Sam Altman complains political correctness (gay) “Free Speech is dead in SF”
siliconbeat.com
siliconbeat.com
The point being is you can argue against speech you disagree with. "Gay people are evil" can be met with "That's ridiculous, and most people find that incorrect and offensive." And leave it at that.
Shutting down speech is the problem. Why? Because once you've made it acceptable to shutdown speech that is offensive, suddenly the definition of offensive gets expanded and it's used to bludgeon any ideas that don't align with current thinking. That's dangerous.
One, the sheer magnitude of easily accessible information is far greater than it has ever been, and this quantity not only overwhelms us in terms of how many headlines we will read but also how deeply we are willing to read. At some point, we are mostly reduced to headline-skimmers that trust far too much about the first few sentences of whatever is posted, and we place great trust in “something” to help us filter it out (and so far there aren’t a lot of great ways to determine what makes an online source valuable).
It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now, which means that people can saturate their input with whatever they want to hear and leave it at that. People have shown that they’re clearly not responsible enough to intentionally diversify what they take in, which almost ensures a very skewed perception of reality, especially when combined with massive quantity and low quality.
And, perhaps controversially, I believe that people are not being educated very well at all to recognize and adapt to these problems. (It’s learning about critical thinking, statistical significance of sample sizes, etc.) Indeed, young people are able to easily access online material from almost anywhere with no friction but all of the echo chamber.
You nailed it. Look at the elections _ Hillary was winning in almost all online conversations (certainly in my limited social circles = echo chambers)...then the reality proved otherwise.
Can you imagine going back to journalism 20-30 years ago, where they just tried to give you the facts?
Sometimes I try to ignore the media and just read books for exactly this reason.
Here are some examples I found searching the interwebs: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/11/sjws-tech-conferenc... I remember the incident about Douglas Crockford as a big WTF that confused the hell out of people.
On the other hand, if you're OK with being respectful to people even if you disagree with their very existence, you're pretty much good to go in the Bay Area.
As an example of this in action, I have a gay friend who eventually moved to New York City with his husband. He works in a big bank in a mid-level job, you'd recognize the name. His manager constantly refers to my friend's husband as his "partner". My friend thought he was going out on a limb when he corrected his manager with "Actually, he's my husband." It's fine to be forgetful; it's not fine to be disrespectful. So far nothing bad has happened, but who knows how it will turn out.
Because it's not about you. The Golden Rule is not "call people by the name you are ok with if you were them", it's "call people by the name they want to be called by". If you like, I can pull out my Miss Manners book and quote that rule to you, from the 1950s.
The problem is that people read way too much into what other people say. It sounds like you hear "partner? this person is clearly insensitive to the history of discrimination again LGBT people."
Instead try "I don't like the word partner, but it is a pretty standard term for not only the unmarried, but also married people. This guy probably doesn't understand it bothers me, but I'll give him the benefit that he meant no harm."
And so is my gay friend in NYC. It's just that he's scared that his boss is actually a passive-aggressive homophobe and he's going to get fired for politely insisting on "husband".
He's just scared.
Keep in mind that he spent the first decade of his career working in places where he could be legally fired for being gay.
And there are lots of parts of the US where he could still be legally fired for being gay.
And in the specific case you mention, I'll say as a gay marriage advocate, that someone who doesn't believe in gay marriage should not be forced to use terms they believe apply only to heterosexual marriages. IMO both of those people are entitled to their views and preferences and both need to agree to disagree. Without being disagreeable.
The social justice warriors aren't "running around". They're flagellating each other in mostly self-selecting circles. People who complain about social justice warriors as though they were commonplace are doing the same.
Most of the less extreme views on this lead to good places - the are deficits in hiring certain classes of people that are worth fixing for the sake of both economics and decency. There are some pretty rampantly abusive environments born when you give a 20something millions of dollars and a building.
I met probably a dozen people (coworkers, acquaintances, etc) in my years there that took this to an unhealthy, draconian extreme. But they're the overwhelming minority. And some of them got rightfully fired for their antics.
If you can avoid being lazily bigoted and sexually offensive, you'll do just fine. The standards of conduct are very reasonable.
There are plenty of people in the bay area that have more conservative values, if for no other reason than that tons of people move here. Nothing particularly bad seems to happen.
I don't follow Sam's life, but has he lived there for at least a few months to be able to say that? Or he just went to a conference or two there?
Even so, it may be easier for an American or other foreigner to "speak their minds" in China, especially if they are known to have a lot of money. But if he was a Chinese, I think there's a much higher chance something like this would happen instead:
https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl...
The only thing you may have to fear for in SF may be your reputation, but not that you will go to prison for saying the "wrong thing". Not yet, at least.
I think your link connects the dots of using China as an extreme example.