. Or even because a blind selection process, the thing people say they want, ends up selecting a wrongthinker.
Bullying comet-chasing scientists into tearful apologies over their choice of shirt. Or a self deprecating joke. That's just in STEM, you see the same in comedy, in politics, etc.
In each instance, a pitchfork wielding mob was summoned with social media outrage by bad faith actors. And get this, they are the ones who also loudly complain about trolls.
The rule to make sense of it is quite easy: when they do it to you, it's just consequences for speech. When it happens to them, it's targeted harassment that makes people feel unsafe and someone needs to step in and ban it.
That may be what you personally felt in this single personal anecdote, but it is not at all supported by the results for the bay area in the election[1].
There were an enormous number of Trump voters who explicitly stated that they voted for him because he was the only national candidate to criticize things like NAFTA and other policies which directly hurt them and/or people they knew. Presented with a series of bad options, they picked the guy who spoke to their concerns and naively wrote off the outlandish comments as news-cycle spam. Go back and look at the contested areas in Michigan and Pennsylvania where Trump did well. Or go back and listen to the town hall Bernie Sanders did after the election in West Virginia where Trump performed well-- you can listen directly to what swayed them the most. It wasn't a fear of retribution from progressive tech bosses for non-progressive ideas. It was jobs.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california-preside...
My mom - and almost all of her friends - are also in that group. What was so surprising about her group of friends was that NONE of them talked about who they were going to vote for, prior to the election - EVEN TO EACH OTHER. AFTER the election they were all shocked to find they all felt the same way and almost all had voted for Trump.
Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view.
Progressive culture in the US has become toxic. The sooner people realize this, the better.
You are making that claim where the evidence is people speculating about a case where they decided not to test the veracity of your claim.
Is there any evidence that your Mom and her friends would have been fired for expressing their political views?
I'm asking because here in the South people who voted for Trump a) express their views when I talk to them, and b) then go on about their day. Frustration, contention, and disagreements, and confusion abide but that's largely a function of Trump's high-noise rhetorical strategy and people (esp. older/retired) getting all their news from a single source. (Btw-- what happened to the stereotype of the proud/responsible U.S. working man reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table? Is that just a myth of a bygone era?)
About reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table... well, we've spent the last 50 years destroying the family life, time, and perception of our media and journalism that would lead to that behavior, not to mention social media. Why would it survive?
I'm not sure this observation has much value. Voting for a candidate that shares your values in a time when those values aren't popular is equivalent to doing so when those values are popular. Either way you're voting for a candidate that shares your values. I'm never going to place a spite-vote for someone who doesn't support my views just because my views are unpopular.
And in any case, I think certain views should be demonized. Expressing disparaging things about gay people (the example from the article) should be viewed with the same revulsion as we would today view the historical opinion that people of color were in some way "better suited" for slavery. The view that some people are somehow "less than" shouldn't be tolerated. The paradox of tolerance is very real.
True but we aren't talking about things at that extreme. We were talking about an unwillingness to talk about your policital candidate, for fear of how "liberals" would treat you.
That should be alot more worrying to people than I think it is.
I think in SV, it is a completely reasonable precaution. If you openly declare you are, say, a communist (I don't mean "support Obamacare", I mean real communist, as in nationalize everything, ban private property, etc.), chances that people would shun you and that hurts you carrier are pretty small. If you say you voted for Trump, chances are higher, and I've heard people say as much pretty much open text.
Contracts with government == money+jobs == votes -> power.
Contracts with politician owned company == money -> power.
Saying hiring more male software engineers may not be that wrong, however, do put you out of your job.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/21/justin-bieber-...
>A Chinese man has been jailed for a year for stamping on a portrait of Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, after being found guilty of inciting ethnic hatred.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42364214?ocid=socialflow_...
Or it could mean nobody understands your English. Does @sama even speak Chinese?
Saying it's easier to talk about things in China vs US. I've been to China and you can get thrown in jail for saying the type of things we say re. our political environment. My friends there have to speak in whispers in public while people in SF have no problem raging about our politicians.
And saying we should "allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics". At its least a really poor choice of words there. The choice of words makes it sound like it's okay to stand aside while they spout bigotry. Perhaps he meant it's okay to say it, but we should argue against it - but unfortunately for him that point was not made because the intention of the article was to support free speech. Bad example.
It's jail vs sacking; different aspects of the same reaction.
(Not that this reflects my opinion of Trump.)
The article isn't that complicated. He meant to say exactly what he did say.
Which makes sense, given the entire point of tolerating free speech is that people are free to say terrible things, not "moderately uncomfortable" things.
Executive summary: (1) Open societies are more innovative. (2) Silicon Valley is becoming less tolerant of divergent viewpoints. (3) This is primarily culture-driven, but will likely have an effect on innovative science, which by definition starts as sounding somewhat crazy.
As measured by what? Are there people being jailed for expressing a divergent opinion, or being refused service in restaurants/hotels/shops/etc, or unable to find employment?
For the latter point, employment, some people are likely to pick one of the few examples that routinely get reused in this discussion - such as Damore + Google, or Eich + Mozilla. But are these kind of things actually happening at an increasing rate? Because I recall similar things happening in the 2000s, and 90s, and I wasn't around before but they likely did too (and go back a few decades earlier, and it'd be saying something like "women can be engineers just like men" or "black people can be doctors just like white people" that'd get you ostracized, so yeah). So unless you have actual data showing that there has been an increase in people getting fired/being denied employment in the past 5-10 years for having divergent viewpoints, there's nothing there.
If your main measure for "less tolerant of divergent viewpoints" is "people being mean to you on Twitter", well yeah, that's part of living in an open society. In fact one could equally argue that people feeling more empowered to call out things they disagree with is the very hallmark of an open society.
Appeal to authority, but I admit he's in a better place than I to see whether it is or isn't in funding circles.
My point was just that for any short amount of time in most totalitarian states, you're unlikely to encounter the arbitrary crackdowns that have a chilling effect on free expression for people who live their permanently.
note: screaming includes what we would call "organizing" and "protesting", including simply using online groups to form such protests.
So, yes, you do have to watch what you say. If you criticize the government for corrupt police or a chemical plant explosion that caused unjust deaths, you can expect to be locked up for an unspecified amount of time and forced to sign a confession of wrongdoing.
Heck, even if you're outside of China you have to watch what you say. Book dealers in Hong Kong have been abducted and held indefinitely in China for selling the wrong books. So much for "one country, two systems"
It's convenient to be a tourist sometimes.
For the most part, no one in your every day life gives a shit what you say or do.
For Americans and nationals of other privileged countries there is even more tolerance for the controversial subjects.
Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.
Particularly when we start involving healthcare, a "move fast/break things" type approach can be extremely detrimental, for example.
We created atom bombs. Some say AI can destroy humanity (perhaps Sam himself) but here we are, I don’t think you can stop science.. it’s what makes us human.
and I'd also add "to the best of our armchair knowledge"
"usa did nothing wrong"
Religion is the anathema to science.
Yes, it's subtle, but the current shift in the US is towards ideas being dangrous
The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.
But that wasn't the entire point of the post. The post also didn't like people criticizing life-extending research, when the examples were people criticizing the direction of the research itself.
The post was hazy about what, exactly, it wanted people to stop doing, but it seemed to dislike any criticism.
Whether the "life extension is bad for the environment" argument was a good argument or not, criticism of the ethics of work must be part of free discussion.
When "this is a bad idea, maybe you should stop" becomes "you are a bad person".
If the CEO of a mining company has the "ingenious, un-PC idea" to increase mining profits by lobbying Congress and donating to sympathetic lawmakers to ease EPA regulations so he can dump mercury directly in the river, my ethical argument against the idea is that it damages the environment and the people in the communities, possibly for generations.
If his answer is "I know that, but I value profits more," what is left to discuss about the ethics of the idea? We agree on the facts of the matter.
All that's left is for me to say "I think your moral framework is very different from mine," which is really not that different from my saying "I think you are a bad person."
But extending human life? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe people will keep having children at the same rate and with no one dying anymore the whole planet is completely full of selfish people who don't care about others of the environment. Maybe only the rich will have access, block everyone else from getting it and control the world by simply out living anyone who is in their way.
But what comparable things do we actually see in history? In every country I'm aware of, once basic survival is taken mostly for granted people stop having kids as quickly and often as they can. In fact these days people often wait so long they depend on science to make birth even possible in their advanced age. And most people have, at most, 2 kids.
Imagine if we lived 10k years. Some people might say "well, lets have our kids right now so we can give up 18 years or so now and then have the rest to ourselves" but I suspect most people would say "what's the rush?". Some would even say "why invest 18+ years to extend my legacy to someone I can't control, can only marginally influence for a decade or two? In 10k years they're bound to solve death all-togher. I'll be my own legacy! And if, after 9,900 years they still haven't done it, I can always reproduce then". Imagine not wondering if there was a Troy, we could just ask the people who lived there. In society, we tend to be safe from some tragedy until most people who lived it are dead then we fall in the same trap again. What if they didn't die?
I say all that to say, it is not remotely obvious that extending human life is in the same category of behavior as dumping mercury in the river to make a few bucks so the consequences should not be the same or even similar.
My mining company example was much closer to the kinds of ideas that are actually pushed by people in the real world, quite frequently, more so than the article's anecdote about life-extension being criticized.
I'm saying that some people seem to pursue profits in such a way that they clearly have a moral framework that doesn't match mine, and arguing over the ethics of the idea with them is fruitless.
Did whoever it was at Volkswagen who had the bright idea to make cars have a system to detect when they were being tested, and change their emissions accordingly, really need someone to debate with about the ethics of the idea? I don't think that was a case of someone with a simple lack of knowledge of the ethical arguments.
These are the kinds of "innovations" people are coming up with in the real world, more-so than life-extension. People are going to create new apps that allow microloans with Bitcoin, with usurious rates, and market them to poor people. People are going to create dolls that listen to your kids and use the info to market toys to them. People are going to create devices to allow you to monitor your health, and sell the info to drug companies, or even to employers. There are going to be plenty of Bad Ideas where the people peddling them know the ethical arguments against them. At some point, we get to criticize the people coming up with these ideas as well.
"people working on this must be really unethical"
No individual has a moral obligation to debate ideas. However if debate is shut down with fallacious arguments it limits the ability for the idea to progress.
If this happens too often then progress will be slowed. That is the point of this post.
Extending life expectancy will increase human population and harm our environment and that harm to the environment will harm future generations so individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations and that's unethical which makes them unethical. You can disagree with the argument but it's not fallacious.
Regardless ideas need to be discussed divorced from the people presenting them. Medical care is no more or less ethical because Hitler is making the argument.
Most people would require action which creates direct (not second order as in this example) harm of a large magnitude before applying the label to a person.
In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
That doesn't make any sense. If I directly try to eradicate the Jews I'm immoral, if my actions just have a second or third order effect of eradicating the Jews then I'm not? Most people probably use the direct vs second order distinction when it's themselves who are doing something unethical via second order effects but that's just to save some cognitive dissonance. If I know my actions have second order effects of hurting lots of people and I still do it that's unethical.
>In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
Reality isn't an honest debate, reality is realpolitik. People are likely to be emotionally charged when they're told that it's okay they're being hurt because it's just a second order effect after all. Learn to deal with that emotion and argue against it, not make posts on the internet opining for something which never existed.
This is a common moral principle; it is found in, for instance, the classical Christian doctrine on homicide, where directly willed killing is (leaving aside war and capital punishment) categorically prohibited, but killing (even when it is a certain result, or as nearly so as practically occurs) incidental to some act with a different end is not categorically prohibited, but judged according to the proportionality of the risked harm of the act with the harm it was avoiding. (Self-defense doctrine in American, and some other, law is ultimately strongly influenced by this principle, though it diverges a bit from it.)
Of course If your definition of unethical doesn't require intent to harm then this is a meaningless distinction. Another Reason why labels are unhelpful.
[citation needed]
>harm our environment
[citation needed]
>individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations
[citation needed]
We don't know any of those things. You can debate it. Even passionately so, but it's wrong and dangerous to assume your unproven beliefs are facts and label people based on them.
Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you would be fired and shunned. Progress, right? The problem is, that power - the power to destroy careers of people who have done something bad - is not being wielded consistently or sparingly. We're aiming it at misogynists and homophobes, and also their defenders, and also people aren't defending them per se but kinda sound like they are if you only read the headline.
(But the point of the essay is not that Brendan Eich and James Damore shouldn't have been fired; it's that the "Brendan Eich and James Damore should be fired" position has caused a chilling effect on open dialogue.)
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...
It's like an "EPROM programmer", which is a tool to make the hardware run the software.
But because you believe (perhaps even irrationally) that the idea could harm you give yourself, and anyone who thinks as you do, the right to damage people's reputation. History has shown this to be very dangerous behavior.
Reminds me of a Kill the Poor sketch by Mitchell and Webb.
Both technology and ethics can progress and regress across a huge range of concepts. Too much unexamined progress (of either tech or ethics) in one area can lead to terrible outcomes.
Being able to debate and have these conversations is essential to finding the balance.
I'm reading this as complaint about opinions condemning discussion of certain concepts, which is fair. But to ignore that other concepts face the same type of condemnation in China is... amazing.
ostracizing hypothetical talks is the problem here, not pursuing the unethical goal; just talking about what part of the goal makes it unethical is being shut down (according to the article)
This line of reasoning leads to censorship. It's the same line of reasoning used by every dictator and demagogue as well as China today. Why? The idea of democracy seems dangerous to a king.
Ideas are not dangerous. Ideas are never dangerous. Ideas acted upon might cause danger or harm, but an idea itself never does, never has, and never will cause harm directly.
Open debate of ideas, or the testing of opposing ideas to find the best among them, is necessary for progress... not only to find and establish new ideas, but to question widely held ideas today in the hopes of finding something better. To have open debate--to find the best ideas--you need to listen to ideas with which you might not agree, or which you might find--if acted upon--dangerous.
Some substances, tools, machines, etc are also inherently dangerous, and can't be made not to be.
Does this mean that we should never use a saw, light a fire, or discuss [insert a controversial topic here]?
Somehow people came up with protocols to work with inherently dangerous material things that lower the risk of a serious injury to acceptable bounds. I don't see why this would not apply to inherently dangerous ideas.
I'd hazard to say that for the last 2500 years quite a few devices were invented in this space, allowing to think much of the previously unthinkable without turning into ravaging monsters or becoming insane. I suspect that we could just continue using these devices (e.g. "freedom of speech", "critical thinking", separation of author's personality form their ideas, etc), instead of running in terror from "dangerous ideas" while swinging a banhammer.
You're missing the parent's point. An idea not being acted upon is not dangerous. The idea of splitting atoms is not dangerous and the atomic bomb is not dangerous: An atomic bomb getting built (the idea being acted upon) is dangerous.
Why are full disclosure policies recommended by security researchers? Why is open source healthy for security in general? Why is "security through obscurity" frowned upon? Because it is important to be able to discuss threats in order to better protect yourself from them.
Burying your head in the sand is just a shitty tactic for dealing with danger. Being able to discuss controversial ideas is extremely important, whether it's to better protect yourself from them (eg. extreme-right ideology) or to independently research facts hidden from you by people who don't have your best interests in mind (eg. north korean censorship).
And let's be honest here, from what I've seen of my (left leaning) twitter feed, Sam is being attacked extremely harshly for his "controversial" post. If people here think that the article is wrong, this is a terrible way to prove it so.
> Why are full disclosure policies recommended by security researchers?
This is still a somewhat controversial issue. Coordinated or "responsible" disclosure appears to be advocated by most security researchers. Meanwhile, the full-disclosure mailing list still exists, but the activity on the list is far lower than it once was.
> Why is open source healthy for security in general?
This is also controversial. Open source software has its fair share in-the-wild 0days. The "many eyes" theory only works if there actually are many friendly eyes, and so far, it seems like that is not true. Nobody does this crap for free.
> Why is "security through obscurity" frowned upon? Because it is important to be able to discuss threats in order to better protect yourself from them.
"Security through obscurity" does not come from the "information must be free" community. The phrase comes from the idea that you should assume that your adversary knows everything about the defenses you have set up.
A gun not being fired is not dangerous. A deadly virus that is contained is not dangerous. Ideas are seeds; action is impossible without them. All you're doing is pushing the responsibility one step further; instead of preventing the spread of ideas we have to prevent their effects. Now instead of dealing with the cause, we have to deal with the symptoms.
A meme like "immigrants are the source of all our problems" is a dangerous idea, because of the actions it can directly cause. Preventing its spread is just good mental hygiene.
Cults are another place where ideas are most certainly dangerous; but this time for the individual. So is any religion/ideology people are willing to die for.
Most ideas are not dangerous. Also, I might be completely wrong; if I lived in Galileo's time, I might be claiming heliocentricity is a dangerous idea.
So the idea of atoms splitting leads to atomic bombs, which - when used on people - are evil, but it also leads to nuclear power plants (and by extension, to fixing current energy problems in an environmentally-friendly way), it leads to new scanning methods in medicine, it leads to improvements in agriculture, etc., and it leads to many similarly powerful spin-off ideas. Hell, it could open up the Solar System for us if people weren't scared shitless of it. Sure we got MAD, and we pointed a lot of nukes at each other, but we survived, and so far we're much better off with the idea of splitting atoms than without it.
And genetic engineering, while opening us up for new kinds of dangers, also has so much more potential than nuclear physics. It has the theoretical capacity of solving most of the problems of humanity, from food supply and environmental damage, to sickness, decay and death. I'd say that the biggest moral hazard here is not pursuing it.
And ultimately, let's not forget that scientific ideas are either good or bad models of the world, and whatever practical danger that comes of it is because of people who go apeshit and exploit achievements of science and technology to further their insanity. So maybe let's focus on restricting the impact of dangerous groups of people. As for the ideas themselves, to quote Eugene T. Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.I can imagine a debate about that, but I can't see how it is appropriate to create a toxic environment for life extension advocates.
Apparently these researchers / advocates found the environment so toxic they were motivated to move. Perhaps they were over-reacting but it seems likely something is wrong.
And "move fast / break things" applied to human biology research is entirely an insertion of the commenter, not remotely an implication of Altman's piece.
Just like laws, ethics are there for a reason, and the social changes going on are happening for a reason.
Is the argument that social media is tearing apart our society correct? I think it goes deeper than that, and that it's tech in general. We've grown impatient with right-swipe, immediate communication (whether through texting or calling on a cell phone; remember when you had to find a phone, or wait until you got to home/work?), immediate gratification. No time or desire to think things through, just react.
The happiest time in the past 25 years was the first half of 2016, when I swore off almost all tech for 7 months, road tripped, and visited with people--strangers--and learned what made them tick. Guess what--not technology. And I was relaxed, happy, free.
Technology isn't the cause of a toxic society, but it definitely is a/the catalyst.
With more patience could come calm and reasoned responses that could help move other people towards a more progressive outlook. But I agree that our society and the somewhat-recent trend towards immediacy of everything in our lives has led to a desire to have the same immediacy in conflict resolution. We don't tolerate as many diverging opinions because they'd take too long to integrate.
It's weird knowing that a large portion of the country has similar values to me, but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable. It doesn't matter that these things have zero impact on my behavior at work; you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms.
This terrifies me.
Personally I think leftists, rightists and centrists are terrible at grokking stats because the human brain can't handle multifaceted realities very well.
It is possible for instance that all political positions are correct, even the apparently contradictory ones because they are part of the Elephant (the one with the blind men).
It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
So everyone needs to ensure they hold no oppinions you might find offensive or be homeless? It goes both ways: how am I supposed to work with someone who thinks it's ok to ostracize people for personal beliefs?
No. Just be polite and respectful to your colleagues. Not every stone needs to be turned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...
Would you also be scared of working with men because they typically commit homicides more than women?
I think being afraid of your life simply because someone is a bigot who hasn’t exhibited any violent behavior is on you, not the bigot. A small number of bigots are violent and dangerous, that doesn’t mean all are.
Now, this is quite different if someone is expressing or advocating violence. But some old catholic lady being against gay marriage represents zero threat of violence. Especially if she isn’t vocally expressing the hatred at work, but does something outside of work.
The issue I have is that simply expressing disagreement “I hate class X” is not a threat compared to “I want to cause grevious harm to class X.”
When your life is on the line, it is generally wise to err on the side of caution. If you assume someone openly transphobic is a threat to your life and you are wrong, you are at worst being rude to them. If you assume they aren't a threat to you and are wrong, you may end up dead (or maimed or otherwise egregiously harmed).
With those stakes on the table, the only logical thing to do is to vet people you can trust, not give assholes the benefit of the doubt that maybe they are merely assholes and won't violently assault and/or murder you.
The odds of a trans person being murdered by a transphobic person are phenomenally low. I think you need to balance risk vs return. Just like driving a car has costs and risks it may be worth it to get to the grocery store.
Without answering these two questions it is rather illogical to have your behavior change at all to someone who engages in open verbal hostility.
But you also need to distinguish between verbal hostility that is threatening vs non-threatening (ie, “I really don’t like people of class X.” Vs “I am going to punch people of class X in the face.”)
This also doesn’t account for the people are aren’t gay or trans yet are also targeted by irrational people (eg, Las Vegas victims).
It is very grounded in data.
I have had college classes on Intro to Psychology, Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I spent a lot of time in therapy and have done a lot of reading on social subjects and so forth. I was a military wife and history major and I have an AA in Humanities. The one urban planning conference I managed to attend, I went to all the social lectures rather than, say, design stuff.
I probably can't readily produce the kind of data you would like to see and I am sure I don't want to bother. Your remarks make it pretty clear to me that it would be a waste of my time. There would be no convincing you of anything.
I am leaving this remark here primarily for the benefit of other people, plus to give notice that if I don't reply further, it isn't some tacit acknowledgement that you are right. I just don't really want to play this game. That's all.
I will add for clarity's sake that the phrase willing to harm you in some way was carefully chosen. It doesn't assert violent intent. People can do you enormous harm without being violent and it is shockingly common for people to be willing to do some kind of material harm, even if they are disinclined to be violent. Marginalized peoples very much need to be leery of that fact.
Through your studies have you been able to identify evidence for a range or risk / odds ratio difference of haters to commit violence vs the standard population?
This is certainly hard to quantify, but seems important if it’s going to impact how you interact with people and how you recommend others interact with people.
