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1) Restriction of speech, as he put it, is not equal to the ability to criticize ideas.

"When we move from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas."

It's the ability to even discuss them without being branded a heretic that he desires, rather than a lack of criticism.

2) He's saying that the people he knows in China were more willing to hear about his ideas than the people he knows in SF. He did not mention anything about privilege, nor do I think it is fair to assume that the Chinese are only more willing to accept his ideas based on his money. Many people do that, not just the Chinese. He's mentioning (anecdotally) that the people he spoke with in China were more open-minded than the people of SF. Perhaps we should take it as a wakeup call rather than an indication of Altman's privilege.

3) Hate speech != "driven out of companies, schools, education programs, and development communities by bigotry and sexism". How can you equate what is strictly speech with that of hateful action?

4) Would you like to pick a quote as an example for why you might feel that way? The common refrain in this essay to me seems to be "we can’t just call the person a heretic", which seems very focused on the individual rather than a theoretical corporation.

1) I don't see people getting arrested for having ideas in the bay area. At worst they don't get funding, but that doesn't seem to be the topic here. Perhaps Sam needs to widen his social and professional circle a bit- there are 7.5 million people here, and I can't imagine I'm the only one who has found open minded ones. If anything he should be encouraging more diversity if he wants to bring in more ideas, not arguing for policies that will drive people away.

2) It is entirely anecdotal, and it completely skips over the fact that China does not have free speech. You know those NFL protests that are happening here? In china that would get you three years in prison[1]. Being an American in China alone is enough to grant privileges that don't exist to the people born there. Shoppinglifting is an offense that carries a minimum sentence of three years, maximum of ten, and the American college students caught there were let go.[2] It's naive to think that his experience was typical in any way.

3) If speech didn't have consequences we wouldn't be having this discussion. If the "anti gay" physicist wasn't hurt by the words directed at him then he would just ignore them and keep doing his thing. If the founders working on life extension weren't upset at being told there are environmental consequences to this then maybe the blog post would never have been written.

If someone who is gay walks into a company and is told by another employee that they are deviants in the eyes of god then the gay person is likely to leave. If a woman is told to "go make us sandwiches", even in a joking way, she's not going to feel respected. Bigots who are given free reign drive away the minorities they target.

4) The simple fact that this blog did not discuss any of the consequences of the hate speech shows that he doesn't think they are legitimate. He argues that we need to be more lenient in allowing bigotry if it means that we also get more innovation.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/04/china-disrespe... [2] https://newsone.com/3757629/china-shoplifting-laws-liangelo-...

I think getting arrested is only one way in which these consequences can occur. Remember, government is at least in theory a formalized reflection of social arrangements.

Think more about what it was like during McCarthyism. If you were accused of being Communist, you became an outcast. You would no longer get invitations to events. If you were applying for a job, it would suddenly be filled already. If you wanted to get coffee with a friend, they would suddenly be busy.

As a more recent example of this, look at what happened to Rachel Dolezal, the "trans-racial" woman who was born white and claimed she identifies as black. After the media fiasco, she couldn't get a job, and most recently I saw an article about her struggling to get by on food stamps, and about to be homeless. There was no government action against her, and yet, nobody would say she hasn't felt the consequences of what she did.

Note: I'm not suggesting that Dolezal and Communism are related, just using them as two separate examples to support the larger point.

> How can you equate what is strictly speech with that of hateful action?

How could you not consider speech an action?

3) Because "hate speech" has come to be a political tactic of censorship, just like "obscene speech"

> He really doesn't seem to understand the difference between free speech and being free of consequences

This is silly. He's not saying you can't criticize ideas, he's saying don't assume ill-intent.

The examples were clear. If someone wants to extend life, you can't assume they don't care about the environment. If someone wants to send a rocket to Mars, you can't assume they don't care about poverty.

China was used as a counter-example explicitly because of their lack of freedom of speech. The entire point is that when people feel more free to discuss ideas in China than in San Francisco, we have a problem, because China is not an exemplar.

Please include all of his examples, not just the ones that most people would agree with.

> 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. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

Not every idea is worth debating in every setting. Someone who just wants to go to work and program shouldn't have to spend their day debating people who think their lifestyles are a sin- they should be able to focus on their job. If you're building rockets for SpaceX what should it matter whether the dude two seats over knows how much you really dislike gay people?

