Sam Altman and the fear of political correctness | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman and the fear of political correctness

marginalrevolution.com

30 pointsmcenedella9 comments

>"Political correctness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing to make accommodations to treat others well. But too often it ends up being used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims. The best ideas are barely possible to express at all, and if you’re constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted, you won’t let the best ideas get past the fragment stage."

> -@sama

These words wouldn't have been out of place in the very PG essay that inspired me to join this community.

It depends on what part of the US you're in. The Bay Area and Northwest are ultraliberal, so conservative and even moderate voices get suppressed. The Midwest/Bible-Belt is ultra-Christian so non-Christian voices get suppressed. The South is ultraconservative, so moderate, liberal, progressive, non-Christian, and non-white voices are suppressed.

The best places for free speech are SoCal and NYC. Both areas lean liberal but have large conservative populations, so extreme viewpoints on either side of the political spectrum get suppressed, but everything in the middle comes through just fine.

Anyone wanting to experience this effect without going to San Francisco can try it here on HN. I've seen smart and reasonable but unpopular comments disappear with amazing speed and also seen people wondering why our government would do something even though there's seemingly nobody that supports that decision.

Rampant shadow-banning on HN if you comment on immigration or terrorism or Net-Neutrality that the PC crowd doesn't agree to.

I am sure this comment will only be seen by me, only through this browser.

Peter Thiel or Sam Altman speak for free speech, yet HN comment auditors keep using their jurisdiction in deciding what is OK and what is not.

Lot of work that engineers do and then social operatives hijack the work and enforce their agenda on top of that engineering work.

I have no clue how they feel being American, operating on American soil, under the protection of American law enforcement, and at the same time stopping American people from having a discussion, that too after specifically creating a platform for that very reason... to have a public discussion.

This is same crowd that gets angry when ISPs want to kick out a packet that the ISP doesn't like, but are super comfortable blocking, hiding and in case of reddit even editing user's comments. How they are able to hold this cognitive dissonance in their head at the same time is beyond me.

I am sure nobody will read this but at least I said it. Hi, HN auditors, have a wonderful day full of opportunities to ban users and comments, enjoy!!!

I suspect this was killed more for striking too close to home than for tone. It reminds one of this passage:

> "The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas."

>I am sure this comment will only be seen by me, only through this browser.

hi!

Since your model has led you to an incorrect conclusion, are you going to revise it?

> Whatever you are free to say in America, you have said many times already, and the marginal value of exercising that freedom yet again doesn’t seem so high. But you show up in China, and wow, your pent-up urges

Except that one country has built up a perception of allowing more freedom of speech than another.

The analogy doesn't cut to the core of the issue.

And the whole "pent up" phrasing makes it sound like Sam was just waiting to express some horrible things and couldn't do it here and had fly to China.

Only in the same sense that Renaissance-era scientists wanted to "express horrible things" about the nature of our solar system.

Getting blacklisted will cost what, 50% of remaining lifetime earnings?

That's a lot, given the country promised free speech on the tin.

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