I’m a bit disturbed that you seem unwilling (or unable) to discuss this and end the thread with “just trust me.” I certainly would like to trust you, but I try to shape my worldview through evidence and defendable evidence.
As I already stated as clearly as I know how, violence is not required to do serious harm to a person. To try to elucidate:
I have a life threatening medical condition and was also homeless for nearly six years. I was quite open about that on HN and other forums. My only goal was to find a means to earn money online as a solution to my situation.
I got a lot of flak from people in forums who wanted me to shut up about my problems because they liked wearing their goodness on their sleeve, we're unwilling to help me in any way and my presence made them uncomfortable. I often could not even get answers to my questions. I was accused of panhandling the internet and my goal of learning to make money online was completely dismissed by many people, making it that much harder to accomplish.
Treating a seriously ill homeless person like their desire to earn a living is not valid is not far from allowing someone to die by standing by and doing for them. You could compare it to denying blacks treatment at a white hospital, which is exactly how the black inventor of blood transfusions died following an accident where he couldn't get the blood he needed because he was the wrong color.
People who are in certain categories can be at significant risk if being egregiously harmed by the actions or inactions of other people, without violence being any part of it. People are shockingly comfortable with such things, which is an underlying principle that keeps things like racism alive.
We can, for example, measure harm to African Americans in terms of both trillions of dollars and in terms of disease and death. Most people don't really want to hear it. Recent articles calling for reparations to Blacks get routinely dismissed as "meh, everyone has been taken advantage of at some point." The idea of reparations has no traction, though the ongoing death toll for African Americans is routinely in the news.
The more eye catching incidents where Blacks get shot and killed by cops is really a very minor portion of the death toll. A much larger portion comes from historical redlining and White NIMBYism, which has forced people of color into neighborhoods with terrible air quality and substandard housing. Respiratory problems have gone up dramatically and the effect of living in neighborhoods with terrible air quality can be measured in dollars, incidence of disease and mortality.
A study in India found that male children receive slightly better care than female children. For example, a sick boy was more likely to be taken to a doctor the same day. A sick girl was more likely to be sent to bed with plans to see a doctor in the morning if she did not improve.
Girls in this study were absolutely not being abused. In most cases, they weren't even really neglected. They just weren't doted on like boys.
The consequences of these small differences in treatment could be measured in terms of mortality. Girls had a measurably higher death rate.
Marginalized people with any kind of survival instinct are wise to give a wide berth to anyone giving voice to open hostility to their kind. Such people can have a great deal of power to help them into the grave without ever lifting a finger to commit violence, sometimes simply by not lifting a finger to help when they need it. Often, the rest of the world will look on and see no wrong doing.
Having been subjected to such treatment as a homeless person, it us both horrifying and deeply psychologically scarring. My fundamental trust in humans has been irreparably harmed. And homelessness is curable. You get off the street, you aren't homeless anymore. But you don't stop being gay, trans, Black etc.
The most charitable interpretation I can find for how others behaved towards me is that they are incredibly ignorant of some things and blind to the serious consequences of their actions and inaction. That was not much comfort at the time it was happening and has done little to help me make my peace with it.
This makes no sense. Avoiding people whom you perceive as having hostility in their words is not a good strategy for finding a support network. A good strategy to is find people who have demonstrated that they are willing to 'raise a finger' and including them in your life. While there is a negative correlation between those two groups, excluding the former group from your search for the latter will limit your ability to build a strong support network.
So let me ask: are you a member of a marginalized group? Because I can't help but wonder at the reasons behind our very different point of views.
If someone is angry about something all the time that really (from my POV) shouldn't concern them, it doesn't make them a murderer that should be locked up right now, no, but it could nevertheless reasonably make me wonder if they are dangerous or will "go postal" at some point.
Do you think religious people are irrational? Are you one those people who freak out when a Muslim steps onto the subway? It seems like your line of reasoning would mean you don’t want any Muslims working at your company. That’s pretty messed up.
Comically, thinking that bigots or Muslims might go postal at some point is highly irrational. It’s like worrying about meteor strikes. So since you’re irrational, you might snap. Therefore people with your mindset should avoid working with you?
Instead, I'll just say neither schizophrenics nor Muslims are necessarily bigots.
Also, you're assuming I'm neither schizophrenic nor Muslim, which is funny. How do you know?
With regards to your statement "I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.", in many ways I totally respect that concern.
But I also think it may be symptomatic of how our approach to these topics has become non-constructive. We've too closely tied support for a person with support for everything they do/believe. To my thinking, whether I take you seriously or want to work with you has nothing to do with the aforementioned topics, and entirely with how you behave/execute at work. And if I'm going to undercut you at work because I disagree with your beliefs, the issue isn't that I disagree with you, it's that I'd be willing to undercut anyone I work with.
Your last point is well-taken. It may even be the case these days that the majority of people who hold views similar to yours think the way you do. But I think we need to take into account the uncertainty that people in these situations face. It's hard to know what the other person is thinking -- and if all you know is that person's opinion, it's hard to know what's going on when you're not looking. Bigotry is often dressed up in talk and behavior that seems polite, even respectful at first glance, but that is ultimately materially harmful.
For example, I think a lot of LGBTQ people from religious backgrounds have had an experience of being told that their family or community will "love the sinner, but hate the sin" -- and then subsequently being subjected to unfair and harmful treatment (bullying, psychological abuse, ostracism, being disowned).
This is a really good reminder that there is indeed a tragic past of marginalized groups being treated poorly and receiving harm/violence. And there still is in certain areas, meaning that even though my standpoint may be that "of course I value them as a person", from the recipient's standpoint that cannot be assumed, and indeed it may be safer not to. This is super important to keep in mind, and at times may be worth stating explicitly (if the topic comes up/is appropriate) when talking about this with folks. I can't assume they know I believe this.
Well my answer is no. See, I'm secure of my ideas, and respect people's ideas, and am not reluctant to hear criticism about the way I live my life or what ethical values or philosophical stances I have. And I prefer living among everyone no matter what they think of the way I live. Otherwise it's living in herds. But I should respect that the US society is transforming and maybe it's expectable that these particularly fragile topics like gender issues or racial issues are very hard to discuss. But if people like you are going to avoid anti-marriage-equality people, what you'll end up is going to be segregation and polarisation, which will only alienate you among them and them among you, undermining society and progress. The fact is no matter how logical or correct your opinion is, one has to convince others if the question regards them. Otherwise all the glory, should you win at your cause, is going to be temporary---until the opposers are going to be strong enough to undo what you did. And you end up with a bipartisan vicious cycle.
[1] Actually I beleive that all the marraiges should count as civil unions for the state, and that the persons themselves should define what it means and how it is lived.
Isn't that a restriction you are putting on yourself? As I see it, it is your requirement that someone has to share your point of view, and to get it to be so has to be your cost, not theirs.
Everyone things something someone else is doing or thinking is immoral all the time. It even has the composition problem: I think its immoral to sabotage people because you think its immoral! Thus who is the immoral!
> It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
I agree. There is a price you pay when you have a contrarian view point. You must. However today that is not vocal disagreement, its firing people and exile. Some twitter mob victims have become unemployable. Thats not reasonable to me.
Have you never worked with people with different religious beliefs?
I think I can change two works of your statement and make it a criticism of the Bay Area.
From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) supporting Trump is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral? I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.
It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
The issue I have with this perspective is that it is not applied equally. I do think you should get protection but I think that same protection should be applied to all groups. Next week I could say in front of my team "All Trump supporters are deranged psychopaths." I would get a few odd looks, my manager might tell my privately to tone it down. If I said the same thing about LQBT folk I would guess I have a 50% chance of being fired.
This feels like a double standard to me and makes me question if the people who support diversity and inclusion really mean it or if they only want what they approve.
The victimization complex Trump supporters seem to have internalized is such a bizarre thing.
I am of course, not trying to start a flame war either, but my take on it is that those sorts of issues would be inappropriate to bring up at work or in a job interview in the first place, regardless of your position.
Based on your description, I believe I probably espouse the opposite position on those issues, and even though I work at a large tech company in NYC I still don't bring them up at work.
That said, I can totally see where you're coming from. I have a friend who ended up being a pretty staunch Donald Trump supporter, and I watched as a lot of colleagues ostracized him (even though he never really brought it up at work).
It takes hard work to see past issues that divide us. In the case of my friend, I always just try to focus on our shared interests. It's what has kept us friends.
In closing...there are of course different degrees of ideas that people will tolerate, and it may just be that large cities have spoken, and they don't want intolerant people in their ranks.
shrugs, walks away
It also gets murkier nowadays because companies are expected to take stances on social issues, and with certain ones are criticized when they don't.
The main difference I see is that the expected stances are more liberal than they used to be, and the penalties for failing to conform tend to be much less severe.
The situation isn't great right now, I agree. But wild exaggeration doesn't help. It just makes people that you might be able to convince that the situation isn't great dismiss everything you are saying because of that wild exaggeration. Or at least some of those people, there may be an age divide here. But the point is if you want to be maximally persuasive you should avoid wild exaggeration.
I live in a major city in the US. I know two or three quite vocal Trump supporters. Yes, they face social sanctions. Yes, it might affect their career on the margin when it comes time to look at e.g. who to promote or who to lay off. No they aren't unemployed, much less unemployable.
What I'm not OK with, however, is people not respecting other people's rights to have their own views. And that goes from calling them names to refusing to serve them in their business to refusing to offer them the health insurance they want.
Edit: Just to be clear, I agree that merely expressing views should not result in an online inquisition. That people whose views I generally agree with do makes me very uncomfortable, and I agree with Sam Altman that this makes it difficult to have serious discussions.
The problem rather is that your particular political belief is viewed as being actively hostile towards people themselves or towards their friends or family or others. Voicing opposition towards gay marriage comes across as an attack on all gay people. That's where the reaction comes from.
A political belief that's not treated as openly hostile towards others (for example, supporting charter schools or something) doesn't get this reaction, of course. It's not merely that "you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms"; you're missing the nuance here.
If we accept this argument that some opinions or positions are unconscionable because they are fundamentally "against" other people, we end up on a slippery slope, and the situation in SF is somewhere on that slope (in my opinion, nowhere near the bottom).
Everyone wants in on the sympathy train and everyone loves shaming and silencing their opponents. We have to be careful to actively protect civil dialogue from such encroachments, because while they may feel sympathetic and nice at the time, that self-righteous reward system gets put on a feedback loop and drowns out everything else.
If we've already seen people getting agitated into conflating arguments over the semantics and technicalities of a dry legal instrument like marriage with their individual right to self-existence and safety, that's proof of this phenomenon in itself.
- Deep South (18 years - born + raised) - Boston MA (5 years @ college then job) - NYC (6+ years) - Los Angeles (1yr @ startup) - San Diego (1yr @ startup) - Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company)
I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never encountered such a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest (where I grew up). Someone literally told me once that "people from the South eat their children" in a half joking tone.
I don't think you can call it "racism" per se, but definitely the most oppressive form of prejudice I've ever encountered, by far, was found among people I worked and came in contact with in the SF Bay Area.
EDIT: Of course, I met (and stayed friends) with really amazing people in SF Bay Area. People with different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes. And the raw intelligence of most people I interacted with - technical and otherwise - is off the charts. But the attitudes I mentioned above were expressed frequently enough to leave an impression on me.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=644311...
San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/03/hes-said-...
Who exactly is he ranting to?
The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.
I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.
Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.
The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.
But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.
The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.
I lived in the South. I have family in the South.
We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.
Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.
It worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Fox_News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
To be a real iconoclast, and I don't see Altman as any sort of iconoclast, you have to take your lumps. You have to be indifferent to your lumps.
Care to say what you experienced in Boston?
Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your intent and is definitely not all your responsibility—it's just that things predictably happen this way, given such initial conditions.
As recently as two nights ago I helped entertain some startup founders from SF who were genuinely suprised that Houston (the 4th largest, soon 3rd largest city in the US) wasn't just a few strip malls.
As an aside, there was a study many years ago about the friendliest cities, and New York and Houston were at the top of the list; both were considered surprising by the authors, I guess based on reputation. While the deep south was way down the list well into the "unfriendly" category, which also seemed surprising to the authors given the reputation for "southern hospitality", but I'm from the deep south and I wasn't surprised, at all. The deep south is, by and large, insular and mistrustful of outsiders, except in a few larger cities. Poverty makes for higher crime, as well (one of the tests of "friendliness" included leaving a wallet in public places and seeing whether it made it back to its owner with cash intact...in NYC and Houston it almost always did, in some other places, not so much), and the south is pretty poor on average.
But, Houston is not a "southern" city. It is an international city with a huge amount of people who've moved there from other states and countries. It doesn't feel southern, though it does feel like other big Texas cities to some degree. I don't really consider Texas the south, though small-town Texas kinda looks like small-town Georgia or whatever. But, also, small-town California is kinda like small-town Texas...lots of cow towns, oil towns, and farm towns, just like Texas. And, tends to be Republican-leaning, just like small-town Texas.
It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport).
In some ways (if you look up the statistics above) rural Texas most resembles rural California.
But I think the whole concept of "deep south" vs the "new south" is where you see the differences come into play. Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, and many other NC areas, are great, diverse places that have far more in common with Dallas/Austin/Houston than with whatever the stereotypical image of "the south" is that most folks have in their heads. So in other words, I think TX is just as southern as NC is, and that isn't necessarily anything to be ashamed of.
what you're feeling in that smugness is an exercise of social power on you. my guess is that you're white, which is why you didn't feel racism in the south but did feel the smugness of the "coastal elite" (and why you tie those two things together in your mind).
I'm not sure what this has to do with "political correctness." People being jerks isn't the same as demarcating hate speech and saying that it has no place in public discourse.
I think what happens is that someone will propose something that another constituency worries will have violent outcomes for them, and they push back saying "that's unacceptable." Then the first party gets defensive and says that they're being tone policed instead of engaging with the substance of the complaint. For people like me (white men) this can sometimes be the first time when our presuppositions are challenged, or that we're told that we might not be totally objective, rational observers in a chaotic universe and its very very easy to get defensive.
Further, it's important to understand that people who worry about "PC" as a threat to the free exchange of ideas are actively having their rhetoric coopted by others on the far right who are actively trying to move the overton window into a place where they are able to espouse things like racism in public without backlash.
I guess I've lived here most of my life and it's normal to me. You can literally strike up a conversation without almost anyone random and you won't get a disdained look back.
I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the acceptance of things they thought everyone in the south was against.
Is the contradiction here intentional self parody?
I think you have to compare apples to apples here. San Fran to Dallas/Houston/etc. You can't compare rural west Texas to San Fran or the rural wine country around SF to Dallas.
And I'm in Dallas, way better than Houston ;)
Values are like the vitamins of culture: You don't notice how helpful they are until you get scurvy.
I lived in Dallas, it was the only place I've lived where people would yell "faggot" at me on the street. People there aren't that friendly if you look different.
I came out in college in a big city in TX and it was fucking brutal.
Someone who thinks SF is intolerant has no fucking clue what real intolerance looks like.
Ive found it's much easier to shrug off discrimination based on my skin color than it is to shrug off discrimination based on my core beliefs.
I'd love to see some research on this - do people who can be discriminated against based upon sexual orientation (which can be hidden) have it a lot easier than people who can be discriminated against based on skin color (which they obviously can't hide)?
Are you white?
If I need to match a culture's values in order to have an open discussion, that culture is intolerant.
No one is calling for absolute tolerance where Nazi pedophiles and sexually harass people. But perhaps firing the CTO of Mozilla because be donated to Prop 8 is too strict a level of intolerance.
If I may ask, where, more specifically?
I grew up in southern California, and my wife grew up in Columbus, Georgia. We met in the midwest and lived there 15 or so years, and so visited Columbus frequently. For the last 4 months of her dad's life, we lived in Columbus.
We've lived in the SF Bay Area for the past 8 years.
> [SF Bay Area ...] most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture
I think I know what you're getting at, and I don't necessarily disagree out of hand.
I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.
I don't mean this to be a counter to what you're saying, I think it's a different thing.
Probably because Columbus GA is 45% black and San Francisco is only 6.4% black. Hard to have black/white tension when one of those groups comprises such a small percent of total population.
As someone who grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Boston, I'm also familiar with tension, and I remember it being far more racially-defined within the poor communities than elsewhere. Upon moving to nicer areas, however, the tension felt more like rich vs poor, with race (very sadly) often signaling to someone's level of wealth. They also seemed less tension-prone overall, in comparison to the poorer communities.
What I mean to say is that:
1. Tension between races seemed to primarily exist at the poorer levels, and that at the wealthier levels, the tension between classes very much overrode any tension between races.
2. Wealthy communities just seem to be more educated and accepting, as they see the better [1] individuals of all races of people.
I haven't spent too much time in the Bay Area, but would you possibly say that:
1. The wealth inequality in the Bay Area creates enough of a class divide to where the racial divide isn't noticeable?
2. Alternatively, does the racial diversity in the wealthy of the Bay Area remove stigmas that result in racism altogether?
I'd be interested in your thoughts! I'm not aiming to counter either, but just curious.
[1] By 'better,' I don't mean to pass judgment on any people; just that people in worse conditions in life will often be forced or incentivized into worse actions. For example, a child's friend is far less likely to steal their toy or game in a wealthier community than poorer. It's not evil, it's just worse conditions resulting in worse actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYRkzznsc0
The man is an elected official in Alabama. Also an idiot and a bigot who think only Christians can be elected to Congress. It's okay to look down on him for being ignorant, but a lot of the comments attack his regional accent. That's not okay.
To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course, but there are plenty of places where that distinction is clear.
I don't think political tolerance is inherently virtuous. If a coworker tells me they don't think women are suited for technical work then I don't feel any moral obligation to be "tolerant" of that viewpoint.
"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [1]
"Tolerance" has a clear power dynamic. One group allows another group to exist. It is therefore shouldn't be looked at as the ultimate goal of a just society. Instead we should simply ask that people are "good citizens."
Whether your coworker believes women don't make good tech workers should be irrelevant to you. What should matter is whether they are a good employee and whether their views manifest themselves in anyway that hurts anyone else (e.g. they should not be in a position to supervise other employees if they can't prevent their beliefs from harming those employees)
[1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...
The gray areas are miles wide in many cases. Tolerance of what people are is fairly easy for most people to agree on, but in some cases what people do and what people are is disagreed upon. That is, to some degree, the crux of the debate about homosexuality still. People disagree on whether it's something people do, or are. At the same time, an older debate under similar grounds (but, ironically with less evidence for it being towards the are end of the spectrum) is religion. Are you a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or do you just practice those religions?
I don't think boiling it down to are and do particularly helps for a lot of the really controversial topics we are currently dealing with.
However, I think Sam occupies a rare position that he may be blind to: He is famous and the media is paying attention to what he says. That makes saying interesting things, which require taking risks, more dangerous, because more strangers are listening to him, his comments are more likely to be removed from their context, and reporters seeking clicks will deliberately misconstrue him.
So while I don't think he's wrong, I think his perception of this environment of outrage and right-thinking is exaggerated by his own celebrity. Famous people are forced to be more careful in what they say. That is less true for the rest of us.
But honestly your comment is so vague I'm unsure exactly what you want to be heard from your words
Can you clarify what kinds of oppression you noticed in SF and the kinds you noticed in other places
When you speak so indistinctly everyone is forced to fill the holes themselves
Those that agree that SF is oppressive will fill those holes with their own aggravating experiences and those that see SF as progressive will read your comment as "I just want to tell my coworkers that their lifestyle is offensive to god but SF is too intolerant of me and my wants"
These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.
Another very important point was missed here. The smartest people can have the absolute weirdest political beliefs. They are the least likely to conform. And the most likely to not shut up about their weird ideas even when the consequences are obvious.
That's just like, your opinion man.
If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare)
These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.
If someone's feelings are hurt because there is a backlash against their technoscientism, that's on no one else but them.
Why not? People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.
But this is beside the point. These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.
Which doesn't really matter unless you have a time machine that can send them back 50 years. At least, none of the poor people I've known (including myself) have ever said "I can't afford to give my children better opportunities, let alone leave them something in my will, but hey! at least they'll have nifty pocket computers!"
So in 50 years what used to only be available to billionaires will be over the counter.
Agreed. But wait, is anyone actually getting ostracized now for having different opinions? Has Sam Altman been refused service somewhere, or denied employment, or suffered any consequence for holding the opinions he does, besides maybe being called a dick on Twitter?
Because this all seems to me like rich people getting their panties in a bunch because they don’t like being called dicks on Twitter.
No. Given the technologies we're talking about, what the parent wrote in those two quoted sentences is literally as close to stating an obvious fact as possible when discussing future technology.
> These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.
Discourse and criticism? Fine. But first, understanding. And some basic math.
The way I see most of those objections look, some people would literally prefer everyone to keep dying over the possibility that they won't be the first to receive a life extension serum. It's one of the most selfish beliefs I've ever encountered.
Death is a great redistributor for all forms of capital - social, economic, and organic.
I can think of counter-arguments to these points, but they do not necessarily stem from selfishness,merely different preferences.
If the richer you are, the healthier and smarter you can make your babies, and the healthier and the smarter your babies, the more access to jobs/education/etc they get, it’s not much comfort that poor people will be somewhat better off than they were 50 years prior as the inequality gaps keep getting wider and wider.
70 years later, our society is still very much suffering the consequences of things like real estate redlining, which heavily discriminated against black people in the US. Thinking that things like targeted gene therapy and radical life extension couldn’t be harmful in the same way is either pure ignorance or delusion.
Yeah uh, it’s statements like these that make people so angry at Silicon Valley nerds who think they’ve got it all figured it out and that anyone who disagrees with them are beneath them.
These things aren’t facts, they’re statements that are very much up for debate and discussion. If you can’t even see that, maybe try signing up for an intro course to philosophy at your local community college or something.
(Oh and a little tip for you: angrily repeating that something is an obvious truth over and over doesn’t make it so, surprisingly enough)
You don't think there are any political ramifications to the possibility of dividing the world into new categories of "haves" (life-extended and genetically-modified) and "have nots"?
The kind of argument you're making only stands to benefit those who will get access to these technologies by default (i.e., the rich).