And again, if you have a bunch of people bashing gay people in your company and you just allow it you are going to push those gay people out. All of their "novel physics ideas" are going to go out the door with them.

As to his entire point about China- it is patently false! It is literally not true. If a bunch of people in the bay area want to talk politics they can do so. If you do it in china and it goes against certain things you go to jail. His example and claim that china has more free speech is a slap in the face to all of the people murdered in china for that speech.

> Not every idea is worth debating in every setting. Someone who just wants to go to work and program shouldn't have to spend their day debating people who think their lifestyles are a sin- they should be able to focus on their job.

I fully agree, but I didn't read it as Sam advocating that people should feel free to discuss highly sensitive subjects in every setting, but rather that he feels that said ideas can't be discussed in any setting. (For this post, I specifically don't take any position on this.)

>As to his entire point about China- it is patently false! It is literally not true. If a bunch of people in the bay area want to talk politics they can do so. If you do it in china and it goes against certain things you go to jail. His example and claim that china has more free speech is a slap in the face to all of the people murdered in china for that speech.

I think he's implying that even though in China the government will jail you for speech they deem subversive, people don't feel like they can't approach taboo subjects in normal social situations. On the other hand, in a politically free environment like California, you can be excluded by your friends or colleagues for speech they don't like.

> I fully agree, but I didn't read it as Sam advocating that people should feel free to discuss highly sensitive subjects in every setting, but rather that he feels that said ideas can't be discussed in any setting. (For this post, I specifically don't take any position on this.)

I completely disagree with him then. It is possible that his own professional and social circles are like this, but there are 7.5 million people in the bay area. There are people outside of his group. I have had "difficult" discussions with plenty of people, both in professional and social settings. Perhaps this is the disconnect- maybe the dude just needs better friends.

For what it's worth, Sam Altman is gay. I think he picked that example precisely because it's one on which he is more vulnerable.

This comment, and the response from Anil Dash, both think of free speech in a very limited way that only takes into account what the government is allowed to do to you. To my eyes, this way of thinking is America-centric. The extremely rigorous protections given by the US constitution make it easy to assume that the constitutionalist view of free speech is the only one that was ever believed in.

I believe something different: that free speech is open discourse between people, and that anything which prevents people from talking to each other openly and honestly stands in the way of free speech, be it bigotry or be it no-platforming. To say something and receive "mean words" or "consequences" can usually means that nobody is engaging your argument.

Sama gives the example of the controversial physicist, where someone has one good idea and some terrible ideas, and asks whether the good idea should be ignored because of the bad ideas. I don't think this means that the physicist has more important ideas as a whole, but rather that the ideas should be engaged in isolation to one another lest we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

> To say something and receive "mean words" or "consequences" can usually means that nobody is engaging your argument.

Advocating genocide (e.g.) is not deserving of engagement.

Anyone attempting to persuade you that genocide is in any way beneficial to humanity is not going to be persuaded by your "open and honest" counterargument. Their intent isn't even to persuade you. Their intent is to persuade other viewers of your argument that "reasonable people can disagree"

I'm more worried about people trying to make themselves the authority on what is or isn't permitted to be deserving of engagement, than I'm about people advocating genocide. For one, there's a lot more of the former and they seem to be getting more all the time.

* “You’re fired” isn’t free speech. “You are not allowed to attend a Python conference because of your political views” isn’t free speech. It’s not guaranteed by the First Amendment that people can’t be fired or blacklisted for their opinions, but when Communists were blacklisted from the film industry, that was seen as a disgrace—despite the fact that, in the 1950’s, the activities of the Communist Party were a much greater threat to American (and, in general, Western) society and values than the kinds of things people get in trouble for saying now.

* The entire point of civil liberties and human rights is that we, as a liberal society, have deemed some freedoms so important that the damage done by allowing them to be restricted almost always outweighs the damage done by their free exercise. There are exceptions, but these tend to be very severe in nature—ones freedom to travel around and associate with others might be restricted if they are infected with Ebola, or one’s freedom to keep the police from breaking down their door might be restricted if the police see and hear someone in the window yelling and screaming for help.

