A Clarification
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
As a result of his original post (which was totally harmless and not even slightly controversial), he's forced to write this mea culpa to avoid being labeled a heretic (which is literally the problem he's discussing in his original post), and has to end it with a dig at Donald Trump as if to say to the people threatening him with claims of heresy: "Hey guys, see, I'm on your side. Isn't Donald Trump the worst?"
The irony is just incredible. Nice try Sam, but you made the mistake of trying to reason with these people. You're not a person making arguments; to the people you're talking about in that original post, you're merely an embodiment of whatever ideology they think you're representing at the time.
Your critics aren't even concerned with what they think as individuals, they're purely concerned with the aggregate of what their contacts on social media will pretend to think publicly. Trying to debate them on an individual or intellectual level seems pointless, especially through any kind of broadcast medium. Your ideas will get through to some, but only the response labeling you a heretic will be shared.
There are jokes people will laugh at when they're in a dark room, but if the lights are on and their family is watching, they will shake their head disapprovingly instead. Politics is the joke, and social media is the light and family in that room.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-opinion-on-the-UC-Berkele...
In the 60s and 70s UC Berkeley used to let controversial speakers present. The audience would listen patiently. And then take turns asking questions trying to catch the racist / bigot / Nazi / homophobe / whatever in the midst of logical failures. Now we just protest and shut down ideas via claims of political correctness. It’s not nearly as effective.
People are literally defending the idea that preventing currently unpopular ideas from finding expression, if necessary violently (and certainly through physical obstructions, which is of course violence), is moral and even good.
The obvious problems are, of course, left without any solution.
1) if this idea had been applied as little as 20 years ago, today's society would have been violently repressed.
2) we are not "right" on everything (on the moral front, and outside). We must allow for evolution of our opinions because of changes in our understanding, and because of changes in the real world surrounding us that our morality just doesn't consider at the moment.
3) the potential for abuse of this attitude is incredibly huge.
Generally we should consider that our attitude is right now violently repressing the morality of society as little as 20 years from now. We will fail in that, and will do a lot of damage in the process. It is as simple as that.
We should welcome speakers and friends and colleagues from wildly different viewpoints and environments and engage with them. Clearly, that's the way forward.
If you try to tell me I have an obligation for the sake of "progress" to tolerate people who condone or advocate either violence or the denial of rights towards myself or people I care about, I will laugh in your face and ask you (politely, the first time) to get out of my place of work.
In general, I'm more interested in the underlying dynamics, as well as the processes we use to determine what is morally acceptable or not. I think that looking at the more complex issues and at the ways in which the different viewpoints evolve over time shines more light on these important fundamental aspects.
Even with all the caveats in the world (that different means neither better nor worse, that this doesn’t make hiring or salary discrimination ok, etc etc), you’re likely to get in trouble because of it.
Yes. Women and men are differently capable.
However, there are many ways in which we traditionally believed them to be differently capable that were actually that way due to discrimination and injustice.
So, people will be rightly annoyed when someone tries to downplay the effects of systemic injustice.
When we have fixed our systems to be more just and inclusive, only then can we begin to talk about inherent difference.
Until then, it is not urgent.
Justice first.
This is not something that ever finishes.
I think we have to allow both to happen side by side, constantly struggling to balance them as best we can.
Gay people are a subset of people who have been harassed because of something that a) they cannot control, b) harms nobody (As long as it is between two consenting adults, but that's the same for heterosexual relations).
Fascists are a subset of people who have been harassed because a) they call for non-whites to be exterminated, b) previous fascist movements have put into practice that goal.
The difference is: If I speak about death to gay people, historically this has led to gay people dying -- even if a gay person sat still, they would be attacked. If I speak about death to fascists, historically this has led to fascists dying -- but only after they have mobilized to take power andor spread their beliefs.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out which voices should be silent. That is, if one values equality among fellow humans, and keeps a gentle eye on history.
This gets kind of dicey to implement in a place like SF, where it seems like half the people my age think that all registered Republicans are, ipso facto, literally fascists.
And I will show you a group of fallen men, like the rest of us, who will abuse their power for political gain.
And where do you draw the line? Maybe you could get everyone to agree on "kill all gays" being irredeemably intolerant. But what about conservatives who think that children benefit from having a mother and a father and so believe that only adoption by married heterosexual couples should be allowed[1]? According to you, is that just wrong or is it worthy of censorship? And what of the many religions who believe that wives should obey their husbands? And what of discussions of multiculturalism and its potential threats to social cohesion? You give only easy examples, but the trouble is never with the easy examples.
[1] And the for the record, I'm in favor of allowing adoption by gay couples.
>Voices that call for repression of rights for certain parties should be silenced.
This is going to sound unbelievably pedantic and frustrating, but... What about the right to free speech?
1. Vulnerable groups should be protected. If my speech has historically led to The Right To Life of others being violated, then their right to life is much more important than the freedom or protection of my speech.