But that's already the case. There are people right now who will live longer than others because they have access to better healthcare.[1] Why should it be strictly better (addressing only your point b) for the situation to change from "people with an average lifespan plus people who live 10 years longer" to "people with the same average lifespan plus people who live 20 years longer"?
Or in other words, is longevity some sort of unalloyed good? Is arithemtic the only tool needed to judge the merits of life extension? Another comment asked us to consider what would happen if Einstein were still alive; maybe there are some other people whose continued existence would not have been a net benefit to humanity?
[1]Yes, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, people on welfare have access to some healthcare, but after going from a premium employer-paid insurance plan to what's available under my state's Medicaid expansion, I can guarantee that the former has a higher standard of care.
To me it's all contingent on whether your brain is healthy, functioning properly, ideally at an optimum. People who talk of Life Extension say that improving 'healthspan' and lifespan are connected.
Probably society needs a range of brain ages to function, or has done until now at least. That said there is no possible utility to people getting degenerative brain disease, I don't see the point of keeping the vehicle if the driver is dead.
Also consider the tasks a person does in life. A blue collar man dies much younger than rich woman, I think 20-30+ years. Some of that may be avoidable through better healthcare or technology or simply unavoidable because of genetics but it's also hard to imagine intense physical labour doesn't affect your metabolism in such a way that it ends your life sooner.
As a blue collar worker I'm becoming aware of this drawback..!
On the other side I know workers who've worked physically demanding jobs who are in their 90s and are still trotting about, have full head of dark hair.
I suspect in practice this is a non-issue, a kind of fake argument we like to make because it sounds right.
I think genetic improvements don't give massive improvements in a single healthy individual, that kind of technology is science fiction and would require many iterations of experimental use over many generations. So boosts of +20 or +200 IQ points or +20 or +200 attractiveness points is off the table.
What we have the power to do is reduce incident of genetic disease and very modestly improve outcomes for more healthy functioning brains.
This levels the playing field between the rich and poor because the rich hit the optimum for genetic improvement very fast (having already a lion's share of genetic advantages to start with), then they must experience diminishing returns for their money. It is likely that most common genetic improvements are also the most widely spread about in the population, the opposite of your vision.
Now having foolishly stuck my neck out I shall ask Gwern whether I am full of it. ;-)
I used to be a Jehovah's Witness and am familiar with those outside the religion criticizing it because it frequently occurs that their children die due to the refusal of blood transfusions.
However I now think there is a similar type of ignorance which has stemmed out of politically correct thought.
I believe biracial children are more likely to die due to the side affects of ignoring racial topics in our society. Here is how: biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.
I have never seen this discussed before but it seems self evident to me. In order for a Congolese-Belorussian (a real family I know) child to obtain a bone marrow match it must be sought out way in advance of the illness, if a match can be found at all that is.
Since few if any people are aware of the rarity of matches for biracial people it must mean a lot of them die, there just isn't enough time to source the match in time.
Of course there are failure modes for rightist thought also. Were biracial couples illegal I don't think that would be a step forward. Still the failures of our current order linger in my mind and I believe that a slightly more right wing policy with respect to biracial couples (activating searches for organ/marrow matches in advance) would save lives.
Some people here may suggest that this isn't right wing, it is merely common sense or logical. Sure, but as Sam Altman's blog post suggests, sometimes good ideas are quelled if they could potentially interfere with political heuristics.
Sure, but the vast majority of people will never need this in their lifetime. I doubt this alone would make a noticeable dent in life expectancy statistics. (Also we are within a few decades of being able to clone organs anyway.)
On the other hand biracial people are believed to have stronger immune systems and potentially other characteristics ("heterosis").
I think this occurs in every political system though.
The only route out is to adopt some form of the scientific process combined with metapolitics, seasteading is a hypothetical example.
And comparing this to Beijing is laughable. When I travel to China, my life is put on hold as you cannot access Gmail, Facebook, Whatsapp and myriad of other mundane websites. I dare not write anything negative about the Chinese government when I am there.
India is also becoming intolerant by the day, where even the though of eating beef can lead of mob lynching or ending up in jail. Even benign things such as a Bollywood movie (Padmavati) is in trouble for imagined cultural threats.
I have lived extensively in Netherlands and Denmark. I love those countries as they are progressive in many ways. Except for the acceptance of a brown man. I don't hold any grudge, it is what it is and it is difficult for such a small country to be open about cultural integration.
I have found Bay Area to be an open community, where no matter you background you just seamlessly integrate. You go to work without thinking how you have to tweak your accent or deep dive in cultural norms to progress through corporate hierarchy (I have done that a lot as a consultant). All it matters is your work and output.
Sure, we have yet to figure out how to approach "tolerance of intolerance", but it will evolve over time and we will arrive at a sweet spot. Many countries have taken a extreme free speech stance on "tolerance of intolerance" - for example, UK allowed one Egyptian preacher to openly preach hatred and violence from the streets of London. Is that a good thing for society ? I am not so convinced.
Scott Alexander wrote this great piece, I leave a link to it here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
For instant enlightenment, search for the word "Bodhidharma" and read the short parable.
Sam Altman is not concerned that a leftist can't have a sane discussion on this website. But he IS concerned that a bigoted racist can't be openly bigoted at work.
Weird. I wonder why it is that Sam Altman is so concerned about the rights of bigots to be openly bigoted? Definitely couldn't be related to his relationship with Peter Thiel. No way...
I've found most of HN willing to dive fairly deep on any topic as long as you remain respectful and don't present your self unwilling to actually reconsider your opinion. The problem is that all too often, assholes don't realize that how much an asshole they are comes across very clearly in how they present themselves or their ideas, and many people don't like interacting with assholes. The other problem is that we're all assholes sometimes.
And further, I've noticed that even the most anodyne comments here that express even slightly right-of-center views get heavily downvoted.
> Definitely couldn't be related to his relationship with Peter Thiel
You might have the arrow of causality reversed there. Also, please don't lash out personally. It's true that public figures are just cartoon characters in most people's minds, and you don't owe any better to cartoon characters, but you do owe better to this community if you're commenting here.
This isn't that hard! The trick is you have to start with an open mind and try to understand where they're coming from. That's true in every place in the US - you aren't going to convince people of your "truth" 99.5% of the time, you're only going to understand their truth.
However! Expecting everyone to want an open discussion or even to hear about your pet controversial topic will make your life hard no matter where you go unless people are pretty close to you politically.
America has progressed through openness to ideological diversity, and through healthily engaging in debate. We're lucky that those who have created/promoted controversial technologies and ideas have been able to so legally, but what is it worth if they're never engaged with? What is all of our ethnic diversity worth if everyone, full of unique perspectives, is forced to tiptoe around most subjects?
It's great to have freedom of speech, but its societal value is substantially diminished when we aren't willing to communicate with the people it protects.
> UK allowed one Egyptian preacher to openly preach hatred and violence
As a side note, our freedom of speech in the US is more hard-wired and extensive than that of the UK, and even we don't allow speech that directly incites violence.
As long as you don't try to subvert the government or anything, you can talk about it.
Talking about it influences opinions, and when critical mass is reached, even autocratic governments sometimes are forced to abide by the consensus of their people.
Noone's claiming that China is a better or more progressive country btw, just that in this very specific regard, US is worse than China.
As I said in the rest of my post, I agree with you that there's more room for ideological diversity without being ostracized in many other places.
In China, you cannot criticize the government but you can talk all day about social issues, and you will actually hear a diverse range of different opinions on hot-button issues. I've heard all sorts of wacky and very interesting opinions, many of which have forced me to think deeply about my beliefs, when talking with people in Beijing.
I think you may be running into another facet of American culture and misinterpreting interactions through that lens. In America, you pick your tribe. If you don't like someone, don't hang out with them! Friendships tend to come and go based on your circumstances of the moment, and if they fade away, it's no big deal, you'll make new friends. While in China (and many other places in the world), you're born into a tribe, and people will make significant compromises to their individual happiness to maintain relationships. Many Asian families exhibit behavior that borders on child abuse by American standards and would result in a kid cutting that parent out of their life, while such a thing is basically unheard of in Chinese culture.
I've got one Chinese parent and my wife is full Taiwanese-American. This was an uncomfortable cultural difference for both of us to learn, and we still sometimes feel the loss of that social web. But American society makes more sense when you view relationships through the lens of "people only maintain them while it is mutually beneficial and fulfilling for both parties, and if one person doesn't feel like the relationship is worth it they'll end it, and so your actions better bring joy and fulfillment to those around you."
American business culture is the same as social culture: association is voluntary, and once either party no longer finds it worthwhile, bye. The flip side of that is that there's relatively little judgment attached to being fired. Future employers may ask a few extra questions to try to determine whether the factors that got you fired from your last job are likely to impact your performance in the next one, but if it really is a matter of cultural mismatch (like a difference in political opinions would be), then you can basically be sure that there is some company out there that doesn't care.
PC stifling of speech often gets laid at the feet of politics and academia, but the hyperbolic increase in thought-policing really seems to be a tech-related phenomenon intersecting with corporate priorities. There are a lot of people outside of tech and SF who are willing to discuss hard topics as long as everyone is willing to have skin in the game.
[1]although I acknowledge that there are a lot of women in Chinese tech and that the social dynamic is different, and suspect that they are more receptive to the idea of sex differences in occupational preferences.
Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
- An Irish tourist I met in a bar.
NYC has plenty of tech talent to work with. Altman is not staying in SV because he can't afford to move. He's staying in the area because he actually prefers working with the people he's complaining about.
Do you actually genuinely believe these absolutist statements, or you make them just coz they make for good sound bites?
Of course, this could all be cleared up if you actually explained what you thought was so horrible about the original comment. So far you've called it "absolutist" and "clearly inflammatory" but not actually explained why you think so. Obviously, at least one person disagrees, so perhaps backing up your statements with your reasoning would help.
1. Ability to hire elite programmers that are a few percent better than those in NYC. You'll pay for that quality though. Plus the cannon fodder programmers that you'll hire if you get big cost more in SV for the same quality as NYC.
2. VC money that is a bit easier to get for tech startups compared to NYC.
Your business is not robust if it would be successful if you hired a 99th percentile programmer and had $5mm in investment in SV, but it would fail with a 95th percentile programmer and had $3mm in investment in NYC. People that don't think they could make their idea work in NYC aren't confident in their idea and just playing entrepreneur.
"Can we do it without moving to where you are? Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them come to YC events in person."
Their stated reason is more about dealing with people face to face, and less about SV. It also sounds like they only tried it once, which probably isn't a big enough sample size considering that most startups aren't successful in the first place. It sounds like they never gave places other than SV a fair shake.
It’s an elegant way to avoid dominant cliques, tribalism, etc. of which I already had my fill. No one can truly own or define the Culture or the Right Way to live in New York, it’s simply too big and too diverse for that.
Been there, done that. Never again.
I'm not going to bother having to get a lawyer to fix something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place. In California it isn't a problem. I'm firmly convinced that this fact is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is in California and not New York.
IANAL, but declining to hire a lawyer out of principle because you think that certain aspects of a given state's employment law "shouldn't be a problem in the first place" is really dumb.
As for hiring a lawyer, most of the people who really need to know this don't know up front that they should negotiate such terms. And most employees, including me, don't really want to start off a new job haggling over the contract. It really doesn't make a good first impression.
Important to note that this is not true. If you, say, have a side project and want to ensure that it remains your property after you join the company, and that you can keep working on it and keep having it belong exclusively to you, having a lawyer review the draft contract a potential employer sends with your offer is not going to piss off anyone you would ever want to work for.
Companies that hire quality engineers are used to potential employees having lawyers, and do not get ruffled when those lawyers do their jobs. If they do, it's a major red flag.
But I am certain that it has done a lot to help maintain our startup culture.
The latter is true of the secular right as well. Just substitute "evolution" and "history" for God and mystical revelation. The secular right believes that human inborn characteristics are immutable and culture is a product of evolutionary processes that cannot or should not be rationally understood or modified. All the Neo-racists and HBD types are basically evolutionary-historical conservatives or reactionaries who see inequality as a revealed result of a process that is beyond human understanding.
It's getting to the point that it is not even possible for the two sides to communicate because they do not agree on language, logic, or basic rules of discourse. The left and the right are cognitively inhabiting different universes.
Humans subjectively experience extreme cognitive dissonance as actual discomfort. I think this explains the intolerance. People are emotionally reacting to the level of cognitive dissonance this divide generates as if ideas from the opposing side are physical attacks. I agree that the right is no different. Go into one of their bubbles and voice liberal ideas and you'll get the same reaction Milo gets on a Berkeley college campus.
What is scientific or empirical about safe spaces and identity politics?
I would not be surprised to see the United States physically fragment and balkanize in the next 10-20 years. I get the sense that some on the hard-right and possibly also the hard-left have that as a goal.
When the list started it was fairly evenly distributed between right and left leaning speakers being disinvited. Now it's much more commonly right leaning speakers.
1. Several speakers are overrepresented (I see a bunch of Milo invitations), which could well just reflect their aggressiveness at getting themselves invited / the strength of their own PR team. If one political side wants to make persecution their thing, they'll show up more commonly in that database.
2. In recent years, we've had a bunch of new forums for dissemination of ideas, which is a good thing. Twitter didn't exist in 2002. YouTube didn't exist in 2002. Podcasts didn't exist in 2002. Smartphones in people's pockets didn't exist in 2002. Today, anyone who wants to know what any of these speakers' opinions are can find out, easily, what they are, without needing them invited to campus. (And anyone who doesn't will just skip the talk anyway.)
3. In Milo's case specifically, he wanted to out a bunch of undocumented students on-stage. That I think doesn't fit the profile of political views being censored. (I agree that preventing him from speaking technically counts as censorship, but it's a very different discussion.)
4. Fundamentally, this list and the original article here both suffer from a blind belief in the "Great Man" theory. If person X doesn't express an opinion, or publicize their idea, or something, chances are absurdly high that someone else will have the same opinion or idea, too. If Newton were imprisoned for his alchemy, however unjust that might have been for Newton as a person, Leibniz would still have invented calculus. What I'd like to see is if certain types of ideas are being censored, not whether certain individuals who happen to hold those ideas are being censored.
And yes, there are new forums for dissemination of ideas, but that doesn't mean they are equally open to all ideas. Some things you can't write without being shouted down. This is distinct from criticism of the idea. These are personal attacks on the person who voiced the idea in the first place.
I don't understand your last point. There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc. I don't see how you can take an objective look at university culture and say anything otherwise.
Milo is perhaps the best example here: Milo comes to campuses to cause a spectacle, not to spread new ideas. Sure, he's talking about some ideas. But that's not his primary motivation.
Milo is not an academic. Would he be happy with letting some academic go in his stead and present his same ideas in the form of an academic lecture?
> There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc.
Do you have any evidence for this?
(Note that you can't talk about things like variations in IQ across races as if they existed more strongly than they actually do or mean something they don't, and expect to be taken seriously. But that's not universities censoring dissident politics, that's universities expecting basic scientific literacy instead of people pushing a political agenda in the guise of science. The concept of IQ is an idea that came from the academy and has been refined by the academy; using an old understanding of IQ and what it means is essentially an abandonment of science.)
Specifically, this evidence could be explained by an increasing rate of conservatism on campuses. The rate of disinvitation could be the same, it's just that there's a greater number of conservative speaker invitations going out from a greater number of conservative students. And right leaning speakers are disproportionately invited by right-leaning student organizations.
Attempts to disinvite more right leaning speakers in 2017: 24
At least on YouTube it does seems like there are more attempts to prevent conservative ideas from being voiced on campuses by rowdy demonstrations that interrupt speakers.
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...
plenty of examples by the side arguing for the motion.
http://quillette.com/2017/12/11/problematic-poor-taste/
If the US Academic reaction to such a straight forward request was so hostile, then I can imagine many people feeling unable to voice actually difficult opinions
"Unfortunate." "Encourage the conference's organizers to change its name."
I'm a researcher. I'm also unusually thin-skinned. Compared to the naked brutality that is the peer review process, that's nothing.
Is your concern that people shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about trivia? I'm afraid academia's definitely guilty of that. Or that you disagree with the complaint? Perfectly fair, but then so did lots of the other people on the list. Or is it something else? I'm finding it hard to parse.
This does not seem to match the reality at university campuses - only the caricature by people who find it politically expedient to be seen as persecuted.
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...
I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account?
Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?
(And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results that are useful. Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.)
Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?
Previously you said "any self selected polling is meaningless"
Now you are saying "Self selected polling is meaningful when people who didn't self select had the opportunity to do so" .
Ok. So by that definition the poll I linked, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the debate, theoretically. What makes it meaningless ?
PS: Fixing democracy ect is not interesting to me in this context, I want to focus your claim self-selected = meaningless.
If you want to know more, I recipient looking up the 1936 Literary Digest poll for US President, one of the most famous screwups caused by non-random sampling: https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...
Perhaps explain how you are defining * opportunity to participate* .
(And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't publicly announced are in fact illegitmate and widely recognized as such.)
"Undecided" went from 8% to 24% for the motion.
Social scientist Charles Murray was censored then physically assaulted at Middlebury because he wrote a book about the correlation between intelligence and success [https://youtu.be/a6EASuhefeI?t=19m25s]
Biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College had himself and his family physically threatened because he refused to participate in a protest that asked all white people to leave campus for a day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk]
A professor at Diablo Valley College smashed a dude with a bike lock just because he was on the different side of the political spectrum as he was. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug34vogS3Fw]
Everything that Jordan Peterson had to go through at University of Toronto because he publicly opposed a draconian bill to forces professors to use specific pronouns when referring to students [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG71YrB_Nw]
Lindsay Shepard at Laurier University had to face a star chamber from a 'diversity committee' because she showed a video clip of Jordan Peterson in class [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4&t=1m18s]
And then there were the psychos that literally lit University of Berkeley on fire when Milo Yiannopoulos went to give a talk there [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi_vX0tknJM&t=4m45s]
etc...
etc...
However, commencement speeches do not have a high reputation for academic rigor to start with, so I think inviting an entertainer to speak at one is sort of different from inviting a speaker with some specific experience (either academic, or political/industrial/etc.) to give a lecture.
All that said, keep that Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley. That's the sort of thing I mean by "antics." I don't think Stephen Colbert does anything of the sort. His partisanship and his satirical character mean that I have trouble saying that anything of value will be lost if he stops being invited to speak at college campuses, but he seems qualitatively different from Yiannopoulos.
I don't think this was ever true, and your whole stance on this hinges on it.
When I entered university in 1989, there was an extremely controversial professor at my school [1]. There was outrage accompanied with generally peaceful protests.
How it was handled at my school back then was that they organized a live TV debate with someone to argue the side against the professor's position.
In other words, we the students (and the public for that matter) were treated like adults and we were expected to be able to hear and process ideas we may not agree with without overreacting or having our heads explode. IIRC, the whole notion of going to university, among other things, was to further develop our critical thinking skills. That seems to be hard to do in an echo chamber.
This, in fact, happens as the move to criminalize speech against Israel on campuses and eslwhere shows.
Liberalism is rooted in liberty and freedom, and yet here we are in 2017 discussing how non-"liberal" ideas cannot be freely expressed in the most "liberal" cities.
I say we stop calling these people liberal, because they're anything but.
That's toxic? First, sounds very straw-man. Second, okay, someone said they think something's unethical. Maybe it is? Maybe they have a point they didn't articulate well? Maybe they're straight-up wrong! If you're arguing for free speech, then you're arguing in favor of people being vocally critical of ideas you hold dear. Hiding under the pillow fort of "California is so intolerant" makes it seem like what you're actually complaining about is people disagreeing with you.
It’s only one anecdote as part of an article so I don’t understand your complaint. I suppose a thorough study of attitudes would be better.
The idea that you should be able to say or do whatever you want and also be shielded from criticism of those ideas is silly. Especially when you're some of the most rich and powerful people in the 21st century. No-one is stopping you from doing anything, they're just questioning you about it. If you can't (or don't want to) answer those questions then maybe you should consider why that is.
I mean, the essay makes the argument that allowing disparagement of gay people might be a necessary in order to allow the investigation of novel physics (which, wtf) - why not also make the argument that being called unethical might be a necessary cost to allow the investigation of life extension?
Is the idea worth perusing? Then you can probably stand to be called a name or two. Especially when you're also proposing allowing whole groups of people to be disparaged in the name of progress.
I don't really know what to make of your interpretation of Altman's statement. He was making the point that if a physicist has homophobic views, we should not dismiss their contributions to physics for that reason alone. Put another way, we should be tolerant of people, but not necessarily of their views.
> Sure. But does it really matter? Are we that sensitive?
Sensitivity isn't the issue: it's that calling someone names for reasons that are entirely speculative (and longer lifespan == ecological catastrophe is definitely that) is the domain of at least two other groups: grade-school children and the alt-right.
People tend to "tune" the details of a story to fit their argument. Especially when they feel aggrieved.
Also, the comment assumes a certain supremacy of science (or physics) over social concerns which everyone might not agree with. Physics is wonderful. But as far as improving people's lives, decrying and eliminating homophobia might also be a very important thing to do. So to say "I'm willing to sacrifice the well-being of gay people so physics can progress..." Not everyone may agree that the exchange is worth it. And that's valid.
"This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people..."
The underlying assumption (or one of many) is that all perspectives have moral judgements attached, and the offended party is the sole arbiter of that judgement.
In other words, it's one thing to question progress, it's another thing to say 'I disagree with this form of progress, therefore the person working towards it is evil'. Judge action all you want, but assume good intent absent concrete evidence to the contrary.
- Extending human lifespan harms the environment.
- Harming the environment is ethically wrong. (this is elided)
- Therefore, Extending human lifespans is ethically wrong.
This is muddy thinking and takes a great leap when it ignores the ethical _benefits_ of extending human lifespans, but I don't think it is indefensible.
A very basic part about good-faith discussions is to discuss the topic at hand and not the people having the discussion.
Researchers are responsible for what they work on just like implementers are (though the nuances are different).
I think the conclusion of your line of argument is that you can never say a particular person is unethical. I don't think I like that consequence - it absolves anyone of guilt for anything.
In an extreme case, how about this: "Stealing thing is wrong. Therefore, thieves are unethical people." Seems clearly reasonable to me.
IE, free speech, applied to private companies, as the controversial opinion that a person is getting fired for.