Along that vein, there are some obvious limits to freedom of expression: you can’t literally yell “fire” in a crowded theater, you can’t lie under oath, and so forth. But it stretches things too far when you make up categories like “blasphemy” or “sedition” or “hate speech” to block out actual ideas, regardless of the danger you think their free expression presents to society. The infamous “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” analogy was used in a Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who advocated resisting the draft during World War I. That decision was later, and rightly in my view, superseded by a different ruling.

So let’s break that down a bit. If you use your freedom of speech to convince people to resist the draft, you impair the ability of the country to win the war, which only extends the war, which causes real suffering and death for a large number of people. And ultimately, that wasn’t considered enough “damage” to outweigh restricting free speech.

> It’s not guaranteed by the First Amendment that people can’t be fired or blacklisted for their opinions, but when Communists were blacklisted from the film industry, that was seen as a disgrace—despite the fact that, in the 1950’s, the activities of the Communist Party were a much greater threat to American (and, in general, Western) society and values than the kinds of things people get in trouble for saying now.

They still are, for that matter. People today seem to be extremely worried about the so-called "KKK" and "Nazi" groups, most of which consist of about five yokels meeting in somebody's garage. They're nasty pieces of work on an individual basis, certainly, but hardly an existential threat to the country as a whole. There haven't been any real Nazis in close to 70 years, and there hasn't been a real KKK for about a hundred.

Communists, on the other hand, not only racked up a far higher body count than Nazis and the KKK combined, they still control entire countries, with standing armies and nuclear weapons.

If we're going to start ejecting people from the public sphere on the basis of their ideas being dangerous, pragmatism would seem to dictate that we start with Marxists.

I agree with your overall point, but this tactic seems almost as disingenuous as the other side. I don't think we should be equating speech with body counts, even if it was the same view that brought about both. Though this is a good example of why the argument for hate speech laws doesn't make sense, I think it's important to preface it as such or else your comment comes across as the same kind of attack that Sam A is criticizing.

> I agree with your overall point, but this tactic seems almost as disingenuous as the other side.

I don't actually advocate that Marxists be ejected from the public sphere. I'm merely pointing out that if we are going to start ejecting people for "dangerous speech", they are the obvious first candidates.

Nah, just nah. You're conflating violence enacted by the state with the political philosophy the state uses to remain come into and remain in power. If you're going to blame the Khmer rouge on communism, then you also need to factor in the conflict in the middle East, American Indian genocide, slavery and more and attribute that to capitalist philosophy.

> If you're going to blame the Khmer rouge on communism, then you also need to factor in the conflict in the middle East, American Indian genocide, slavery and more and attribute that to capitalist philosophy.

No, actually, I don't "need" to do that.

Communists have murdered more people than any other single group in the history of the world. Sorry, but they have.

The Middle East has been a bloodbath since the dawn of recorded history, and likely before.

"American Indian genocide" had nothing to do with capitalism per se, nor does slavery have any connection whatsoever with a free market. It is, in fact, quite antithetical to it.

sure, you don't need to do that, but it's disingenuous if you don't and reveals a biased interpretation of history.

Communist _regimes_ have killed a a lot of people.

I'm not sure why the American Indiana genocide is in quotes. As if there weren't policies at the federal and state level that promoted the theft of land from the original inhabitants and the ensuing displacement and murder of them?

You're corroborating my point that those violent acts weren't expressly mandated by the underlying political philosophy but were instead carried out via the state powers who latched onto those philosophies in order to gain populist support for the policies that would ensure their power.

"Communist _regimes_ have killed a a lot of people."

And Nazi _regimes_ have killed a lot of people. So you're saying that Nazis are okay, then?

"I'm not sure why the American Indiana genocide is in quotes."

Because most of the Indians were killed by diseases, not by deliberate genocide. Most of them died without ever seeing a white person (e.g., the former inhabitants of some of the Missisippian culture cities). There were certainly genocidal incidents, some of which were horrifying, but that's not what caused the large-scale depopulation.

In any case, that had little or nothing to do with "capitalism". The colonization of the Americas (and, indeed, much of the world) was primarily driven by mercantilism, not capitalism. I'm trying really hard not to sound condescending here, but do you even know what "capitalism" means? It doesn't just mean "not communism".

Besides, my argument had to do with current threats, not things that happened hundred of years ago. That Nazis (the real ones) no longer pose a threat while Communists do was the whole point.

Can you name a Nazi regime that is constantly threatening to launch ICBMs at the United States, as North Korea does on a seemingly daily basis?