2. The right to free speech is a legal device to protect you from the government coming into your home and taking you to a gulag for stating certain things. In no cases are your rights to speak being violated, you can speak these things privately within your home. However, when in public and on private land, we need different rules. Just as public indecency violates your right to wear or not wear whatever you wish when out and about, so do hate speech, libel, slander, and defamation laws also restrict what you can state in public.
3. I wonder why people only bring this up with respect to social justice discourse. A couple of months ago, a person was taken to court by someone in government for laughing at them during a speech. Just this week the CDC was banned by the government from saying "evidence-based" and "science-based". And yet the social groups (on 4chan, twitter, facebook, HN, etc.) that frequently claim for freedom of speech with respect to social justice is curiously silent about examples of actual government repression of speech. This leads me to believe that there is a certain disingenuity when this is used as a rebuttal.
In Sam's case, it sounds like all of his social discomfort is happening entirely within free speech principles?
From what I can gather, Sam sometimes freely-speaks an idea that other people find harmful. Others then freely-speak back to him that he should stop, because it's harmful.
But it sounds like Sam's arguing not just for the right to free speech, but the right to have everyone listen to you. That right is limited by others' rights to live peacefully, and not be regularly subjected to words that harm them.
What's in the back of my mind is an unremarkable person who has an opinion that their boss doesn't agree with. We never read their blog posts, because by definition I'm talking about when the power dynamic is backwards.
EXACTLY. It's amazing to me how many people take it upon themselves to conflate Right To A Platform and Right To Speak Unrebutted with the Right To Free Speech
Let's take a 30 year old and a 15 year old. We accept in a society that two 15 year olds can consent to sex to each other. We do not accept that a 30 year old and a 15 year old can consent to sex.
But for a person with a sexual preference for teens, their attraction is
(a) something they can't control
and
(b) something that doesn't harm anyone if there is consent between both parties.
There is a lot of room for argument here. Take a 15 year old and 19 year old. Is that okay? What about 17 and 19? Where's the line? How can it possibly be the case that age difference necessarily indicates a power differential that inhibits consent in all circumstances?
So we are in a pickle now. Either this similar argument is wrong, and hence the original argument can be questioned, or this argument is good, and hence the majority cultural belief about such relationships needs to be drastically questioned.
Either way, we should allow people to voice their arguments.
But for a person with a sexual preference for teens, their attraction is
(a) something they can't control
and
(b) something that doesn't harm anyone if there is consent between both parties.
A minor is someone who we have arbitrarily decided has less ability to determine how to act compared to an adult. Yes, different cultures having different ages indicate that this is arbitrary, and yes it is difficult to know where to draw the line exactly, but the fact is that to protect minors the line needs to be drawn somewhere. It is mildly contradictory that a 16 year old in Britain can sign up for the armed forces, have a child, and get married, but they are not allowed to drink or drive a car. That doesn't mean that those boundaries should not exist, however.
Ultimately the exact definition of these sorts of things come down to cultural handshakes. Why do people drive on the left-side or right-side of the road? It's a cultural handshake. Consent between two parties of different emotional maturity is a difficult thing to figure out, hence why we have the cultural handshake that says that for certain parties it is unacceptable for them to liasion at certain ages.
To say that those power dynamics apply to two adult men of the same age, is -- to put it mildly -- ridiculous.
But again, my main point stands. If we are to shut down any discussion of the scenario I gave, which many people would be willing to do, by your own considering this would be shutting down a discussion on whether we can drive on the right side of the road or whether we should shake hands.
And then this is predicated on such lack of debate not causing any harm, when it can be argued there is similar harm as what people say gay people experience.
Again, please, these are devil's advocate arguments. Not personal views.
We live in a political environment where you can be labeled a fascist for not wholeheartedly supporting an array of ideas that have been determined to be so obvious that they don't warrant discussion (large scale immigration, white culture as toxic, transgenderism as normal and desirable, just to name a few).
Given that context, you'll excuse me if the idea that we can easily figure out who deserves to be silenced is implausible.
As for your specific example, it doesn't really fit into what's happening now. Violence towards people labelled as fascists is common, but not the other way around. And in parallel cases, things like "death to cops" has absolutely led to an increase in people murdering police officers. This whole thing is benefiting the far right from a propaganda standpoint.
when it's acceptable and somewhat popular to say the same thing about whites, men, straight people, etc.
In contrast, cis white men are not being murdered by trans women. Thus for them to state that "cis should die" is a act of protest, and has very little effect on the real world. The difference is: Is this likely to happen, is this happening, and has this happened? In the former instance the case is yes, in the latter the case is no.
Violence towards people labelled as fascists is common, but not the other way around.
Indeed, White Supremacy is listed as one of the things that the US DHS is working to combat[2]
"death to cops" has absolutely led to an increase in people murdering police officers.
[0]: James Fields was a fascist. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/charlottesvi...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/27/portland-dou...
[2]: https://www.dhs.gov/blog/2017/08/16/did-you-know-four-ways-d...