(Also, no place worth working for will fire you for saying “private citizens should have the right to free speech without being fired.” What is the controversial opinion you’re actually worried about expressing at work? That Windows Mobile is making a huge comeback? That pina colada Oreos are tasty?)
The controversial opinion that free speech should apply to workplaces.
Yes lots of people oppose free speech. Some of those people might be willing to fire people over it.
I believe there's some other idea that you're talking about expressing and then defending by saying "free speech should apply to workplaces."
What is that idea?
Just because you wouldn't fire someone doesn't mean someone else wouldn't.
And free speech is a controversial opinion these days, depending on where you live.
Apparently, free speech is so controversial, that people like you believe that a person who supports free speech must obviously hold some sort of deep dark evil opinion.
The fact that you automatically assume some nefarious motive, proves that supporting free speech is indeed a controversial opinion to hold, and that it is rational to be worried about being persecuted for believing in it.
One of my favorite ideas here recently is a "steel man" argument. It's putting the best version of an opposing argument forward before explaining why it's wrong.
This charity to the people behind the ideas is missing when you're looking for a soundbite or worse looking to banish to an out group.
Moved back to SF, and there is a HUGE difference of what it was for me 5 years ago. The people I know are way more cautious and the people I don't are even more afraid.
The Damore essay is still one of the unspeakables. I know I fear getting fired if i publicly said i agreed with it, even though i never read it or did anything of the sort. That to me is a ridiculous state of things.
Indeed!
That's why it's so concerning to some of us that our colleagues are apparently children who blindly parrot misinterpretations of source material and call for blood over their own fabricated outrage.
A part of me is uninterested in reading it because I find other topics way more interesting. But a part of me also feels I can't read it. Because if I read it and I agree with it, I will have to balance honesty and integrity with oppression.
All my life I held all my controversial opinions quite openly, but this was the first time I actually fear being controversial.
I'm with Voltaire on this one: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". A coworker can say something I disagree terribly with, that even could impact my life personally, and would consider it just the way people relate to each other, sometimes its not nice and thats it.
"Moral outrage" on twitter is a ridiculous measure for progress or improvement over people's lifes. It does terrible damage in so many levels. And companies listening to that are just succumbing to their PR and legal department, not striving to an idealistic work environment. Google can be sued for not firing Damore!
Edit: If someone makes a general claim like "nobody should be fired for agreeing with any text x", it makes sense to test that claim by putting an extreme value in for x.
That said, I have not read Mein Kampf and its a similar situation. Is everything in that book ideological garbage? Maybe, maybe not. I actually dont know what its about!
But trying to find that out in public can get you beat and people will clap in encouragement if that happened.
Hell, I would be even afraid to google that book in amazon.
Argentine culture has it's advantages, but "tolerance to new ideas" is not one of them. I should know, I grew up there.
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If politicians in Argentina had to resign the way they do in the US for what they say, anarchist would get their way.
The perceived notion that people have to resign for "what they say or think" in the US is overblown.
>they should "respect all points of view" (no matter how flawed or ignorant they are.)
Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant. Democracy sort of works because we tolerate each other anyway. When political polarization increases too much, bad things happen.
Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced his preexisting beliefs, which is kind of the opposite of science.
Thats what's scary.
> he made himself essentially impossible to work with
Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him.
But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him?
He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you?
Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination?
> He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself.
Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it.
Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility?
> Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
Someone being actively nasty towards women in his team just because they are women will most likely get fired, so that's a self-limiting problem.
> He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
What timeline? There's only one timeline:
1) He releases a "manifesto" expressing his opinion
2) Someone reads the manifesto, is disgusted and a controversy ensues
3) Media picks up on the controversy
4) Google is forced into a really shitty position by being asked a bunch of times what they are going to do
5) Damore gets fired
6) Damore goes to "men's rights advocate" Stefan Molyneaux podcast and wears his "Goolag" shirt. He does a bit of media, tweets out some really ambiguous tweets.
7) The world forgets about Damore.
So where's the flaw in the timeline?
I propose a mental exercise: let's say that Damore had written a similar "manifesto" but instead of concluding that "women are not that interested in engineering" he concluded "black people are not that interested in engineering". Would you see a problem with that? Do you think that might create some friction with fellow engineers of color?
This is just en exercise in public outrage, not in morality, responsibility or the application of ideals.
I seriously doubt that. The public would generally be conflicted about crucifying a woman in the name of women, it would have not arised easily to public knowledge.
To deepen the understanding of the situation, men and women withing google might have shown public agreement of some level with the essay and they havent been fire. People have done threats and attacks of many degrees on Damore because of that essay, which would have been a firable offense in any other circumstance.
And that's your prerogative. But it also makes the rest of your argument just conjecture. Making a huge deal about "inequality" based on conjecture is probably not the best way to spend your time.
Which isn't true anyway. As I said, his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capable or should be treated any differently.
I never said it was illegal. I said it was stupid to do it at work. There's a lot of things that while not illegal, are stupid to do at work and will get you fired.
> his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capable or should be treated any differently.
His opinions demonstrated that he holds biases against women and minorities, and he thinks the company is doing the wrong thing by hiring more of both. Whether those biases are justified by his "science" (they aren't) or not, is neither here nor there, he's a walking legal landmine. On that basis alone, it would be perfectly justified to fire him.
Now, should he be able to express his opinions? Sure! Talk to your friends at a bar. Find people you think are like-minded and discuss this. Better yet: find people you know to hold the opposite opinion and discuss it with them. Don't fucking spread something company-wide and then complain when you get fired.
But if you dare to object to it... Against policies that are actually sexist and actually relevant to your work. Make an actual scientific case for your side. Then somehow you are an evil sexist that wants to discriminate against minorities.
Please give examples.
> Even policies that intentionally discriminate against men, which is insane.
Again, provide examples. I hear this argument a lot "poor men are being discriminated by women!!!" and yet I have to see a single shred of evidence of this. Again, for context, I'm a male working in the tech field and I have worked at Google.
Do you personally feel that a field where 80% of the workforce is male (vs a 50/50 split in overall demographics) is "actively discriminating against hiring males? I find that argument very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
> Then somehow you are an evil sexist that wants to discriminate against minorities.
What exactly do you propose was Damore's original intent?
Mandatory gender quotas. Women-only lectures, events and benefits.
> What exactly do you propose was Damore's original intent?
Why does it matter. Thats not the point.
Those - as far as I understand - don't exist at Google. I interviewed tons of candidates there. I was never told to benefit this person or the next because they were of a particular gender or ethnic background. In fact, there was mandatory training on how to not fall for your own biases.
> Women-only lectures, events and benefits.
So you are all for "freedom of thought" but you don't want people to be able to group in whatever way they want. That's an interesting take.
> Why does it matter. Thats not the point.
That's totally the point. Why on Earth would he write the manifesto otherwise?
> Those - as far as I understand - don't exist at Google.
You asked for example of extreme "feminists" opinions that are allowed in the workforce and I gave you some. Also Damore's argument is that google is propping the numbers in a way akin to quotas, by jigging the selection process. (Well, I heard people say that, i haven't read the essay).
> So you are all for "freedom of thought" but you don't want people to be able to group in whatever way they want. That's an interesting take.
Now you are reframing the question as in a constitutional matter. That was not the question you asked. You asked for examples of extreme feminist positions in the workplace and women-only events is an example of one. Man-only corporate events dont exist, and if you called it one, there would also be public outrage. Women-only is actively discriminatory. Some people are fine with that, some aren't. The standard is not the same for everyone.
> That's totally the point. Why on Earth would he write the manifesto otherwise?
So if a feminist had written the essay, you would agree with it and would find it enlightening? Its a simple ad-hominem. It can be true and Damore be the worst person ever born at the same time. Its not an argument of anything.
Or maybe I'm trying to consider the whole context of a nuanced and complex topic before reaching a conclusion. Dishonest, idiot me for not taking every discrete input as an absolute determinant in order to keep the argument "simple" for your benefit.
> Also Damore's argument is that google is propping the numbers in a way akin to quotas, by jigging the selection process.
Damore does not provide proof of anything like that happening. His biggest gripe is that Google is proactively reaching out to minority groups in order to try to get more candidates from that pool. He also mentions a "high priority queue for diversity hires", but I haven't found any evidence of that and he doesn't provide any.
> (Well, I heard people say that, i haven't read the essay).
So, let me get this straight: you are criticizing my analysis of a manifesto you haven't read (I have), written by someone working at the same company I used to work for (Google) on a topic I have researched quite a bit on my spare time (causes of gender disparity in Tech and other STEM industries). Your criticism is not based on published statistics, academic studies or any other kind of hard evidence, but rather hearsay and anecdata. Wow. That has to be the most Argentine behavior I've seen in a while. La Argentinidad al palo.
> Now you are reframing the question as in a constitutional matter
No I'm not. You cited things that are perfectly legal as examples of "extremist behavior". Damore's behavior was legal too, it was just stupid.
> Man-only corporate events dont exist, and if you called it one, there would also be public outrage. Women-only is actively discriminatory.
It's kind of bizarre that you are trying to paint males as some form of oppressed minority. Have you ever stopped to think why some of these events might want to avoid having males take the spotlight from people trying to discuss something? Maybe it's because they deal with that every day?
> So if a feminist had written the essay, you would agree with it and would find it enlightening? Its a simple ad-hominem.
You attack my supposed ad-hominem, by offering an ad-hominem based on a completely baseless assumption. Meanwhile you complain about me being dishonest. Again... wow.
I'm still not sure if you do this on purpose or not, but you again answer a question that was not asked. I didnt make any conclusion in the previous post, so you are responding some question about conclusions that is not relevant to the context.
> Damore does not provide proof of anything like that happening. His biggest gripe is that Google is proactively reaching out to minority groups in order to try to get more candidates from that pool. He also mentions a "high priority queue for diversity hires", but I haven't found any evidence of that and he doesn't provide any.
I dont work at google, but i have never heard any of the rebuttals or official statements by google saying that it's not true they benefit minorities in their process. In any case, if Damore claimed that was happening and it isn't, then everyone can be happy, because Damore was asking precisely to stop doing that, and noone needs to feel attacked.
>So, let me get this straight: you are criticizing my analysis of a manifesto you haven't read
I think you haven't read my first post at all ,where i start by saying it haven't read it. Talk about accusing people of not reading the source!
> Your criticism is not based on published statistics, academic studies or any other kind of hard evidence, but rather hearsay and anecdata.
My criticism is based on the most classical anecdotal case, that Damore made an essay, there was a shitstorm and he got fired. That was my original topic. I have made no opinion on the contents of the essay , because i haven't read it nor its a topic I find interesting.
> That has to be the most Argentine behavior I've seen in a while.
Thats xenophobic. Bear in mind that if you had made this comment on twitter, you would run the risk of being fired and also become unemployable.
I think this last comment is enough. You sounded sour for a lot of your exchanges, but when you start insulting I lose interest. Hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Damore claimed a lot of things in the manifesto, for example he claimed that conservatives are treated unfairly at Google. Had you read the text, you would know that the manifesto was more of an alt-right screed than a treaty on the biological determinants of behavior.
> My criticism is based on the most classical anecdotal case, that Damore made an essay, there was a shitstorm and he got fired. That was my original topic. I have made no opinion on the contents of the essay , because i haven't read it nor its a topic I find interesting.
So you are painting Damore as a martyr of PC culture, but haven't bothered to actually inform yourself on the subject.
> Thats xenophobic. Bear in mind that if you had made this comment on twitter, you would run the risk of being fired and also become unemployable.
That's cute. I lived most of my life in Argentina, my family is in Argentina, I am an Argentine citizen and an active member of the Argentine community in San Francisco. Nice of you to take a joke and try to make yourself a victim. For someone who decries PC culture, you are becoming really good at cry-bullying ;)
Read page 6 of Damore's memo. He gives a number of very serious examples.
>Do you personally feel that a field where 80% of the workforce is male (vs a 50/50 split in overall demographics) is "actively discriminating against hiring males? I find that argument very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
What are you not understanding here? If 20% of qualified applicants are female, but 30% of new hires are female, you must be discriminating against men. A 50/50 split would require severe discrimination. Damore suggested they were lowering hiring standards and setting arbitrary quotas. I find this very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
Thing is, you don't have these numbers. And you are making them up, to push your narrative. Which is another massive flaw on Damore's argument: he's trying to solve a problem he doesn't even know exists.
> Damore suggested they were lowering hiring standards and setting arbitrary quotas.
Damore suggested based on assumptions. I find that very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.)
If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.)
I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
And that was basically Damore's argument. You have personality types like INTP being vastly overrepresented among programmers, yet 4 times less common among women. You have the same percentage of young girls interested in computer science at a young age as work in the tech industry. You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
No I haven't.
> ... that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that...
So what you are saying is that:
a) We don't know if this is a cultural issue or not
b) So the tech industry shouldn't do anything about it
Huh?
> You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
There's definite proof to the contrary: certain cultures (like Soviet Russia, for example) had a much bigger female representation in STEM fields than others [1]. Heck, even Mexico today has a higher representation of females in CS degrees than the US [2]
How do you explain that if "it's definitely not culture"???
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...
Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests. And so statistical differences in interests start to matter.
You say this, but quote absolutely no science to back it up. Maybe this is just an intuitive perception that you have, rather than a fact? I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
> Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests.
So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role? Unless you use the word 'culture' in a very narrow definition that only includes things such as food, drinks and folk dances.
Communist countries, especially Russia, made a big deal about erasing gender inequality (they saw gender roles as another form of oppression.) That's the main reason why Russia had such a high participation of women in STEM, it wasn't because "parents would force them because they were poor."
I'm all for having a conversation about this, but are you willing to take new evidence and process it, rather than keep pushing your intuitive notion?
Yes I do, and I've been over some of it with you in this thread.
>I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
>So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role?
In poor countries, yes. How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth? I had trouble finding statistics, the only stat I could find is this:
>In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%.
Which is about the ratio of women in STEM in the West.
I looked for all your comments with your name in my history. Not a single one of them links to anything.
> What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
You haven't addressed it, though. You claim it's based on economic growth, yet cite no evidence. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary: the UK has a bigger (and more advanced) economy than India, and a bigger participation of women in STEM. The same goes for Norway vs. US. In fact, Latin America has a much higher participation when compared with, say, Asia for comparable economic growth.
Even if we take the US in isolation, your claim doesn't hold up: we have grown at a relatively steady pace for the past few decades and more women participate on STEM fields today that they did in the 80s and 90s. If "economic growth" was the one driving factor, you'd see the exact opposite.
Again, are you sure you are putting enough effort into validating your statements? Here are two sets of statistics you might want to consider [1][2]
> How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth?
Russia has gone through a huge amount of "Westernization" since the Berlin Wall came down, so trying to make the case that economic growth or cultural shift are 100% to account for the changes is a fool's errand.
> In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%
What makes you think that patent filings of all things represents industry participation? You have to be careful, you could easily conclude there are no males younger than 24 in a given industry if you used patents filed as your only data source. I think the links I posted above, in particular [2] are a better reference.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-inclusive-growth-and-dev...
[2] http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs43-wom...
The statistics are nearly useless anyway because of how differently they are measured. Women are much more represented in "soft sciences" like biology. But in math etc, the percentage has been pretty consistent. Math majors show a huge increase in women. But when you dig into it, it turns out that they are going into it to become math teachers. And the actual percentage of female Math researchers is the lowest of all of STEM. And pretty consistent through time. And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
Why is it so implausible to you that it's biology? You want some links and statistics? Try reading this: http://www.sci-hub.la/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
>gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender- inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolution- ary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
d=1.18 is one of the largest effect sizes I've seen in a social science. It means something like 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average woman.
My "hypothesis" is that without trying to eliminate the cultural factors, we'll never be able to actually measure how strongly the alleged biological factors affect behavior. So no, my hypothesis doesn't explain anything, because it doesn't try to.
> And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
Our academic scientific culture is barely 200 years old. Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women". Our current cultural system is thousands of years old, yet you expect that the last 100 years of science to have fixed all disparities accrued over millennia. Doesn't sound very realistic.
> Why is it so implausible to you that it's biology?
Why is it implausible to you that it is culture, when there are reams of data showing that different cultures perform differently? You are cherrypicking data that supports your thesis and completely ignoring everything else. Why?
Notice that even the paper you link is hedging when making the claim: "In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences." But you, somehow, are 100% sure. Weird. Makes me think you have an agenda first, and look for evidence to back it up second, just like Damore did.
This is a basic scientific question. It has nothing to do with politics. You accuse me of "having an agenda" just because I disagree with you. You accuse damore of being "alt right" and defend his firing, just because he believes a relatively uncontroversial scientific claim. You accuse me of "cherrypicking data" when I've done nothing of the sort. Yet apparently cherrypicking a few random countries with different stats to support your bizarre culture theory is fine. But as I've shown your model doesn't make any sense of the data either, which apparently isn't a problem for you.
What even is your theory? Yeah, it's "culture", sure. But what predictions does that make? How can it be disproved?
If I show, for example, that there's the same percentage of female computer science graduates as female tech workers, does that disprove it? Does your theory predict that? "But the sexism is happening before the industry then." Ok.
So what about the same percentage of female high schoolers interested in computer science as female computer science majors. Does your theory predict that? "The sexism is happening before then."
Well we can go back to middle school. Hell let's go back to early childhood, and we find boys and girls show strong preferences for different kinds of toys. That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
But that's far from the only evidence. Does your model predict neurological differences between male and female brains? That doesn't make any sense if all differences must be explained by culture.
>Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women"
Exactly! 160 years ago women were excluded from many areas. There were no women doctors, few women at universities, no women lawyers, etc.
Now, in 2017, we've reversed all that. There are more women getting university educations than men! They make up 51% of law students, 50% of medical students, 75% of psychology majors, etc, etc. And yet in engineering they make up 20%. And it's been that way, consistently, for decades. And shows no signs of changing even as culture continues to change.
Think about this. It makes no sense to your theory. Why should culture change so quickly for every other area but engineering.
(And also why the double standard of caring so much about gender ratios in engineering, and not any other area like psychology or university in general?)
Oh, for sure, if it was proven beyond reasonable doubt culture is not a factor in decision making.
> That there are biological differences between men and women?
This is not what I am arguing. There's a huge difference between "there are differences between men and women" and "they comprehensibly explain the current gender ratio in the Tech industry".
> That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
Not really, because for the fifth time: my "theory" (call it: my anti-theory) is we don't know the extent of how potential gender differences might affect career selection, as long as we have a culture that has embedded strong gender identities even before the first career decision is made. Even if you think girls should play with toy ovens while boys play with toy guns, you can just discount the effect such boxing will have long term.
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For the rest of your post, let me draw an analogy:
Let's say that we are working out of the same office. At some point you are trying to load a website (say, Hacker News) and it doesn't load. You ask me if I know what might be going on:
Me: "Yeah, the WiFi has been terrible today, we called the management company to come and fix it".
You after trying to ping google.com, and getting about 50% packet loss: "I know what it is, it's the database they use to store the articles, it's broken and that's why Hacker News won't load".
Me: "Wait, but the internet is really bad"
You: "Yeah, but there's some connectivity, so it must be the database"
Me: "Have you tried pinging the host?"
You: "No, but I pinged google.com"
Me: "Have you tried loading google.com?"
You: "No, because I know it's the database"
Me: "But... how? Nobody else can't connect to anything because the internet sucks. Even if the internet worked perfectly, there's a bunch of other stuff besides the database that could be broken."
You: "Is there any piece of evidence that will convince you it's the database? Why are you so against it being the database? I know it's the database!"
That's pretty much the conversation we've been having over the last few days. If a coworker of yours did that, you'd think twice before asking for their next time you have to debug something, wouldn't you?
You latch on to one tiny scrap of evidence that might point to a database issue. Say, the Russian site had a slightly better packet loss. And they have a different server over there, or something.
Then you make it political. And start ranting about how I'm a "database heretic" that should be fired for daring to question the database theory.
Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...
Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.
There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.
The text you quote just says that some behavior might be driven by biological differences. Cool, nobody is arguing that. So what's the point you are trying to make?
The point I'm trying to make is that there's enough evidence that culture plays a major role in behavior and so we should maybe try to make the playing field fairer, so that if there are any biological traits dictating this or that behavior, they can be allowed. You know, work on what we know before we focus on what might be. It's pretty simple, really.
This is entirely what the outrage for Damore was about. Entirely.
Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right.
> Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant.
Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. The problem is lately a lot of people make claims based on nothing else than their "intuition" and they expect people to accept it as a "valid opinion".
I'd love a source on that, because as far as I remember most of the stuff he referenced wasn't very controversial. E.g. one of his biggest points was that men and women have statistically different five factor personality distributions.
>Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail.
Sure. The problem is I strongly disagree with you about what the "objective observable truth" is.
They weren't. In fact you don't even need to look at studies, you can look at raw standardized test scores and see this is true.
This is a factually incorrect. Please try to introspect whether you're saying this because you want Damore to be wrong, instead of attempting to ascertain whether he was actually wrong.
Anyway, some people are building a future that others do not want to live in, so it is no wonder that some ideas are going to be received harshly. Nonetheless I understand that we cannot predict the future, so maybe, what people think will happen, won't. But people are fearful of a possible Pandora Box event.
I personally do not like those who are so excited, by the business or technology they are building, that they never stop and think about the consequences. I also do not like those who think, "my intentions for the use of this technology are wholesome, therefore I am not responsible for any harm that can be caused by others using this technology maliciously".
New ideas should be explored, but with caution.
As someone who has lived in Alabama, I assure you that long term economic uncertainty, lack of good public education, entrenched mistrust of the government, and familial loyalty signaling do more to shape opinions than a logically sound argument and upstanding ethical principles.
I'm not sure how writing about my opinion is the same as shutting down discourse
> By writing off the people in SF and Alabama as "zealots," you've closed the door to reasoned debate and to educating them on their miscues.
I have lived in both the South and SF for years and I'm posting based on my experience. Yes there are always exceptions. At the same time, I don't find it useful to ignore the culture or trends at large. Different places have specific, unique cultures.
> people occasionally take unjustifiable stances, but that doesn't make them unreasonable people.
I could be wrong, but the point of Sam's post is that more people in places like SF and Alabama don't just occasionaly take strong stances. It happens a lot more often and these stances are so entrenched that they're more akin to religious beliefs, where it's just hard to even entertain alternative view points without offending people. It shuts down discourse and thought.