Communists have murdered more people than any other single group in the history of the world. Sorry, but they have.

Citation needed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communis...

People seem eager to blame the Holocaust on fascism; do you take exception to that?

Conversely, what if instead of censoring all Marxists, we just censor the various apologists for Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc., ban that “heroic” portrait of Che Guevara, and just focus on the glorification of these actual regimes that murdered people?

I think that you're the one who misunderstands free speech. Free speech means precisely the ability to speak freely without negative consequences. In our constitution, it is guaranteed that you can speak freely without any legal consequences. The principle of free speech goes further though. The principle is that society is better if people can discuss things openly and honestly without fear, and that open discussion will lead to a better society than having people afraid to express their true thoughts. Hardly anyone is a true free speech absolutist, where you can say literally anything without any consequence whatsoever. On the other hand, if you're not in jail for your speech -- if you're merely on a universally adhered to employment blacklist, you still don't have free speech.

What this really comes down to is people's ability to compartmentalize. If I'm willing to be on your software team even though I think you're a sinner who is going to hell, I'm compartmentalizing. If you're willing to serve on a school board with me, even if you think I'm evil for eating meat, you're compartmentalizing. This sort of compartmentalizing is how we build a functional society that provides what we all need even though we don't all agree on everything.

> He wants people to be able to say controversial things without there being blowback

When the blowback is to smear your character, conflate it with other unrelated negativities, and avoid actual discussion on the topic at hand who can disagree?

Edit: several assertions therein, feel free to debate :)

The issue is not that people are criticizing people who have certain ideas. That is fine. That is free speech. The issue is that people are taking actions that actively harm those people. Whether by excluding them from events, preventing them from speaking, firing them from their jobs, etc.

If you fight words with words, that is good. If you fight words with actions against the people who said those words, then you are against free speech.

Note: the principle of free speech is much broader than just the Bill of Rights.

Maybe there is something wrong with me, but after reading Sam's article, I don't see any of the things you're accusing him of in the article.

I have a lot of issues with your post.

> He really doesn't seem to understand the difference between free speech and being free of consequences, and as a result he's in danger of suppressing free speech. He wants people to be able to say controversial things without there being blowback, but the only possible way to accomplish that is by suppressing the free speech of people who disagree. You're either for free speech- which includes the right to criticize ideas- or he's arguing that specific people's speech (the person with the "novel physics idea" for example) are more important than others.

Sam's article is a criticism of the form of criticism received when on the "losing" side of a controversial topic. The criticism is not of the opinion (which leads to actual discussion) but of the person. That criticism of the person tends to be over-the-top.

Pushing back against this over-the-top criticism will open up free speech by letting people who are scared to share their opinions for risk of extreme consequences (being fired?).

> His example of China, one of the worst human rights violators who has been known for violently suppressing free speech, is just a continuation of that. He's happy because as a privileged person with money China is super excited to hear his ideas, but he's also ignoring the fact that China literally jails and kills people who speak out with ideas that their government doesn't like.

I think you're making Sam's point for him. He feels more comfortable in a place as bad as china for speech than San Francisco. What does that imply? China's treatment may not be equal, but this is not the implication. The implication is in how uncomfortable he feels in SF.

> He completely ignores the damage done by hate speech. Just completely ignores it. If you were to read this blog as is it seems like he thinks people being driven out of companies, schools, education programs, and development communities by bigotry and sexism were never going to contribute or that their losses aren't as important as the ideas being lost to people uncomfortable being called out for bigotry.

You are ignoring the damage of calling someone a bigot for sharing their opinion. I think we both have a point here, and a further discussion would be interesting.

> The blog seems to put a higher value on innovation and corporations than it does people.

I'd assert it's putting a higher value on the quality of society which he asserts is improved when controversial topics are free to be discussed without risk of extreme personal attack. People make up society (and corporations btw), so it can be assumed that assertion of higher value applies to them as well.

do you have the impression that Sama's essay has anything to do with government? why bring up china's government?

Because Sam brought it up in the first paragraph of his essay?

> 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.

It's entirely relevant that stating the wrong 'controversial ideas' in Beijing can get you killed or imprisoned.

he's talking about speaking directly with Chinese individuals in China.

the original post is about discussing these topics in person-to-person situations... not about posting politically motivated speech online, not about challenging the government.