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Comment by youdontknowtho | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing that from people saying things like...

"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!

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I completely agree. The exchange seems to go like this:

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?

You’re leaving out the part where B whips up a Twitter mob to demand A be fired and ousted from the industry.

Ah, we come to the heart of it. If Sam had said, "Twitter is a problem because it enables dangerous groupthink, promotes overreaction, and stifles meaningful discourse" then (a) his argument would have been a lot more clear and (b) I would have been 100% onboard

I'm not sure twitter is the cause, more the primary avenue. People can be dangerously groupthink-y and overreacting in person or on social media, and our culture certainly seems to be moving more in the direction of instant reactions and emotional self-satisfaction over engaging in nuanced debates.

Well, is twitter actually the problem, though? Twitter's biases are a problem, but that's a separate issue. Twitter can't be expected to prevent all forms of propaganda from its users, and even if they could the problem is not just twitter specifically, it's all social media. While the parent made a pithy comment using Twitter as an example, in reality instigators rely on an array of platforms to spread the message and whip up the proverbial mob.

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.

Why is Twitter the problem if a company fires an employee.

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.

You might agree, but you're both completely wrong. As James Damore proved, the exchange goes like this:

    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...

(A is fired)

    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!

Note: D never read the original post and has no first-hand knowledge of what A may or may not be guilty of.

But what if A said this:

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 think it's completely fair to think that a lot of these thoughts are coming from a good place. But the people who are espousing these perspectives need to understand that there's a lot of really intense history behind ideas like this. When these ideas have surfaced in the past, it usually hasn't really been about "fixing the cons" -- and even when it has, it often has major unanticipated and unintended consequences that cause serious harms.

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.

>What if the ideas are unethical?

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...

The average of several traits in different populations are (obviously) different. Sometimes with more than 1SD difference. OTOH variance withing the same group is bigger. If you say this, you'll be ostracized in academia and fired at your work by mob pressure. Even Altman can freely speak about how chilling is the PC culture. Mentioning China as a place where he can speak "freely" should have been a hint to you.

> What if the ideas are unethical?

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]

I agree with you.

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.

> I keep hearing that from people saying things like...

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.

Definitely, some ideas should fall out of the Overton window, and I'm glad that they do, even if there should be any truth to them (e.g., re: possible genetic inferiority/superiority of some groups -- whether true or not, it falls outside the window today, and that's a very very good thing).

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).

I'm not, and I don't think most other people are, advocating for total equality. There has to be democratic push-back against the drive towards massive accumulation in capitalism or you don't get to have functional capitalism. It's a catch 22. Without some non-capitalist institution with a lever of power to redistribute, capitalism has a built in tendency towards self-destruction.

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.

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