In terms of having conversations, I'm not on a mission to change the status quo; I just want more freedom to think & speak especially when I'm trying to relax. Logically for me, it makes little sense to be in an environment where everyone will suffer due to the topic. I'm not saying that it's wrong or bad to 'educate people on their miscues'. I'm just saying that it's not for me.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...
To which I submit as evidence "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World", an art exhibition currently on display at the Guggenheim in New York City.
This retrospective of Chinese art had 3(!) works of art removed (ie, censored) from the exhibition because the content was perceived as morally reprehensible by some groups of new york animal rights activists.
Proof that at least along some avenues of discourse (what is allowed in art? when is animal suffering allowed? when is representation of a disturbing act that occurred in the past allowed?) the NYC progressive contingent is more conservative than the Chinese.
Note: This does not mean that China is a paradise of free speech. There are other avenues of discourse (ex political discourse) where this is not the case.
Note 2: They sell hot dogs outside the Guggenheim.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/26/guggenh...
What about all the novel things about physics that we won't ever hear from the gay people who are forced out of physics because of a life-threatening climate of hate and bigotry?
Their argument is 100% relevant to the sentiment that was expressed. If the stated benefit of excluding one group to allow for the free expression of the other is increased scientific discourse, how do we balance that against the loss of discourse from the excluded?
I don't quite get how one jumps from 'we have to tolerate different ideas' to 'people will be excluded'. How does tolerating different ideas excludes people ?
tolerating [this] different ideas excludes [gay] people
Imagine you worked in a 90% gay office, and it was tolerated to disparage you and remark on the vile nature of your heterosexuality on a daily basis.
Only an exceptionally strong willed person would stay very long and it still probably would reduce their output of novel ideas.
The argument is not, and should never be, that we should fire people for their thoughts. If someone is strongly socially conservative, that's their right. But is is perfectly reasonable to require people to leave those conversations at home when they head into the office.
But the unreasonable people saying "gay people are evil" are not even pretending to be joking. They have killed.
So I think Sam lacks empathy. Try this thought exercise. Replace the word "gay" in Sam's essay with "white" or whatever group you belong to. How does that make you feel? Would you want to work with that person? How well do you think that will go over in SF, HN, or America?
Sam is both gay and jewish...
| Replace the word "gay" in Sam's essay with "white" or whatever group you belong to. How does that make you feel? Would you want to work with that person?
I don't think "white people are evil" is a controversial statement is SF.
As for the second part, valley employees have gotten in trouble for criticizing "white". Wasn't there an outrage over Github?
Regarding Beijing: I think he may have been in something of an 'expat bubble'. Speaking with other entrepreneurs far from home, it's easy to focus on that. Try criticizing the political leadership, though.
Every few months living in the Bay reminds me of the importance of Paul Graham's http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring.
Well said, so well said that I'd like to tweet it and share it, but I won't, because of the exact problem it describes.
Sometimes I'm wondering how many people like me just pretend to blend in and go with the mainstream political correctness just because we don't have the guts//strength to fight this fight right now. My guess? a LOT from what I can see in my circle of friends over here.
The issue is that the next day, when you're back to your 9to5 at BigCo (or even a random startup in the area), you are not back among people who support authoritarianism and will shoot you down (possibly getting you fired) for not having the same viewpoint as they do.
It was also odd to see Altman use China as the bastion of freedom, a place with widespread internet censorship and where things like democracy are considered heretic.
"In January 2003 the website of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of China's Communist Party, reported that a court in Hefei, Anhui province sentenced two men, identified only by the surnames He and Yu, to prison terms of nine and seven years respectively for "unlawful operation of a business." Their crime was publishing love poems without government authorization."
"Prior restraints are synonymous with censorship, and represent one of the most onerous infringements on freedom of expression. The term "prior restraint" refers to any system in which the government may deny a person the use of a forum for expression in advance of the actual expression. Chinese authorities employ several different types of prior restraints over the citizens of China in order to ensure that the Communist Party is able to silence critics and maintain direct editorial control over political information and news reporting..."
"The Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department sends out regular bulletins to editors informing them which topics are forbidden."
Etc.
https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privil...
A religion, as opposed to other forms, usually has postulates you may not doubt, words you may not say, etc. That is, it constraints rational approaches in the area of what's sacred for that religion.
Well, I don't mind religious people. People are free to believe and practice what they believe — as long as they do it without pressing other people into compliance.
And this is exactly what happens. Faithful people who see something from the list of "progressive" sacred cows being discussed, especially at some critical / unorthodox angle (as opposed to praised in a canonical form), become furious: it's a sacrilege!
Now Mr. Altman notices that SF tech circles have turned into something of a Mecca (or Constantinople) of "progressivism", and raising a voice against the predominant religious views becomes unwelcome and downright dangerous. Well, yes. Sorry about that. Maybe you've been noticing signs of it for a few decades already.
The irony is, of course, is that "progressivism" often writes "reason" or "science" on its banners. I suspect the more ardent adepts will notice the discrepancy and suggest to remove them soon.
My thought on this is that the world is simply too complicated to operate in, and everyone is looking for a system that has the answers. It is a form of compression. You don't have to handle the flow of complexity because someone else tells you the correct move.
Catholicism did this, it said that it had all the answers. Science wants to provide all the answers, and tries to advertise itself as such. However, as the post modernists identified science only gives you the facts, but there are infinite ways to interpret the facts. You need a value structure, a religion maybe, to interpret the facts. I think this is the religion that you have identified.
Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable).
So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
It seems we are mostly in agreement. What I am trying to get is many people do look towards "science" and "reason" as sources of salvation. Regardless of whether or not science advertises itself that way.
"Religion" is a confusing, misleading term that has a lot of baggage that isn't helpful in discussions like this. Most religions also have supernatural beliefs and a literal definition of sacrilege such that certain things are bad in the eyes of God/the universe itself. Progressivism (whatever you mean by that) doesn't.
A better word for what you're describing is "culture". A culture is ready-made collection of best practices and anti-patterns for human behavior. You don't need a religion to have forbidden practices. A cultural more says "Don't do this." but doesn't follow that with "because God hates it as attested to in this book".
The benefit of culture is that it's efficient. You don't have to figure out every single action you perform from first principles. If the people who came before you did it, it becomes part of a culture and you do it too. That's why when you're hungry, you don't go out into the woods and start sampling plants one at a time to see which are edible. You pick one of the many known-good plants that you were brought up eating.
The risk is that, like all technology, it can become outdated when the constraints that led to it change. For example, many in the US have a cultural idea that pork should always be cooked well-done, even though it doesn't taste very good. That was a good rule back when trichinosis was common. Now that it isn't, that cultural norm is technical debt.
If that was a religious belief, it would be unchangeable. Pork would be cooked well done because Important Old Book says it must. That constraint never changes (unless you revise the text of the Old Book, which does happen), so the rule never changes.
In a culture, it can change. We both absorb and affect the culture we live in. That's why I think it's important to not call things like "progressivism" a "religion" even though it makes for a fun, provocative claim. It obscures the very different mechanisms around how those belief systems respond to change.
One of the fundamental beliefs of progressivism — the thing that gives it its name! — is that change is good.
Progressivism is about infrastructure and government transparency. It has nothing to do with identity politics or other leftist issues.
Try pointing out that Taiwan is a separate country sometime and you'd be absolutely shocked at the reaction you get from some people, even though they have different passports and a separate government. A Chinese engineer at Google once threatened to resign and started a a major firestorm over a dessert called "Free Tibet Goji Chocolate Creme Pie":
https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2015/04/...
Long unedited podcasts are turning out to be the best platform, with people like Sam Harris, Dan Carlin, and even Joe Rogan becoming the most important public intellectuals alive today. All three have financial and editorial independence. They reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Carlin is in Oregon, from Los Angeles, where Rogan and Harris are.
Sam Altman could obviously run a podcast where he discussed his controversial ideas. Many like minded people would rally around him. Some idiots would call him a monster. It would be great.
If you have FU money and you're complaining about PC culture, you're being unnecessarily cowardly. Start a podcast and help change things.
However I think those differences can be resolved by viewing tolerance of background and tolerance of opinion on two different axes. In my mind SV scores very high on tolerance of background but low on tolerance of opinion (as in "we don't care how you look like, as long as you agree with our opinions"), whereas NY scores high on both, and places like Japan are the reverse (scoring low on tolerance of background but high on tolerance of opinion -- hope I haven't offended any Japanese readers but that was my impression when I lived there for a short while).
I have been watching Sam Altman's sayings for a long time, I believe his judgment is at least reasonable for some reason we cannot see from the article.
Actually as an ordinary Chinese citizen and IT worker, I have always seen SF as the best place in the world to work and create something. However, in recent years, the atmosphere has subtly changed, between Silicon Valley and Beijing, between China and USA.
Such different ideas are always good for understanding the world better.
For long decades, the Protestants and Catholics did bloody battle for dominance of Europe. It seems silly to those now who think religion is a trivial lifestyle choice, but the lesson is to be learned by viewing this from their perspective. To them, each saw the other as putting the immortal souls of the masses in grave danger. The stakes could not possibly be higher, which is why the solution was so hard to see.
Freedom of religion is a very, very counterintuitive idea if you think religion is deadly important.
The churches agreed to live together in peace, not because they concluded their cause was unimportant, but because they could see resolving their disputes with blows was error-prone and cruel. The best way forward, the best chance truth had, the most just and practical way to live, is to commit to resolving these conflicts with words only.
The idea was so successful that today we would not think even of dragging someone out of a cult against their will. Even if a religious idea is obviously bad, we are committed to opposing it with words only because the lesson of history is that the alternative is so much worse.
It's a lesson we need to learn in politics.
We are not at the point where opposing political views generate open warfare, but I wonder more and more if we might be heading in that direction. But we do oppose each other in ways we wouldn't tolerate in a religious context: we ostracize and chase away people with unpopular views from various societies, either virtual or physical. We organize campaigns of legal or personal harassment. We organize economic pressure to attack the livelihoods of individuals whose views we find offensive.
All of these tactics run the same moral risk that physical warfare does: if you turn out to be wrong, you have done a grave injustice. And someone is wrong. You can't be sure it isn't you. Therefore, to prevent society being an awful place to pursue your conscience, none of us should do these things.
Worse, a campaign against an idea that consist of anything other than criticizing the idea runs the risk of being wrong. Strenuous debate is the arena in which truth has the best chance, so it is where we should all agree to fight.
We need to learn the lesson the church learned centuries ago. We need to commit to fighting our political battles with words only, not because they are so unimportant that we can tolerate error, but because they are too important to let the strong and popular hold sway.
> Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones
There's quite a difference between 'I feel uncomfortable discussing topic X in location Y' and 'location Y is restricting speech'. The only concrete example in the article of the former is a 'toxic reaction' to work in 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension'.
What exactly does a 'toxic reaction' mean? Is there a meaningful distinction between it and 'strenuous debate about ideas'?
Based on the examples given, this article seems to hold 'mainstream' and 'heterodox' ideas to different standards. Criticism of mainstream ideas is (rightly) described as 'necessary to get the really good ideas', 'what drives the world forward', etc. Criticism of heterodox ideas, on the other hand, is a 'restriction of speech' and a 'toxic reaction'.
I wish that Altman had provided more a single example (the reaction to 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension') instead of vague references to 'controversial ideas', 'casting the people behind the ideas as heretics', and 'heresy.
Quite frankly, if you can't find the courage to have a reasonable debate about your ideas, you shouldn't be the one working on those ideas. If your ideas run contrary to public thoughts around ethics, perhaps you should move to a culture where your ethics more closely mirror theirs. Or more radically — listen to why people disagree!
This whole post comes off as someone who's realizing their ethics are mismatched with the culture they're living in, and instead of questioning themselves, demand that the rest of the culture shift to their views. In other words: let me be this asshole, because I deserve it!
The problem is that because of growing social polarization reasonable debates are becoming increasingly rare. Hoping to have a reasonable debate with people who are not looking to have a reasonable debate is silly and has nothing to do with courage.
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
There are many more unsayable things in Beijing than San Francisco, and the penalties for saying them are much harsher (though of course not for Sam, as a very wealthy foreigner most rules simply don't apply). People are regularly beaten, harassed and murdered for reporting the truth about the government in China. Journalism is a very dangerous profession there in ways it is not in the US.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/14/asia/chinese-beat-korean-j... https://cpj.org/2016/04/chinese-journalist-sentenced-to-near...
In contrast, the dangers Sam runs from being open are that people will be mean to him on the internet.
I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true
This is a really odd statement of a non-problem which dismisses real world life-threatening problems a lot of marginalised people live with. First, reasonable people are not the problem, violent, irrational people who are influenced by bad ideas are. Second, this is not an academic debate over people with naughty ideas, real lives are ruined by the normalisation of bigotry and hatred (in ways that Sam in his privileged bubble has never and will never experience, and apparently can't even imagine). People are murdered, spat on and denigrated even at their funerals when hate like 'gay people are evil' is allowed to spread. Sometimes, to remain human, you have to choose a side.
This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.
Why would those two things ever be related? Why can't we let people say novel things about physics, and call them out when they (for example) harass gay people, sexually assault people who work for them, or do other bad things. Why would we possibly want to excuse bad behaviour because someone comes up with novel physics ideas?
What sort of confusion of ideas could lead to linking these two topics?
To address what I hope is your point (not really about skin colour, I assume that was simply an example of a no-go zone for your imagined liberal interlocutor), there are not many areas of research out of bounds because of social mores - there are always some at any given point in time in any given society (for example cloning or using fetal tissue in the US), and there are valid discussions to be had about whether research is ethical or not (which shifts over time).
Those hard ethical issues on the edge of science and what it means to be human are unrelated however to: novel physics ideas, almost all startup ideas, ideas for a new currency like bitcoin, spacex etc. Of course to have good ideas you need to preserve some innocence, ignore all the naysayers (of which the internet has plenty, a never-ending horde we all participate in at times), you may need to stand apart from your society (as in the case of bitcoin) or reject its tenets but that is entirely unrelated to tolerance for intolerance, to tolerance for hatred, to a happy ignorance of ethics or moral boundaries.
The writer mixes up simple cynicism and societal pressure which he experiences (which are as old as the world and easy to ignore), and real hatred leading to violence and seems to think they are somehow equivalent. Those are different categories of objection, different qualities of harm. Paul Graham or Sam feeling bad because people are dismissive, petty and wrong about good ideas he has, is simply incomparable to the real harm caused by the normalisation of the ideas in this essay (e.g. a given class of people are evil and subhuman - be that gays, jews, rich white men or something else). By giving those ideas credence, he's lending a hand to evil in the world.
In short, you don't need to allow hatred of [insert your hated group here] to allow good science.
This one has been around FOREVER but he was surprised to hear it this year? doubtful. I think Sam actually picked safe examples for his contrarian essay. e.g Notably absent Damore.
It wasn't always like this, and it has definitely gotten worse IMO. Based on conversations I've had with some friends, they also agree. We've all been living in the bay area for over 6 years and we're now entertaining the idea of moving away. I also know some smart people who have left naming this as one of the reasons.
Unfortunately, the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas is failing to distribute value as obviously as our economic marketplaces. The openness of communication made possible via technology has turned us all into Sophists. Efforts to confront and address this reality is peripheral at best. As long as this is true, censorship will be an appealing option to keep bad ideas from spreading. Is censorship worth the cost? I don't know, but I'd lean toward saying yes, while fully acknowledging that the cost is huge.
Every objective measure of society is better today than at any time in the past, and yet we have people calling for curtailing a core American value due to a supposed social emergency. These demoralized people need a hard reality check because there's nothing fact-based about the way they think or behave.
There are orders of magnitude more educated people in the world today than ever before. Development of technology is rapidly accelerating. The idea that we can't solve our problems without sacrificing our souls is just pathetic and historically un-American.
I am having trouble following your jump from shutting down trolls to sacrificing our souls. If you think the loudest person should get a platform, I encourage you to spend some more time in (non-HN) comment sections.
You say you want to shutdown "trolls" but you surely also want to modify the definition of troll on an on-going basis.
The pessimists think they can't win on ideas alone so they resort to using force against the "trolls" to ensure victory. Harassing, deplatforming, doxing, getting them fired, boycotting, etc.
The optimists (see: MLK Jr.) know humans are pretty great and, given sufficient time and information, the good ideas will win eventually.
If you actually care about your society you should be engaging "trolls" and trying to understand them. And you should be trying to convince them they're wrong, if you can. And if you can't, you should look to others that can.
Let me be even more blunt: I suspect what you really mean is simply that people who disagree with you should be shut up.
Let me be a bit philosophical: Unless you are so arrogant as to believe that you are right about everything right now, the set of people you believe should shut up includes both your future and past self.
Perhaps you should accord to others the rights you are so anxious to claim for yourself.
I think that we can collectively come to a reasonable agreement about what should and should not pass as discourse vs. plain trollery. If someone is parroting "facts" about Barack Obama's secret Kenyan birth and closed door Muslim religion, all of which have been refuted, and cannot offer a standard of evidence that would be sufficient to change their mind, they aren't engaging in a debate, they are simply spreading a lie. That lie, and many others like it, have recently shown the ability to propagate propelled solely by regular repetition. Is censorship the only way to provide a pattern interrupt? I don't really know, but I do know that it is TERRIBLE for a democratic and free society to have huge portions of the population very certain about opinions that are totally, demonstrable false, not to mention that these same opinions also incline these people to be less tolerant, less trusting, and more aggressive. I don't think we should rule out some level of censorship, at least at the interpersonal level, for thoroughly refuted ideas. I'm not saying we should have government intervention, I'm just arguing that you should have every right to tell your angry, misinformed uncle to stop spreading lies at the dinner table.
On a personal level, my own standard is that you earn the right to have a discourse by being willing to let go of your viewpoint if it's refuted, in fact that's part of why you are entering into a conversation - to learn what you are wrong about. Strong beliefs, lightly held. The right to speak comes with a responsibility to engage honestly.
A good philosophy for personal projects and starting companies too, IMO. Seems to be a pattern among indie hacker types.
Seen from abroad, SV and the US in general is becoming less appealing every day and it's not really Trump's fault.
If you tend towards "constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted," congratulations, you're neurotic, like me. It's just something you have to overcome enough to be comfortable expressing your own unique opinions. When you do this, you may find your controversial opinions are merely out of touch. Like you have an IQ of 180 and you've been reading scientific papers and you can prove there are only two genders... and now if you can't express this view over a beer in SOMA without getting some looks, you can't invent the self-driving car or something...?
- Gays are about 3% of the US population. Higher in a few big cities, lower in rural areas. Transgenders, maybe 0.4%.
- About half the US population supported Trump. His supporters have legitimate complaints.
- Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US white IQ: 100. Average US black IQ: 85.
- "Medical marijuana" is a joke.
I don't get it. Assuming this demographic fact is correct, what's your point? That they shouldn't be entitled to the same rights as the other 96.6%?
> - About half the US population supported Trump. His supporters have legitimate complaints.
About 63 million Americans voted for Trump. This is not half the US population. Whether half the US population supports Trump or not is pure speculation.
> - Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US white IQ: 100. Average US black IQ: 85.
Even granted that this is true. Do you have any evidence that this is nature not nurture?
> "Medical marijuana" is a joke.
Possible. But is it any worse than the current opioid epidemic? And why is tobacco legal anyway? Seems like I should be able to choose my poison.
135.4 million people voted in the presidential election, 46% of them for Trump.
135.4 million isn't everyone in the US, but discussing if children should be allowed to vote is an entirely different argument.
"To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture."
Like I tell my son, "anytime your minds says something is 'weird or wacky', what it is really telling you is that you should seek understanding'.
[Updated] To be clear, what I mean is that you confessed your limits of acceptable thought by declaring alchemy and decoding of the Bible as being bad and wacky. If a genius like Newton was willing to believe these were worthy of his attention, and the British authorities were worried enough to ban it, maybe it's time to challenge the scripting you have that won't let YOU go there.
I think this is the most interesting section in the whole essay. Is Sam really suggesting that he wants to supress the truth because he doesn't like what the truth is telling us. Here is a totally novel idea - how about changing your mind when the evidence changes.
Once the whole planet becomes a single-hive-minded social-media entity, innovation will stagnate, and the human race will slowly die off.
CS Lewis
I think de Tocqueville made a similar report about America a very long time ago, that Americans had to self-censor, French peasants didn't - they didn't vote so the powers that be cared little about their opinions.
I'd argue that it's not really about ideas as much as it is about the public being much more accepting of authoritarianism.
The broader values of free speech and free expression come not from an aesthetic judgment of particular acts of speech, but from a desire to limit the power of authoritarian governments to suppress speech/expression.
We're seeing in both parties an amnesia about the downside of authoritarianism, and this filters down to things like office culture, university culture, and the perception of the trade-offs associated with various freedoms.
While this sounds good in theory, in practice you have to draw the line somewhere. Do I need to engage in a debate about whether the earth is flat or not every time someone says it is flat? Am I not allowed to just dismiss the idea and say 'this is not something that is up to debate'?
Not all ideas are worthy of discussion, and someties you have to tell the people constantly proposing ideas that we have addressed before to knock it off.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cE4YRnjrM1Q
And I remember being very upset, that I seemed to be the only one moved by the topic, while the rest of the class, including the teacher, found it booring and just learned about it, because they had to ... blasphemists!
For instance, both "radical life extension is worth working on" and "gay people are evil" are ideas that certain people consider toxic to society - not just ideas they disagree with, but ideas that, if they are considered and debated and experimented with, will result in harm even if they're defeated in the long term. (And yes, the responses to these ideas will be themselves "toxic;" you get rid of toxins by killing them.) What distinguishes one from the other?
The article is clearly advocating for us not just to tolerate "radical life extension is worth working on," but to support an environment where an advocate of that idea can draw other people to that cause without public opposition and can publicly espouse that cause without social judgment. Someone who believes this should be able to be viewed as a great thinker, as someone doing worthwhile research, as someone who's not a "heretic".
But then the article turns around and says, "I am not worried that letting some people on the internet say things like 'gay people are evil' is going to convince any reasonable people that such a statement is true." Why? Plenty of people both on the internet and off say that and do convince people of it. (I was one of the people convinced by this; if you haven't had the experience of growing up in an environment which isn't a cult by any means but enforces religious-cultural orthodoxy, I do strongly recommend talking to such people about how that environment operates and propagates its beliefs if you're going to have opinions about "heresy".) Why should we believe that nobody will be convinced by "gay people are evil" but people will be convinced by "radical life extension is worth working on"?
And what about other ideas like "gay people aren't evil, we love gay people, but they're demon-possessed and conversion therapy will successfully fix them towards heterosexuality, which has been the norm throughout all of human society?" That idea is definitely going to get you a toxic response in SF culture. Should it not?
If we're simply going to judge ideas by whether other people are likely to be convinced by the ideas, and nothing else, we're not going to drive society in a productive direction. We have to be willing to say that certain things are good and certain things are bad. C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man is somewhat relevant here (and is a worthwhile read) - either we have our standards, our things we value, or we will let ourselves be ruled by whatever ideas seem defensible, and those ideas will start controlling how we are open to new ideas. Of course this is not to say that we have no problem with discourse, that the way that we approach "this idea is bad actually" or "this idea is good actually" is not broken. But that's very different from saying that all such judgments should be banished.
(Preemptive response: I do realize that the author is gay, and I don't think that invalidates this comment.)
There are social tectonics at play and the stress causes people to overreact negatively on anything that doesn't solve the current issues.
ps: augmenting intelligence is still weird to me, at least above a certain point, I'm all about balance these days; fix me but I don't need augmented abilities.
Me: let's extend life
Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical
Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
The issue is instantly accusing someone of serious moral failings and painting them as a social pariah to be ostracized, the instant they put forward a locally unorthodox view.
One group is constantly expanding the area of topics that are taboo, the other believes that having taboos is a bad long term plan for society.
The point, I'm assuming, is that Sam doesn't want to pack up his stuff and leave, he wants the Bay to become more open.
Open a YC branch in another city. Sam and other partners can spend more time there and find out if it really is more conducive to new ideas.
If the other location(s) really does turn out to be more conducive, ramp it up and close down the Bay Area operation.
Maybe the Bay loses out, but other places and the wider world win.
So why are we treating "This person is morally bankrupt" as the sort of argument that is unworthy of polite debate? What fundamentally makes it a worse idea than any of the above?
I think there's an incompleteness problem here, yes - but I think that problem genuinely applies to the original argument. I'm just pointing it out. (And the gist of The Abolition of Man, which I mentioned in another comment, is essentially an incompleteness argument against the idea that you can have an ethical society evaluate its own ethics without a base moral code.)
(If you take Gödel seriously, then you can't take Gödel seriously, in which case he's correct and you must take Gödel seriously, &c.)
You can say "it's a bad idea to work on extending life", but following on from there to cast the person presenting the idea as unethical is doing more harm than good.
"I think black people are genetically inferior." ...followed by... "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"
What if the ideas are unethical? There is a lot of that going around these days.
Life extension is one that comes up quite a bit, because the question doesn't seem to involve life extension for all, but life extension for a few who can afford it. Or, if it is being presented as a public good, the owner of the tech gets to become a new robber baron.
Maybe we need to decide if being ultra-wealthy is moral when people are in need and there is a system in place that generates people in need.
Downvotes away!
A: "I think black people are genetically inferior." B: "I think that's a bigoted thing to say that has historically caused a lot of harm to a lot of people." A: "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"
Person B is engaging with that idea, it's just that they think it's completely indefensible. I have a hard time understanding how Person A thinks this conversation is supposed to go -- like are we supposed to entertain everything as if it were serious? If I go up to a physics professor and say "I think physics is completely inferior and wrong" what is she supposed to say?
And more importantly, people with decision-making power have shown a remarkable tendency to submit to the will of these capricious and volatile online mobs.
If I can just ignore Twitter (and I do) then Twitter mobs don't directly affect me. But if my management does things because of Twitter mobs (or anything else like that) we have a big problem.
A: Statistically speaking, there are some genetic explanations for trends we see between men and women.
B: That is a sexist thing to say that women can't do tech, so you are harming women in tech. You need to be fired.
A: But... that's not what I said...
B: SO COURAGEOUS of the company to fire that employee for those bigoted ideas
C: Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?
D: Every time someone says something bigoted, they're like "muh free speech!" Stop saying bigoted things!
There are obviously genetic differences between races. That's how AncestryDNA can tell where you came from. So if there are obviously genetic differences, why can't I talk about the pros/cons of being black without being hateful? Some differences are going to be objectively better or worse, why I can't we talk about them without going into full blown racism? If we acknowledge the fact that there are physical differences due to genetics, maybe there are mental differences too (that's a real touchy one)?
Pro: some localized African phenotypes make for world-class athletes in certain sports- a single tribe in Kenya is vastly over-represented in marathon running.
Con: Africans are worse at living in the Arctic Circle compared to Nordic people. Their dark skin isn't suited to producing enough vitamin D with limited skin exposure.
Con: Black people with high blood pressure don't respond well to beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. Instead they need to be prescribed diuretics and calcium blockers, but these have worse side effects.
It seems like today if we mention that there are actually genetic differences between races it automatically gets shut down because they assume we're going to start making the conversation about hate instead of what we can do to fix some of the cons.
I guess what I mean is that even when folks are talking about these things in good-intentioned ways, they're not appreciating the weightiness of the ideas they're throwing around -- and depending on your priors, it's reasonable to worry about that.
Then argue the case for that position and tease out the ethical ramifications with your interlocutor. Bring a lot of evidence to back up that argument. Argue against the strongest form of the opposing idea(s), don't just create straw men to knock down or attack simple weak spots for easy points.
Unless the person advancing an unethical idea is intentionally trolling, take them seriously and seek to engage & explain your point. But it also requires truly understanding the other side (hence why you should be able to both articulate and argue against the strongest form of their argument).
Humanity has had some pretty awful ideas over its brief history. We have a mixed record when it comes to eradicating them by dialogue vs fighting. Usually we try dialogue for as long as we can. Too often, we wind up fighting when dialogue fails. Changing hearts/minds isn't an easy task. But the more we vilify, insult, ostracize, and otherwise verbally (or physically) attack those whose ideas we deplore, the more they frequently dig in on their position because they've tied their own identities to their beliefs. It's a funny condition with people that they often hold their identity as a believer in thing X far more strongly than they actually hold thing X.
[edit: wording & a little extra explication]
The best argument for life extension here would probably be to say that technologies like cell phones, which we now consider to be liberating technologies that almost everyone can afford -- even people living in poverty -- also started out as affordable only by the ultra-wealthy, and there's simply no way to arrive at a new tech without going through that stage.
If the tech were only useful to the ultra-wealthy once developed, that would be a flaw demanding criticism. But criticizing a technology for having a first stage of not being affordable before it becomes more affordable later seems to miss the mark.
Are you actually hearing that, or are you reading someone else's disingenuous over-simplified interpretation of what someone else said? Maybe just doing the incorrect reading yourself? Or are you reading an anonymous 4chan one-liner that could have been posted there by anyone for any reason?
> What if the ideas are unethical?
Then explain why. If you can't explain why something is unethical without resorting to intimidation of the people expressing those ideas, then maybe they are more ethical and your concept of righteousness is flawed or missing something important.
I disagree as to inequality. You just can't get equality; get over it. But life extension can still be problematic. E.g., life extension w/o extension of working years is a tremendous burden on everyone else, especially if such life extension is/becomes low-cost, and the only way out is to automate more and more so that we might provide for enormous elderly populations. On the other hand, we'll end up automating as much as possible, so it may be that this is a non-issue. Life extension w/ extension of working years would certainly be better. Another issue is whether we can correspondingly extend fertility years, otherwise we might risk negative population growth (which might or might not be a good thing anyways).
Workers can't afford to buy the products and businesses lose demand in a downward spiral.
That's what worked about the New Deal. If capitalist's want to continue getting to be capitalists, they have to sacrifice large amounts of profit to the common good. They still get to be wealthier than every one else, just by a smaller amount.
I really just consider life extension a wealthy vanity project. All of them contribute some money to defeating death, just in case...It really makes you think you should be in the business of promising immortality to wealthy people.
Propositional claims, in and of themselves, cannot be unethical. It's just a category error.
Now, if you're talking about the propositional claim, "black people are genetically inferior", well, as far as I know, it's contradicted by reams of available evidence and supported by little to none. You might as well claim the moon landings were faked, and, I suppose, many racists probably also do claim that one.
I do think there's a difference, so to speak, between heresy and quackery, and if we're treating racism as heresy, we've arrived to a very worrying place. The problem is, we treat ideas as heresy when we don't think we can actually provide evidence against them. That's why the whole notion originates with the unprovable realm of religion.
Claims like the supposed "inferiority" of some groups of people, on the other hand, were, at least as I was taught, quackery. They're just wrong, and all you have to do is point at the contradictory state of affairs in the real world.
A quack you ignore because you can prove they're wrong. A heretic you burn because you're secretly worried they're right.
Which makes me wonder how many secret racists we have around those pyres burning racists and sexists.
>Maybe we need to decide if being ultra-wealthy is moral when people are in need and there is a system in place that generates people in need.
This sorta idea? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-im...
Why would it be wrong to regard someone dedicating most of their time to actively accomplishing ("working on") an unethical thing as an unethical person? What else could "unethical person" possibly mean?
I haven't censored anyone or shut down any argument by saying this, and neither was I attempting to, so your point seems to be confused.
You haven't shut down any argument by saying "anyone who works on this is a bad person"? Seriously? I happen to think the exact opposite: life extension is probably one of the most noble things we could possibly be working on. Imagine if Einstein were still alive. We never learn from history, maybe because the people who lived it are all dead now. But in your mind, thinking this way probably makes me unethical (i.e. bad)! It's no problem when we're both two blobs of text on a forum, but I certainly wouldn't want you to be a boss or someone I was forced to interact with on a regular basis. And if enough people behave as radical as you are they will likely want to go beyond simply labelling people (e.g. see all the "hate crime" talk).
I don't see how I can stop extrapolating from "action X is unethical because the expected consequences look like bad ones" to "this person who dearly wants to bring about action X is behaving unethically". I simply don't see them as being meaningfully different statements.
In your second paragraph you've deviated from what I'm talking about (perhaps I was responding to the wrong person? EDIT: I didn't). "Person X is behaving unethically" is perfectly fine. "This person is an unethical person because they engage in action X" is where I draw the line (asuming action X is controversial and not very clearly evil like first degree murder) because it assigns a trait to someone by which they will be judged by their peers.
EDIT: Actually no:
>people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people.
You said that. So your revised statement is moving the goal posts.
> I haven't shut down any argument by saying this
You're being naive if you think that saying this doesn't end any hope of a reasonable discussion.
One person's reasonable discussion is another person's interminable sea lion. http://wondermark.com/1k62/
Given your stance here, you're perfectly ok with the baker refusing to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, right? Because the law was effectively the sea lion in your comic.
Everyone is going to have some threshold where they think 'an act that is this immoral means the person doing the action is also immoral', where actions that are below that threshold are treated as 'this action is unethical, but the person doing it could still be good'
Most people think someone who murders is a bad person (the act is immoral, and the person doing it is immoral). However, as the we move down the line, EVERYONE has to 'make the call' as to where the action becomes something that doesn't immediately make the person doing the action immoral. It isn't wrong that we have to make that call, it is the only way.
If people aren't allowed to state that 'behavior X makes person Y unethical', then how are we supposed to determine what is 'objectively unethical'.
To be sure, there is a lot of self-censorship -- the Overton window is real, and it's not advisable to say things fully outside the Overton window. Perhaps Altman is saying that the Overton window is closing on some opinions that he thinks we should be able to discuss openly, but because they're now outside the window he feels unsafe mentioning them. That would be a fair argument, though it'd be nice to make a list of things that can and cannot be said publicly, then we could argue whether we should widen the Overton window.
I happen think the Overton window is a good thing, even if I'm not always happy as to what falls inside and what falls outside of it. And, of course, the Overton window is a natural result of human nature, so it's hard to argue that there shouldn't be an Overton window. We can affect the Overton window, and sometimes we really should try to.
If person A is a white supremacist, and person B thinks ether exists, am I supposed to treat them equally because otherwise I would be "ostracizing" person A?
It should go like this: Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment Me: Ok lets talk about that...
But you can't do that if now you're already unethical, etc.
No, he's asking not to be critisized for his ideas. And it's troubling to me that you think what you presented is a proper discourse but I guess that's where we are today. The "someone else" in your example is simple minded and potentially dangerous in large enough numbers. It is not at all a given that people living longer would be disasterous for the environment [1] and therefor, no, people working on this may not be unethical.
Your "someone else", whom you seem to think responds in a completely reasonable manner, makes a highly oppinionated statement and then judges people based on that oppinion. How far is it from "they must be unethical" to "we should boycott their means of feeding their family" or even "we should probably put them in jail before they do something bad".
[1] In fact I find the idea beyond ludicrious. If people live longer, they're likely to put off having children until much much later (people in the west already wait about as long as they physically can). Further, if people like the Koch brothers knew they would have to stay on this planet for 10k years maybe they wouldn't be so willing to destroy the next 50-100 years for a nice 5-10 now.
Well the jail comparison is really far away. The boycott one probably isn't so far but who cares? If people band together to boycott someone they view as unethical that doesn't seem wrong to me.
>No, he's asking not to be criticized for his ideas. And it's troubling to me that you think what you presented is a proper discourse but I guess that's where we are today. The "someone else" in your example is simple minded and potentially dangerous in large enough numbers.
Or we're dangerous in large numbers huh? How long until you start jailing us?!?! Anyways somehow I don't think people are calling just any idea unethical. Usually the idea that provokes this kind of response is an idea which involves hurting some one or some group. The idea that I can work towards something which hurts a lot of people and not be criticized for it? Come on man.
>It is not at all a given that people living longer would be disasterous for the environment [1] and therefor, no, people working on this may not be unethical.
Then make the argument. Where Sam cuts this conversation is totally arbitrary but it invokes the feeling that calling someone unethical ends the conversation. No, it's a claim. You don't think it's unethical then argue back. Maybe the someone else is convinced, maybe not, that's called a conversation.
People in the west, right now, are going to jail for expressing oppinions. Right now those oppinions are universally seen as bad (e.g. rascism) but does that justify going to jail?
>boycott one probably isn't so far but who cares? If people band together to boycott someone they view as unethical that doesn't seem wrong to me.
You don't find it bad that a bunch of people, based on their own non-objective oppinion get to ruin someones business and/or career? I feel like I'm talking to a Hitler youth right now. If the person is behaving objectively unethically, that's one thing but this is not at all settled.
>Or we're dangerous in large numbers huh?
Yes, when you become a voting block and start outlawing thought, as is already happening. It's distasteful thought at the moment, but this entire discussion shows that things that are potentially great can be targetted.
>Usually the idea that provokes this kind of response is an idea which involves hurting some one or some group.
Not in the case of life extention. The objections are based on people assuming the worst possible case there but the evidence I see suggests the opposite.
>The idea that I can work towards something which hurts a lot of people and not be criticized for it?
Which is not what we're talking about. Only in your own mind. But here is the issue again, as soon as you decide, on your own, that something is "harmful" for however you decide that, now you get to do whatever you want.
>Maybe the someone else is convinced, maybe not, that's called a conversation.
When is shut down when you start off by claiming anyone who believes what you saying is unethical. Do people not understand how to think anymore?
What is an 'objective opinion'?
> get to ruin someones business and/or career?
Are you saying that it's a bad idea for people to boycott businesses, or that boycotting businesses shouldn't be allowed? If it's the former, how do you distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' reasons to refrain from purchasing from a business? If it's the latter, what would that even mean? Should people be forced to buy from a particular company?
> I feel like I'm talking to a Hitler youth right now
If calling someone unethical is "shutting down a conversation", what is comparing someone to the Hitler youth?
> Which is not what we're talking about. Only in your own mind. But here is the issue again, as soon as you decide, on your own, that something is "harmful" for however you decide that, now you get to do whatever you want.
As opposed to (objectively?) determining if something is 'objectively unethical'?
Look, things like murder or pedophilia are unabigiously evil. So it's not out of line or particularly dangerous to say that a person who engages in one of those activities or supports/defends those who do is unethical and possibly even evil.
Extending the life of humans? That's not objectively evil. It has not been clearly demonstrated to be a negative on anything. In fact there are plenty of arguments that it could fix a lot of problems we have. So to come out and attach a label to someone who dares work on such a thing, before we even know what it would mean is dangerous. I feel like society, at least a larger portion of it, understood this in the past. Your creating taboos. Things we don't dare talk about or explore because we fear having our lives destroyed by twitter lync mobs and the like.
>Are you saying that it's a bad idea for people to boycott businesses, or that boycotting businesses shouldn't be allowed?
No one should force you to have to shop where you don't want to. But what you actually want to do is knowing as "mobbing" in Europe and it's generally illegal (at least in some countries). The issue is one of power. With twitter flash mobs and so on today, you can quickly destroy someone's life with this kind of behavior. Most people don't mind if what that person is doing is obviously unethical but this thread is applying this to things that are completely unsettled. No one knows what will happen if we extend life because it's never existed before.
>what is comparing someone to the Hitler youth?
I appologize. This was certainly well over the top but please understand the context of what I'm saying: Hitler was able to come to power, in part due to people behaving this way. If you said something critical of Hitler, certain people took offense. They felt Germany had been in a bad way for a long time and this man was doing something about it. Why would you question him unless you wanted to destory Germany? So they started supressing thought. If your paper was critical of the Fuhrer brown shirts would storm in, trash the place and assualt people. As we know, eventually there was no one left to say anything eventually.
I hope you can see the parallel here: people felt their view was sufficient to begin censorship. It wasn't made illegal to question Hitler, it didn't need to be. Society had effectively shut down such behavior on their own.
>As opposed to (objectively?) determining if something is 'objectively unethical'?
Live and let live. There are people out there with different views than you. Some of those views might be down right offensive if you really thought about it. But society has always been this way and until recently we still managed to avoid getting so polarized about it and trying to censor everyone.
But they're absolutely not. What's the one thing everyone says they would do if they could time travel? Kill Hitler. Those actions are unambiguously evil to you which makes them subjectively unethical.
>So it's not out of line or particularly dangerous to say that a person who engages in one of those activities or supports/defends those who do is unethical and possibly even evil.
>Extending the life of humans? That's not objectively evil. It has not been clearly demonstrated to be a negative on anything. In fact there are plenty of arguments that it could fix a lot of problems we have. So to come out and attach a label to someone who dares work on such a thing, before we even know what it would mean is dangerous. I feel like society, at least a larger portion of it, understood this in the past. Your creating taboos. Things we don't dare talk about or explore because we fear having our lives destroyed by twitter lynch mobs and the like.
Here I begin to question whether you know what objective and subjective really mean. You're basically using "objective" to mean anything that agrees with your subjective opinion. All ethics is subjective, there is no objective base on which to call someone unethical.
>No one should force you to have to shop where you don't want to. But what you actually want to do is knowing as "mobbing" in Europe and it's generally illegal (at least in some countries). The issue is one of power. With twitter flash mobs and so on today, you can quickly destroy someone's life with this kind of behavior. Most people don't mind if what that person is doing is obviously unethical but this thread is applying this to things that are completely unsettled. No one knows what will happen if we extend life because it's never existed before.
This has nothing to do with boycotting which is what we're talking about. Mobbing != a boycotting campaign and I think you know that. So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign.
>If you said something critical of Hitler, certain people took offense. They felt Germany had been in a bad way for a long time and this man was doing something about it. Why would you question him unless you wanted to destory Germany? So they started supressing thought. If your paper was critical of the Fuhrer brown shirts would storm in, trash the place and assualt people. As we know, eventually there was no one left to say anything eventually.
This is so stretched... You're making the jump from me exercising my individual freedom to call someone out to brown shirts. Come down to earth please.
>Live and let live. There are people out there with different views than you. Some of those views might be down right offensive if you really thought about it. But society has always been this way and until recently we still managed to avoid getting so polarized about it and trying to censor everyone.
Read a history book, polarization is not a new thing, censorship is not a new thing and people exercising their freedom of speech to decry unethical people and actions is not censorship, it's the opposite. What you want: removing my ability to boycott, removing my ability to speak freely is censorship though.
Fine. I was going for "things society generally accepts to be evil".
>there is no objective base on which to call someone unethical.
If you want to get this technical but I'm obviously using the words loosely here: I'm using "objective" as a short cut to mean "things that are outright proven or agreed on by practially everyone". So nearly everyone would be ok labelling a criminal as such but I don't think most people believe extending life to be evil. In fact, I'd consider such a position quite niche in general since everyone is for it at least to a limited extent (i.e. medicine).
>So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign.
I think social media has made the random person too powerful. Any random person can decide that someone else is "evil" based on literally anything they want and if they have some means of organizing a flash mob they can destroy that person's life. The victim doesn't even have the ability to sue who ever did it. So it's a major imbalance of power. Normally this kind of power to destory people's lives is limited to the justice system.
>So put away the crazy comparisons and make a case for why people shouldn't be able to participate in a boycotting campaign.
Well, labelling someone is defamation of character and it's not a protected right. You can be successfully sued for doing it (though not arrested afaik).
>censorship is not a new thing and people exercising their freedom of speech to decry unethical people and actions is not censorship
Social media has changed this. Decrying someone everyone knows to be unethical is not the issue here. Getting a flash mob to attack someone doing something that some consider unethical while others consider it some of the most important work humans will ever work on is an entirely different thing.
You never had the right to "speak freely" in the way you're trying to twist it. Defemation of character will potentially land you in civil trouble and no nonsense about "first amendment rights" will save you.
If by 'murder' you mean 'unjustified killing', then that's trivially true. If, on the other hand, you just mean 'killing', then it's far from obvious that killing is 'unambiguously evil' (self-defense comes to mind).
> I feel like society, at least a larger portion of it, understood this in the past. Your creating taboos. Things we don't dare talk about or explore because we fear having our lives destroyed by twitter lynch mobs and the like.
Harassment on social media is certainly an issue, but it's ridiculous to describe 'people criticizing me on the Internet for what I say' to 'censorship'.
> But what you actually want to do is knowing as "mobbing" in Europe and it's generally illegal (at least in some countries)
No, what I 'actually want to do' is allow people to chose which companies to purchase from, and to allow them to advocate for others doing the same. What exactly do you mean by 'mobbing'?
> If your paper was critical of the Fuhrer brown shirts would storm in, trash the place and assualt people
Are you really going to compare online speech to physical violence?
> Live and let live. There are people out there with different views than you. Some of those views might be down right offensive if you really thought about it.
How do you determine which of those are 'unambiguously evil'?
I don't, I was going for "things everyone, pretty much everywhere, accept as evil".
>but it's ridiculous to describe 'people criticizing me on the Internet for what I say' to 'censorship'.
First of all it's not "people criticizing me", it's "people applying a detramental label to me". And, no it's not (yet) government sanctioned censorship but I'm sure you realize it has an effect of shutting down the discussion.
>and to allow them to advocate for others doing the same. What exactly do you mean by 'mobbing'?
But in modern times with social media, I think we need to begin to realize that this is too much power for individuals to have. Anyone can simply decide that someone is bad for any reason and all and then advocate for others to get them fired, boycott their business, etc. To apply these kinds of consequences to people used to require going through the justice system.
>Are you really going to compare online speech to physical violence?
That's not what I was talking about here. I was describing a case where a group of people started deciding what kind of speach was ok and how that turned out. If there were brown shirts today they wouldn't engage in those tactics, they'd probably get lots of online accounts to brow beat and shut down any conversation they don't like. It would probably be even more effective than trying to go beat everyone into submission.
>How do you determine which of those are 'unambiguously evil'?
I go with well established societal consensus.
Scientists get paid like children, seriously most in medium size cities can’t afford a mortgage on the crappiest house in the cities they work in. I will not build products to extend the lives of NIMBYs that vote against high-density housing and public transportation all for a shit salary that can’t even get me a house!
I’m basically extending the lives of selfish people while simultaneously making it harder for me to ever buy a home. Die NIMBYs Die. I’d love to help you live longer if you’d let me own a home, but you’ve proven you’ll prevent that as long as it benefits you.
So, die NIMBYs die.
> "There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation."
I find this to be a pretty mundane statement, and it's fairly spectacular to me that a 20 year veteran of the company was fired for saying it. I also think there's a lot of irony in the fact that Apple removed a black woman from a position of power just because she suggested that diversity as a concept should not be reduced completely to skin color and gender.
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So the problem is not with the criticism of ideas. It's that folks are being fired or completely ostracized for ideas that deviate even slightly from established consensus.
2) Is that a problem of speech or a problem of the authoritarian nature of corporate power?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/apple-vp-of-diversity-and-...
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/16/apple-vp-of-diversity-l...
Please post a source documenting that person being fired.
Toxic environment motivating you to move to another town: Tends to create an unhealthy society.
Maybe, in Altman’s Panglossian view, house arrest is just an opportunity to think deeply about inconvenient truths.
Furthermore, what is he really ostracized from? He never makes that clear. His anecdote about " radical life extension" relies on literally the worst version of criticism of life extension, the kind you would get from the angriest and least informed type of person. It's a bad argument.
Furthermore his argument about Newton undermines itself. Newton hid his work on alchemy and it was uncovered after his death, because he'd have literally been imprisoned for it. That wouldn't happen if Musk tried to turn lead into gold today.
Again, the mention if Elon Musk is ridiculous, because plenty of people ridiculed SpaceX when he started it, but he push on anyway.
Sure, occasionally good ideas get shouted down throughout history by small minded reactionaries, especially slightly transgressive ones, but that's just the hurdle you have to cross to execute on brilliant ideas sometimes. This whole thing seemed extremely thin skinned and petulant to me, and I definitely have diminished respect for Sam after reading it.
And, if indeed he is correct and SF has entered a phase of reactionary response to new ideas, then that change hasn't happened in a vacuum.
Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with China's treatment of public protests, and think it's despicable. And I find that free speech in the US is one of the only things that we are right about when it comes to exceptionalism. It's maybe the last thing that is special about the US, and that's why I don't like attacks against it. Only a few weeks ago during "free speech week" at Berkeley and the South Carolina protests I had leftist friends and acquaintances advocate for limitations on speech, and violence towards those who use hate speech, despite the fact that the first amendment protects hate speech. It's ass backwards, and exactly what China's faux-leftist policies advocate. In any case, that is not the topic of this post, which is topics of daily conversation.
However, none of that changes the fact that Sam Altman is playing loose with some sloppy analogy. No one is stifling his speech.
It's a good thesis to try and prove.
How would you even fix this freedom? Somehow constrain people to not speak their mind when they disagree with you? Constraining them through government would obviously make us less free so that's out. Constraining them through culture is no different than what's already happening, it just makes people like Sam the winner instead of people who disagree with him. So again no freedom difference.
No, this is not quite as severe as being arrested and imprisoned for thinking the wrong things. But career-wise, at least, it can be almost as disastrous.
It surprises me that Sam didn't include instances like that in his essay; maybe he wanted to avoid specifics so his argument couldn't be attacked on an individual case level, but nonetheless.
Side note: Are there any other alternatives that take privacy as seriously as Apple?
You can't place the companies you buy from under too strict an ideological purity test, either in one direction or the other, or else you'll never be able to buy anything.
I recall Facebook arguing that Peter Thiel offered diversity to their board, and I don't think anyone was fired for it.. sadly, though, they're also arguably the most frightening behemoth when it comes to tracking users.
Eich was free to think whatever he wanted, and he spent many years doing exactly that. What he turned out not to be free to do was enforce certain ideals he held on others.
In the US, there is a long history of self-appointed leaders in moral and political panics shutting down dissent via social norms and pressure, with or without the blessing of a government institution.
That's why we have an appeal from Sam who is suggesting that people willingly open their minds to debating ideas and not demonizing the people espousing them.
This is a freedom that could be fixed only through the people's choice to acknowledge it and fix it.
You say it's common to talk about weight or salary without people taking offense. Fair. On the other hand, in the US it's common to talk about the misdeeds of the President, express disagreement with the legislature, or question the government's policies. These are day to day conversations too. I don't think I've ever heard anything like that in China.
I think it's pretty obviously the latter....
And the government is at least sort of predictable, and is unlikely to make you disappear without any warnings. Social circles and careers can flip at a moments notice based on criteria no one is exactly sure of. A less than favorable opinion on any racial or sexual minority group or gender? A too favorable opinion on something sexual? Some comment regarding a woman's appearance? Support for a certain political party? Not thinking some individual woman/minority is amazing? Desiring the (il)legality of guns? Desiring the (il)legality of abortion? Other opinions on healthcare? Expressing a preference to (fe)males for some occupation? Acting on the belief it is okay to flirt in a workplace environment? Believing 'political correctness' is bad? Thinking human engineering is a good thing? Being for/opposed to the trans movement? Having some religion? Not having a religion?
You never know which one of these is capable of killing off your career/social group. In your average environment today, you really just can't tell which of them will set off the bomb. So you're silent on all.
Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.
And yet the position of moderator is one that could do wonders for setting a better culture.
HN does in fact reflect on YC and Sam, whether you want it to or not. It's their site. And in a different way than Youtube is Larry and Sergey's site (something I at least hope you understand), though even they don't escape responsibility for what shows up there.
I'm genuinely interested.
"Censorship" and "moderation" sometimes refer to the same thing from different points of view. The basis of HN moderation is not ideological agreement or disagreement, but the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Most of the time when people complain that they've been censored/moderated because of their "controversial positions", they're unaware or don't want to admit that they broke the site guidelines. Of course we also make mistakes.
Mad scientists are born not entirely because they're mad, but because the world doesn't appreciate their intention and brand them as villains.
Once you're branded as a villain, you have no other way to go but than deeper into villainism.
But he doesn't ask himself why. He doesn't try to understand why PC is so important right now, to the point to risk missing out on important and revolutionary ideas. And that made me think: where the best idea come from? Not from being free to be jerks but from questioning the status quo in constructive ways.
Why there's so much focus on Political Correctness right now? One possible answer is because the status quo has provided a windfall for White Educated Middle-Class Males with good connections at the expense of people further away from this description. Example? Are you a woman? You have to cope with molestation from entitled men. etc etc...
I'm crazy thinking that if we solve these problems we could then start again being open to crazy shit ideas, criticize each other ideas and keep things moving.
Or yes, we could be expats in China, where for now this problem hasn't emerged yet. But it sounds to me like just swiping the dirt under the rug. Is it innovative? Just asking...
I would like to see data on this. This seems like a very anectodal post (and I think the controversial comments underline it).
part of the problem is demand for applications for theoretical research done at universities. You can't just do research on wacky ideas because the money you need to do the research have deliverables attached.
Wait, but why not? Isn't this the crux issue of our time? The Russians and the RNC have spouted fake propaganda so loudly that ~40% of the US believe falsehoods already. And the main reason they believe things that aren't true is because they are said 1000x on the internet every day.
I'm not saying we should restrict free speech or anything like that. No way. But how can you ignore the problems of the world? Many people are not 'reasonable' and they do believe false things. That the do so matters, because our collective society is interconnected.
It doesn't matter if no "reasonable people" believe a false or bad statement is true. It matters that they believe it because they have and affect on everything. We all do.
Now we have President Trump because so many educated people thought that "no reasonable person" would vote for him. But here we are.
The world, the whole world, has a problem with fake information on the internet right now. The answer is not "oh well, too bad" and the answer is not "I'm not worried".
1) It somehow should be acceptable, in a dream society, to say that gay people are evil, but not to question the ethics of scientism.
2) A white dude who doesn't speak Chinese somehow finds China to be a better place for startups and freedom of speech, because there is some backlash against the technolibertarianism he peddles in his home city. Never mind that political activists routinely get executed in China and all that.
Sam seems like he has gone far into the deep end. Not sure if this what happens to your brain when you are super rich and constantly surrounded with people as rich as you, but I am struggling to make sense of it any other way.
If this had been posted by anyone else than the CEO of YCombinator, it'd have been dismissed like the drivel that it is.
Citation needed...
Apparently I should be allowed to say that gay people are evil, but not that radical life extension is a really really bad and yes, in my opinion, truly evil and selfish idea.
Should I be allowed to profess that humanity would be happier and less taxing on the planet if there were less of us? And should I be able to research methods to sterilize most people, and seek funding to experiment, without ever discussing the moral and practical consequences? What about radical life reduction (for others, of course)?
The consequences of radical life extension should be discussed prior to implementation; I can't see what's so frustrating about that.
Best way I can explain why is an anecdote. The other day, someone asked if anyone could recommend a book on JS, and someone else suggested "Javascript: the good parts" by Douglas Crockford. The following exchange occurred:
A: Oh, not Crockford, he's a sexist.
B: Really? I hadn't heard, what'd he do?
A: Ah, I forget.
Turns out, the accusations against Crockford were (as far as I can tell) pretty weak and largely abandoned, but most people never read about that, they just saw the initial salvo and took it as gospel. That's where we are right now - we have gotten to the point where we take accusations of bias seriously, but not yet the point where we always make them that way. We have the power to destroy the careers of bad people, but not yet the responsibility to use it wisely or sparingly. Right now, the result of that is an understandable reticence to speak frankly about controversial topics and to hash out ideas in public, which is what the essay is describing.
To have an useful discussion with someone, there needs to be an assumption of good faith on both sides - that each person will make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other, will set aside semantics and minor errors that don't matter, will directly confront key points that are brought up and will admit errors or spaces where they lack knowledge or clarity.
This assumption of good faith, in my view, has been the major casualty of modern politics and the new means of communication tech has provided to us in the last decades. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with views that match your own, to gorge on straw-men and memes and bad faith arguments that then result in pattern-matching responses when dealing with someone of opposing views.
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That said, I suspect there might be something else at play here in Sam's case. In the last decade we've seen tech grow up, and much of this has shattered the "tech is the way to a better future" idea. Google has gone from "do no evil" to the biggest marketing and personal information gathering force on the planet, with intentions that now seem ambiguous at best. Facebook has gone from a convenient way to stay in contact with people or make new connections to a machine optimized to capture human attention to such a degree that notable former Facebook folk are coming out of the woodwork to say they don't use it and forbid their kids. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the capability to have massive impact on politics, seemingly in negative ways, and seem to avoid interest in taking responsibility for the impacts of their platforms.
All of this leads to people being less optimistic about tech and startups. Sure, Uber sounded like a great idea at the start, but now? All those people working below the API seem to be in the same spot as the taxi drivers before - making minimal money, in debt over a car instead of a medallion, etc. And above it, a valuation of billions. It feels like a resource extraction project, where the average people are squeezed for the wealth growth of investors and techies.
Capitalism has a warping effect on tech. The successful startups aren't about saving the world, or making things better - they're about making money. If that coincides with doing good for the world, great - and if it doesn't, oh well, because making things better isn't actually the name of the game. It's a feel-good thing to put SV above finance or resource extraction or energy - and less people are believing it.
China probably just hasn't gotten there yet. They're still in their tech honeymoon phase, where everything is great - easier ways to pay, communicate, etc. Given that they're used to restrictions on communication and what they're allowed to know and think, maybe they'll never leave it.
In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
-- Cryptonomicon, 1999.
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Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy.
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Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
This really resonates with me. One reason I like working in software is that many of the limitations of other engineering disciplines (the strength of materials, the weight of concrete, etc) don’t limit our creations. Our limits are our own ability to manage complexity and the limits of what we can dream to do.
Ok, one more that is nice from our software point of view then and matches your comment:
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"Look, " said Roark. "The famous flutings on the the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in the wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?"
It means that the material world is what it is, and that reality is not modulated by human decree.
I think Sam is right and the quote (from 1999) also points to the issues. However, many comentors are pointing out that this is some 'culture war' thing that has infected SF. I think it's just a natural progression of maturing companies. They become managerial, not entrepreneurial. As such, stability is valued more than innovation, and you get a stifling environment. In essence, the Gervais principle[0] comes into effect as the 'graphite control rods' that are middle managers are lowered into place to help control the nuclear reaction that is capitalism.
Aside: It seems that HR departments (as an idea) have not been doing a good enough job a 'graphite control rod' (to help control the capitalistic reaction) in reference towards the #MeToo movement. Some better invention than an HR department is needed to prevent/control these harassments. Perhaps better surveillance/monitoring at work will help?
I don't even entirely understand the blog post. Did Sam see mean comments on the internet then write up something about how we can't talk about things because of said mean comments?
Something everyone, including Sam, is missing is this: everyone has different experiences than you and, more importantly, in an anonymous setting such as the internet you're going to get extreme views not necessarily representing the majority far more frequently (and more loudly) than anything that could be considered moderate. Stop giving so much of a shit what other people think.
As Paul Graham said then, the biggest threats to free thought and speech come from people who have just enough power to enforce taboos, and not enough to be confident in their power. In this case the political ideology that is stifling thought is one that has nationwide lost Congress, the Senate and the Presidency. Which naturally results in a strong "us vs them" mentality, and stronger incentives to require that everyone prove that they are part of "us".
The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative.
This is not, of course, one-sided. If you lived in a deeply religious part of the country you'd find similar levels of intolerance towards liberal ideas as a result of feeling like they are on the receiving end of years of losing the culture war. That won't be the problem that you experience in the Bay area. But it is two sides of the same mentality that you are either with us or against us.
That's a clever slogan. But the logical response to that would be to say that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance.
Which as a factual statement is of course arguable, but as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
Here is a simple demonstration. Consider the conservative argument that when you raise the minimum wage, elementary economics of supply and demand results in fewer jobs for poor people. I guarantee you that if you present this argument to 10 liberal friends, more than half will have a strong emotional response against it. While responding, some are likely to turn an interesting shade of red. Yet there is no intolerance in that argument.
Furthermore the argument is fairly well grounded in reality. Supply-demand curves are well-established basic microeconomics. And furthermore if you play around with https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#pa... you will find that Republican policies (which include low minimum wages) are consistently better for creating jobs. Just as Democratic ones are better for increasing GDP.
Of course some liberals will have emotional reponses to something that is not actually an intolerant opinion, like your example. There is no admission requirements to be a 'liberal', so we can't deny entry to people who don't understand the difference between a moral question and an implementation question like minimum wage.
The fact that a liberal thinks that "conservative" should be replaced with "intolerant" is a symptom of the problem that I describe.
You probably don't really think about the times a liberal person is reasonable and logical. You certainly will remember the ridiculous liberal who says illogical things.
Might that be skewing your impression of what 'most' liberals believe?
The statement that I made about minimum wage has the effect that I describe because it is a major liberal-conservative argument. As soon as someone states a position on raising the minimum wage, everyone else around will tend to assume that they know their political position. I could have produced other examples ranging from approving oil pipelines to the wisdom of tax cuts to cost effective ways to produce health care.
Now you may be atypical. But most liberals/conservatives respond with the same pattern. They figure out whether you're with/against, and then respond emotionally. And the issues do not neatly divide on "intolerance".
More interesting, the dividing issues change over time. Today woman's rights is obviously a liberal issue. If you go back 100 years, allowing women the right to vote was just as obviously a conservative one, because women were a reliable vote for Prohibition, which was a thinly veiled tool to attack blacks, Jews, Irish, and other "undesirables". You can thank the KKK for helping women get the vote in this country.
The dividing line really isn't as simple as it seems at the moment. But it is sometimes easier to see this with the perspective of history.
> as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
Upvoted for bringing it to my attention, though. :-)
If I want to be a tolerant and accepting person, do I have to accept someone who wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body?
This is similar to a love of freedom; I want everyone to have freedom, but that means having to restrict the freedom to infringe on other people's freedom. That might seem to be a contradiction, but it is a paradox you have to address.
No, just their freedom to express that they don't like it.
Not grant them actual power to interfere in people's lives by implementing the denial.
> Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body?
We have to tolerate someone who expresses (in a non-harassing way) that it would be a good idea for them to do that; we shouldn't tolerate someone trying to instigate such control.
And I mean as a matter of public policy. Whatever you choose not to tolerate personally is up to you as long as your preferences aren't used as the basis for perpetrating discrimination.
However, that isn't what the blog post is talking about. It is saying people SHOULD tolerate it personally, and we shouldn't call people 'heretics' for their ideas no matter what those ideas are.
I think it is ok for people to say "If you say gay people shouldn't get married, I am going to immediately respond that you are wrong and that it is immoral to hold that belief. If you say and hold that belief, I do not want to be friends with you and I don't want to support your business."
Boycotting people and businesses that hold views that go against your moral beliefs isn't wrong, and should not be condemned as blocking progress.
Now, I do think we all have the responsibility to make sure we limit the things that we respond to in this way. For example, we shouldn't have the 'shun the person' response if you disagree with what the tax rate should be, or if you think that raising the minimum wage will cause rampant inflation. Those aren't moral beliefs, they are implementation details.
Now, it would be different if your belief was "I don't want to raise the minimum wage because poor people don't deserve help", we might run into more issues. It becomes a bit tricky because a lot of horrible, immoral, views are hidden behind false justifications. Sometimes we make mistakes, and people with legitimate beliefs might be caught up in the crossfire, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasons into account when determining the response to an opinion.
That simply isn't the case; definitely not "everyone".
> and we shouldn't call people 'heretics' for their ideas no matter what those ideas are
Indeed, those people are wrong; if you want to publicly call someone a heretic, or whatever, (in a non-harassing way), that's just your freedom of expression. You don't have to like the fact that someone thinks controlling women's bodies is a good idea, and may call them a backwards idiot or whatever.
> Boycotting people and businesses that hold views that go against your moral beliefs isn't wrong, and should not be condemned as blocking progress.
Right as far as a personal boycott goes; but now suppose you don't want to let such a person into your restaurant, or give them a job in spite of qualifications.
Also note that if you belong to some religion A, then people from a certain other religion B almost by the respective definitions of A and B hold views that go against your moral beliefs.
You should not be able to keep a person out of your restaurant because of their views, but the job one is tricky and nuanced.
I think there are certain beliefs that a person could hold that are valid disqualifications for hiring that person; for example, if a person is advocating that women shouldn't be allowed to work and should stay at home because they have nothing of value to offer, how can I possibly hire that person? How is a woman supposed to work side by side with someone who has expressed the view that they have no value in the workplace? I think if your opinion is that some of your coworkers have no value in the workplace, that has to disqualify you to work there.
Now, of course, the spectrum of troubling views will eventually reach a point where the answer is not so obvious as to whether they should be hired or not. I don't think I have a strong answer to where that line should be.
A person who holds the views that you describe because he is an Orthodox Jew cannot be fired for said views. No, I'm not making that up. Perhaps you should think carefully about what "freedom of religion" means to you!
I think it's just based on how much of a threat a group is. If conservatives were a tiny minority of the population like Muslims are, no one would care enough to hate them.
>wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body?
This is super uncharitable btw. Imagine a conservative saying "why do I have to tolerate someone who literally wants to murder children?"
You're spinning the argument and calling the other side "intolerant". You're part of the problem Altman is mentioning. Sad thing is that probably you are not aware of that.
However, no one is arguing for a woman to be able to abort a fully healthy baby at 9 months. That isn't an operation that happens, so it is a complete straw man to try to argue it.
This is because American Muslims are nowhere near powerful enough to write their prejudices into law, whereas conservatives control all three branches of the Federal government and 31 state legislatures (see https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_houses).
You will always find that people consider your opinions worthy of much closer scrutiny when you reach a position from which you can impose them on everybody else.
In fact that's the biggest problem. These two groups completely hate each other, but live in separated regions. If they were completely mixed together geographically there would be no issue. People fired from liberal run companies could just go work at conservative run ones. We would have conservative social networks and liberal ones, and the "free market of free speech" argument would actually work.
This is only true in some parts of California, whereas other parts of the state are notoriously deeply conservative. Orange County, for example, was central to the power base of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. (The Nixon Library is in Yorba Linda; Reagan's is in Simi Valley.)
Taken as a whole California tilts left these days, and even Orange County isn't the hotbed of conservatism it used to be (it went for Hillary by a few percentage points). But there's still plenty of conservatism in the state -- enough for Donald Trump to win 25 of its 58 counties last year.
- [Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage | Pew Research Center](http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...)
I think this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives of a certain type.
The pattern seems to be:
A right-wing person makes a statement saying, "We need to stop allowing Muslims into this country to protect ourselves against terrorism"
A liberal response is to say, "That is intolerant. You can't group all Muslims as terrorists. We need to be tolerant of people with different faiths"
Right-wing response: "What?! You get mad at Christian conservatives for being anti-gay, but you want us to tolerate Muslims? Muslims are even MORE anti-gay than Christian conservatives!"
The problem is that liberals AREN'T tolerant of Muslims who have anti-gay beliefs; we are as against them as we are against Christian's who are anti-gay. The liberal position is that you shouldn't lump ALL Muslims together; there are Christians and Muslims who are tolerant of homosexuals and Christians and Muslims who are intolerant of homosexuals. We are against the latter group. We are defending the moderate Muslims who aren't intolerant against being lumped in with the intolerant ones, but conservatives seem to think that is a blanket support for all Muslims.
Now, of course, the reponse when I make this point is usually to link to some tweet or post by a self-proclaimed liberal supporting anti-gay Muslims. However, these are often parody tweets or posts made by a conservative trying to mock liberals support of Muslims, or perhaps some delusional person who calls themselves a liberal. It is NOT an opinion held by the majority of liberals.
And yes, my characterization of pro-life as being trying to control a woman's body might be a bit uncharitable. I could have worded it more neutrally.
In principle, yes. In practice they definitely are not. Liberals are not going on mass firing and blacklist campaigns of conservative Muslims. They aren't getting filtered and censored on social medial platforms. There is nowhere near the same level of emotional hatred and vitriol towards them. And anyone that has such hatred is seen as a bigot. But the same level of hate towards Christians is perfectly accepted.
This was a big issue in the atheist community. A lot of atheist thinkers became massively successful for mocking and criticizing christians. But there was huge controversy when they started doing the same for Muslims.
What happened? Well Muslims might have the same wrong beliefs. But they aren't The Hated Outgroup like the Christians were.
Where are these 'mass' campaigns happening? I am sure there are some by fringe liberal groups, but 'mass' is probably an overstatement. Same with filtered and censored on social media; I see plenty of right wing posts on Facebook and Twitter.
> This was a big issue in the atheist community. A lot of atheist thinkers became massively successful for mocking and criticizing christians. But there was huge controversy when they started doing the same for Muslims.
Any examples? I have never seen any 'huge controversy' for mocking conservative Muslim beliefs.
Some of what you are observing probably also has to do with location and culture; the people posting things encounter a lot more conservative Christians in their day to day life than conservative Muslims. You don't have the same emotional response to something that isn't happening near you.
I am realizing as we are continuing this discussion how difficult it is to reach each other. A lot of this has to do with our own perceptions of the zeitgeist of society, and we clearly are not seeing the same things. I see the massive power social conservatives wield over our national discourse and politics, while you see the power liberals hold. I don't know how we can convince each other. We can both surely find countless examples of both conservatives and liberals making comments that prove our points, and countless examples to disprove the other person's.
I feel like so much of this is your own personal lens with which you see the world. I don't think we can show the other person our lens through an anonymous internet forumn.
If your belief is that you want to deny rights to some people, you are going to be held accountable by society in the sense that you won't get to hold powerful jobs. You won't be arrested, but society isn't going to let you run a public company.
What does that are liberals who are trying to assert their power. Now I would bet that most of the liberals who helped bring about that result wouldn't support a legal right for polygamy, polyandry, or marriage between close relatives.
Why not? While being sexually attracted to close relatives is very rare, the portion of the population that is preferentially polyamorous is larger than the proportion that is preferentially gay. Why should people who wish to make multiple commitments not have the rights that gay people have?
I submit that their reasons for not supporting those causes are no better or worse than Brendan Eich's for not supporting gay marriage. I further submit that when people are punished for publicly supporting statements that half of the nation supports, you're creating chilling effects for free speech that fly in the face of how this democracy is supposed to work.
In the sake of disclosure, my white mother was married to a Chinese man before that was legal in much of the country. Furthermore my sister performed a gay marriage before THAT was legal most places, and I have another close relative who was openly polyandrous for over a decade. As a libertarian, my only issue with gay marriage is why the government involves itself in people's private affairs.
But that is a lot less important to me than concern over political correctness making people feel scared about expressing unpopular opinions. When am I going to have an unpopular opinion that I get penalized for?
And your presentation of his belief is, again, very uncharitable. A decent percentage of conservatives were in favor of civil unions and other legal work arounds to give gay couples the same benefits as straight ones. Many didn't really care what gay people did and were just afraid of the slippery slope.
>A liberal response is to say, "That is intolerant. You can't group all Muslims as terrorists. We need to be tolerant of people with different faiths"
That's a very good characterization of most liberal responses on this particular issue. It's a complete non-sequitur. The RW statement does not in any way imply that all Muslims are terrorists. The liberal response doesn't address the crux of the statement at all, it just impugns the character of the person who made it.
While it is true that the RW statement doesn't imply that all Muslims are terrorists, it does imply that it is ok to ban ALL Muslims if some are terrorists. The liberal position is that this is NOT ok; we feel that the cost of blocking innocent people from entering the country is not worth the cost of allowing some possible terrorists in.
The RW position is that the cost of innocent people being blocked from entering is worth paying to block the possible terrorists.
This is somewhat ironic, because the positions become reversed when talking about gun control; conservatives believe you shouldn't punish law abiding gun owners because some people use guns to hurt people, while liberals believe it is a fair price to pay.
This is actually one place where I diverge from the traditional liberal position; while I think some gun control is reasonable, I think we shouldn't punish gun owners unreasonably because some people can't be trusted with guns.
I don't personally support banning Muslims because the terrorism is so low it's not worth worrying about. But one could imagine if it got much higher and was a legitimate large threat. Then I would be completely ok with banning Muslims.
I'm about to speak one of the "heresies" that sama referred to in the third paragraph.
I don't believe there is a significant "cost" to barring immigration of low-skilled, poorly-educated people into the US. If fact, in my calculation, it costs us more than we gain by letting them in, considering that the number of jobs that the half of our citizenry with an IQ of 100 or below are capable of doing are shrinking.
I'm not without compassion for those people who want to come here. I don't blame them at all for wanting to. But my main priority is helping our own citizens (of any race, creed or color) who rightly view their future with trepidation. America has a huge number of huge problems, and I don't see how low-skilled, low-educated immigration addresses any of them. But I do see how it exacerbates some of them.
Unlike many people, I'm not moved by platitudes like "but we're a nation of immigrants!" or "diversity!" I think US immigration policy should be based on what benefits the US and its citizens, rather than other countries or their citizens. My position is essentially based on mathematics.
I would say that in about 80% of the instances where I've attempted to discuss this issue with liberals, they've offered not a shred of dispassionate reasoning, but reached straight for the old "but that's racist!" arrow in their quiver. They either can't or won't refute my reasoning, so they impugn my character instead.
I really enjoy the rare occasions where I can have a legitimate discussion on political issues with someone who disagrees with me, and who can discuss the issues without calling me names. But alas, those occasions are rare. That's why sama's article really resonated with me.
That said, the majority of studies that I have seen disagree with your calculation. http://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-ef... is typical. Even low skilled immigrants have a small but net positive effect on the net wealth of US citizens. But the effect is small, and there are some who are impacted negatively. Particularly among blacks and teenagers who have been displaced from bottom rung jobs by immigrants who are willing to work harder for less, and still feel lucky because their lives are better than where they came from.
Due to that I am happy with having relative open borders for immigration. But I can understand why others might be concerned.
I understand that reducing productivity costs will increase productivity, so unlimited immigration would make GDP go up. (And GDP does not factor in the costs of supporting increased numbers of unemployed people.) But this, from the study, strikes me as pure hand-waving:
>Moreover, immigrants are often imperfect substitutes for native-born workers in U.S. labor markets. That means they do not compete for the same jobs and put minimal downward pressure on natives’ wages.
For the statement "they do not compete for the same jobs" to be even partially true, you would have to show me at least one job in the US that only immigrants do, and no natives do. It certainly would not be construction, or landscaping, or custodial work.
A flood of low-skilled, low-educated immigrants would benefit people like me, who they do not compete with for jobs, because it would make the services they provide cheaper for me.
But as you acknowledged, it does hurt the people whom they DO compete with, and I would argue that extends beyond blacks and teenagers, although that alone is enough for me.
Roughly half of the working population in the US has an IQ of 100 or below. These are the people upon whose well-being, I, personally, place a far higher priority than similar people who are currently not US citizens. That is what my position is premised upon. I am willing to forgo the extra GDP and cheaper lawncare so that their lives might be a little less difficult than they currently are.
I don't think this is the reason. The offending group could be arbitrarily big or small. Today's true problems (from the perspective of likelihood of affecting the civilization or the planet) and today's problems that dominant ideologies care about and feel threatened by, are two completely different things, sometimes laughably so.
I think it's entirely about signaling, and that applies to all sides. When a person or movement or another social entity claims they care about X, the real information the entity is conveying is "caring about X is now the color of our flag, raise a flag of the same color if you're one of us". The actual issue of X is largely irrelevant and can even revert if necessary (i.e. if the signal becomes too unreliable to detect potential members). At least this is what I've noticed across cultures, ideologies, languages, continents..
Edit: Incidentally, that's also why you hear complaints about double standards all the time (how come Europeans don't criticize it when... how come Feminists are silent when... how come Conservatives are nowhere to be found when...). Logical consistency is rarely a useful signal as people are not well-tuned for detecting it and have great capacity for bypassing it: by applying self-deception, compartmentalization, a host of biases, and by building narratives and simple models in their heads while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It's difficult to think of even one group that enforces logical consistency as its signal (maybe logicians? who knows?)
Almost everyone is happy to tolerate everyone who doesn't try to interfere with them, their preferences, and their beliefs. Racists are generally happy to tolerate black people as long as they sit in the back of the bus, use their own drinking fountains, and remember to say 'sir'. Even racists tolerate those who tolerate them.
That is a very different statement that comes from you defining conservatives as being against what you are for. But that is generally not the case. They are for something different than you are, and sometimes it comes into opposition with what you want.
This is in principle no different a substitution than pro-life people defining pro-choice ones as pro-murder. Obviously you see why that one is unfair. Can you see why the other is as well?
As a non-American liberal, I'd argue 'liberals' are tolerant of anything except non-American liberals.
Try bringing up progressive topics in polite company and see how long you can last before becoming a conspiracy theorist / radical.
You agree with every UN member countries wrt Palestine/Israel except 2? Oh, we don't talk about that here. You want to support grassroots primary caucus delegate? Nevada primary co-chairs were expelled from the causes they were chairing for trespassing. You want more than 2 corporate parties? Jill Stein was handcuffed to a chair for hours for attempting to enter the televised presidential debate venue. You're anti war? You must be a Russian spy or literally Hitler for not opposing strawman foreign governments who resist trading oil in petro-dollars.
Nothing you listed seems even slightly crazy to me, nor anything that a good chunk of American liberals would disagree with. Or a non-trivial fraction of conservatives, for that matter.
We have no choice but to work within the window of tolerance of the body of this community. I don't mean 'tolerance' in the virtue sense but in the physical sense of excessive stimulus triggering meltdown.
The same people who oppose life extension on the grounds of the environmental cost probably applaud uneducated africans having 7 kids.
The people who oppose understanding a genetic basis of intelligence would tell you that each human is blank slate with equal potential to every other human.
The people who oppose wealth are the ones who advocate for full luxury socialism/communism.
Frankly, the only reason we have so many voices opposed to these good things is because our welfare state is too generous - people can survive on food stamps and ruminate about the moral evils of capitalism. If they had to get a job, their idle hands would do less of the devil's work.
It's good to see people waking up to the intolerance in San Francisco. I used to enjoy going there, now whenever I visit I have to change my phone background (away from a picture of a greek sculpture and the quote "tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire") so no one tries to accuse me of being a n*zi and derails the business at hand. The world is worse for the intolerance but hard times make stronger people - what the world needs is titans and if we make a crucible for the titans then mission accomplished.
Maybe but somehow we don't focus on dangerous ideas. Communism is by far the most dangerous idea devised in the west. It infected dozens of societies and led them to a century of poverty, slavery, and hundred million deaths.
Yet someone who's open about being a communist won't really be ostracised in SF. Communist flags are available on Amazon. Communist subreddits are not banned. So no, I don't buy this new wave of censorship as a defence against dangerous ideas.
I am genuinely curious about where you get the figure of 100 million deaths from. I also believe that all the societes that had slaves were capitalist ones.
But we can both agree that communism leads to poverty although the poorest countries in the world are failed states rather than communist: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-poorest-countries-in...
The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.
As for "all societies that had slaves were capitalist" -- it is unclear what you mean by that. Certainly the US was capitalist and had slavery, but many (indeed most) pre-capitalist societies had slavery.
German POWs were kept as slaves until, IDK, the 80's?
Raise more specific ideologies, like Stalinism or Maoism or even Leninism and you will certainly meet a lot more opposition, and rightly so, because many on the left are closest ideologically to victims of the followers of those ideologies. E.g. one thing most people forget about the October "revolution" was that it wasn't a revolution at all, but a coup against the socialist provisional government - it was the Bolsheviks overthrowing the revolutionary socialist/communists and largely Marxist groups that had popular support after the elections to the constituent assembly went against them.
So painting them all with one brush is not just ignorant, but offensive to the many socialists and communists who took up arms, and fought and died to try to stop those regimes.
Your example is pretty much equivalent to complaining about capitalism because various governments allowing some variation of private ownership of capital have committed atrocities.
This argument would be more credible if the least awful Communist regime wasn’t a toss up between Cuba and Yugoslavia. Every single attempt at actual communism has gone so terribly that any rational person would flee a country that was about to turn communist with the clothes on their back.
You're free to argue that actual Marxist socialism is somehow impossible, given that it has not been demonstrated other than at a small scale. That's a matter of opinion.
But the failure of these regimes does not change the fact that they were so far ideologically divorced from Marxist socialism and communism that most of them have met armed resistance from socialists and communists.
And does not change the fact that the name has been used by groups with diametrically opposed world views.
The point was not to argue whether or not socialism is possible or viable in any particular form, but to point out why communism gets treated differently from nazism:
There are only totalitarian nazis, while among people who call themselves communists you find people ranging from totalitarian via supporters of parliamentary democracy, to anarchists, and within those groups the former have throughout the last century been among the ones who have murdered most of the latter.
E.g. during the Spanish Civil War, Stalins Comintern agents were more successful at murdering high-ranking anti-Stalinist communist leaders than Franco's fascists was.
Anti-Stalinist socialists and communists are as opposed, or more so, to the type of regimes you talk about as they are to the nazis or facists
I've personally faced Stalinists who believed I belonged in labour camps because my views on socialism includes a firm belief in democracy, and I've personally made it clear to very same people that if they were to ever gain power, I'll take up arms against them same as I would against fascism or nazism.
Try flying a rebel flag off your SF apartment balcony. Or even something not as inciteful like saying you support the current sitting president.
If you go into a startup and say "I'm a communist," many of them are going to be pretty skeptical of your ideas. You will find yourself in a lot of awkward conversations if you make this a thing you want to talk about.
If you pitch a VC and throw in "btw, I'm a communist," or they find your online writings about being a communist, you aren't getting a check.
If you apply for upper management at Google and you say "I want to overthrow capitalism because I'm a communist," you're going to have a really, really hard time.
I don't think it's arguable that communists are actively operating in America and causing capitalists to have longer jail sentences or killing them when they wouldn't kill communists. So, no, I don't think communism is a threat whereas anti-semitism and racism are immediate threats.
I don't think that we need to jail all people who are racist, but I think it's just fine to not talk to them or to yell at them or even to fire if they feel the need to express their beliefs in a way that gets in my business or stops me or my team from doing our work.
A friend of mine has had half a dozen startups funded in the Bay Area, and most of the books on show in his living room is Marx, Engels and Trotsky. He now runs a VC fund. One of the first things he told me when I met him was that he used to be a member of a communist party.
If you make a big deal of it in contexts where it would seem weird, like as part of a pitch, then yeah, because it'll make them question why. But the Bay Area is quite more tolerant of left wing views than the rest of the US.
That's not to say it will not affect you - said VC above did tell me he once lost a job over it, but the one time he knows of it was an "outsider" not someone from the Bay Area that prevented him from getting hired.
Wait can people not say these things in SF?
If not then what's the point of this post.
If so, then wow SF, Thats messed up.
...except maybe tacitly agreeing with people who posited that talking about something was a bad thing, because, you know, in this particular case freedom of speech is trumped by more important considerations.
This is, of course, not limited to liberals, or any other political affiliation.
I am not surprised that he felt more comfortable in China...
You're a vile hypocrite. And there's nothing to debate, there. It's just fucking true.
When people say this always I try to point out that the opposite is the truth. Maybe I can't convince you, but I want to reassure any silent readers who might worry about this. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is what we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved. Plenty more on this at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants it.
> You're a vile hypocrite. And there's nothing to debate, there. It's just fucking true.
Even though this breaks the HN guideline in bannable ways, it feels like more of a cri de coeur to me, so I'm going to leave it up for now. But really, you're just making things worse both for the community and for said coeur. It would be better to speak more directly about what you feel, and if possible to connect it with what others are saying. I mean really connect it, as opposed to throwing something in opposition. You don't have to reduce any of your views to do this.
Your assertion is that it is very important to human progress that people who despise homosexuals (or others) be allowed to spread their hatred without any social or professional repercussions.
This is, at best, a questionable assertion, and it is one that you give no evidence for.
However, you are so insanely fucking arrogant that you're comparing yourself to Gallileo? As you fight for the right of powerful oppressors to demonize minorities?
Go fuck yourself, sam. Go fuck yourself.
I know that you're a fucking coward, so you won't respond. You'll probably just have dang delete the post (because you do not actually believe in open speech).... but man... fuck you, and fuck your shitty fucking parents for raising you to believe that it's somehow more important to protect bigotry and hatred than it is to protect actual goddamned people.
If you care too much about what other people think of you, then you possibly aren't spending enough time thinking about things that aren't people.
Without providing more examples/specifics, it just reads as a tirade against the boogeyman of "political correctness".
Is he upset that the SF crowd rejected Peter Thiel for endorsing Trump? Or is he upset that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla? Who knows? He's being so coy.
You should take the strongest form of the argument to debate, not the weakest.
It would contribute more if you gave your response to why you disagree with the necessity of fully dispelling bad ideas through reasoned debate, or why you disagree that we have to accept the existence of bad or 'wacky' ideas without ostracizing the person altogether in order to have the good ideas.
The tolerance for "gay people are evil" has, more than once, led to "gay people must die". In fact, it is an inescapable consequence - if you declare people evil, you do declare you want to rid the world of them.
And coming from that point: You are still free to say this, of course. And everybody in the Bay Area is free to say it, too. But there are consequences to your speech. And the consequence to this particular speech is that most sane people will shun you. Tough luck, Sam. We've seen your colors when you desperately clung to Peter Thiel, you've just shown a little bit more of yourself.
And yes, of course we must allow the free exchange of ideas. But speech that strips away the humanity of others is not "an idea". It's hate. And it cannot be accepted in a civil society, without undermining the very foundations of that society.
I find it especially amusing that he thinks "gay people are evil" is perfectly fine, but "biotech work is unethical" is something that really shouldn't be said. He couldn't be much clearer about his actual intentions: he really wouldn't like criticism of the things that make him money, and to not annoy the existing "talent", bigotry should continue to be OK.
Putting that half-baked kind of intellectual dreck under a Galileo quote is a truly Silicon Valley thing.
What do you think about the choice of the ACLU to defend the neo-nazis' right to protest in South Carolina? I abhor the content of their speech, but I think I agree it's important that it's defended.
On the other hand, what about the restrictions on neo-nazi speech in Germany after WWII? I think I agree that this restriction of speech was a good idea, as it prevented the possibility of that thinking continuing to take root and spread.
The difference between the two scenarios in my intuition is that one feels far removed from being "real" -- I don't sense that neo-nazis are close to taking over American government (Trump jokes aside) so I see it as important to protect it as minority speech; but in post WWII Germany, it was much closer to "real" that the hate speech would transform into hateful action, including restricting speech on the other side. So the probability of the outcome of speech matters (or the popularity of the speech) in my mind, and the more minority the speech, even if abhorrent, the more important it is to protect; but, as the speech approaches majority or becomes "action" then my intuition starts to flip. But it's always maximizing protection for minority speech, and draws a bright line between speech and risk of action.
In a nutshell - tolerance is a mutual agreement, and the protections of tolerance only apply to those who would uphold those protections. If you deliberately step outside these bounds - "gay people are evil" clearly doesn't tolerate gay people - you have lost the right to be tolerated.
I disagree with the ACLU on protecting neo-nazis on those grounds. They have positioned themselves outside of civil society, with the deliberate goal of destroying that society.
Does that mean we should restrict neo nazi speech? I honestly don't know. I do believe we shouldn't protect it, and I do believe we should shun people who subscribe to those ideas, but does that mean we should make it illegal? It's a very tough question.
It's not what I'm arguing, either. But I am arguing that Sam disingenuously conflates two things, and to make it more interesting would like to get rid of speech that harms his business interest while he's OK with speech that has provably caused physical harm over and over.
He's unhappy with his ethics being questioned, and dresses it up in a free speech argument. That is what I dislike about this.
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
Yes. undeniable. In fact more often it's lead to "gay people must be fixed" which is also inexcusable, but...
"In fact, it is an inescapable consequence"
.. NO. Tolerating people having distasteful and bigoted opinions, especially when they differ from yours, does not inevitably lead to those ideas beoming reality.
Ideas about what? Did you try discussing free speech or democracy? Did you try to show a flag of Tibet or Taiwan?
It's true that a lot of people in China are free from the same political concerns of Americans, yet, how has that turned out for them in the long term? Per capita GDP?
Just keep in mind that when Valley "thought leaders" complain about the lack of freedom to discuss ideas, those are the kinds of ideas they're talking about.
It's been 23 years since The Bell Curve and I am still waiting for someone who makes this statement and seems to have a solid grasp on the problem of general IQ scores across wildly different populations. I think there's a reason I never see it . . .
However, judging from a recent Y Combinator post (https://blog.ycombinator.com/13-startup-ideas/) on 13 startup ideas from YC alumni and staff for startup ideas that they wish would exist, Sam should start right in front of his own door regarding "working on less ideas for the 1%".