And there have been specific instances of BLM activists killing police, this being the most high profile one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
We also had a Bernie supporter shoot Steve Scalise, and the general social media response to Rand Paul being assaulted was celebratory and saying he deserved it for being a Republican.
Seems like the power dynamics doesn't necessarily mean what these people are saying won't lead to violence. There are certain things which no power imbalance excuses, and in my opinion this is one of them.
And what happened in Dallas is much more clear cut than what James Fields did in Charlottesville. He seemed to have snapped after someone hit his car with a bat. Seems more like road rage to me based on the video. I think they're going to have a hard time convicting him of 1st degree murder, honestly. Plus, had the police done their job that entire situation likely would have been avoided. The violence should not have been allowed to escalate like it was.
Normal humans will, in fact, stop associating with unpleasant people just as a matter of course.
There should be a power struggle at the implementation level of ideas. This is where violence may or may not actually occur. But the advocacy level is below that. Certain ideas may make you uncomfortable, you may fear they will be implemented, but they are still only words.
The point of the article still stands: If you rigidly restrict what is okay and what is not okay to say, you risk actually valid countercultural views ever making it to the implementation level.
There is also a very real normalization that goes with online threats. If 100 people talk about running over liberals in a chat room, and then one of them does it; the other 99 facilitated that violence.
Groups that do just that have governmental support in Canada, the UK and many other first world countries, and this is one of those things that one simply isn't allowed to speak of publicly.
We need to be able to attack bad ideas, and few ideas are worse than "Death to all people of <ethnic group>!"
I'm generally for free speech, but very much against governmental support of groups advocating violence and very, very against shutting down discussion of whether, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood does or does not advocate ethnic violence.
Verbal violence is a real thing that has real impact on people. Ask anybody who was in an abusive relationship, even if they were not physically beaten. Or consider that Trump has not physically thrown a punch, but most reasonable people would agree he has caused a lot of harm to minorities and immigrants’ safety and ability to share their brilliance with the world.
We don't take into account peer-pressure when charging adolescents. However, that does not mean that peer-pressure does not exist, on the contrary, it is sometimes the sole motivator behind the deed. These things don't conflict.
If Bob only made the decision to punch Alice because Mallory asked him to, yes Mallory shares in the responsibility. But that implies a notion between Mallory and Bob that is rather different from mere advocation. I do not consider a scenario in which one party convinces another, both with agency, to be advocation. In some cases, I would even consider the person who provided the imperative for violence to be more responsible than the person executing the imperative.
But we are getting into Wittgensteinian weeds here with respect to definitions. For my part, I consider advocation to be the scenario in which one person or group receives peacefully submitted recommendations for a course of action. I think an advocate can be responsible, but I do not think it is productive to use one word to describe the impact of both advocation and execution of a thing.
Using your real world example, I can agree that Donald Trump has committed real harm to various people. I cannot agree that Donald Trump’s position is one of advocation; in fact, I would say that Trump is one who is advocated to. A position of advocation, in my opinion, implies a position that is lesser in power to one which has the power to effect the change on their own.
I disagree. I do not consider peaceful advocation of an extremely controversial or violent activity to be violence in of itself.
Moreover, I think it is important to be able to express why advocation of a thing can be bad without resorting to conflating the advocation with the thing itself. You lose a lot of nuance in discussion (and charitability for opposing views) with this kind of hyperbole in the general case.
> Talking about "ideas" is so abstract and antiseptic; clearly there are things beyond the pale.
I disagree with this as well. In my opinion, things are only beyond the pale if there is nothing new to contribute to the discussion, not because we are born with a heuristic that refutes it automatically.
For example, we should consider advocating genocide bad because every critical, completely informed examination of genocide comes to the conclusion that it is a net loss for society, and there is no novel information to lead us to a different conclusion. We should not consider advocating genocide to be bad because we believe genocide is bad a priori; this is in fact untrue.
Note that I disagree with dialectic methodology, not overall conclusion. It is important to use rational methods for deriving conclusions instead of subjective dismissals. It is bad to beat a dead horse when we know the result is bad for society, but we can’t begin from a position that is unwilling to examine certain subjects because others consider them “beyond the pale”. Rational dialectics generalize to other topics and arguments; subjective heuristics do not.
There is a distinction to be made between advocacy in general and advocacy of harm (such as deportation or the denial of civil or human rights and of course including violence) or the spreading of slander/libel (e.g. [1]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of...
Now can you tell me what amount of difference in views you are willing to tolerate for the sake of working with someone brilliant and productive? If you eat meat and one of the most accomplished physicists in the world is militantly opposed to eating meat, would you work with them? What if they refuse to eat lunch with you if you eat meat? What if their views on abortion are diametrically opposed to yours, and they actively vote against your ideals? What if they believe all human beings with mental defects should be aborted in the womb?
In other words, I want you to haggle with your position a bit so I can understand how you react in the more real world scenario, in which an otherwise useful individual’s views are very different, but not cartoonishly different from your own.
What they actually said was "people who condone or advocate either violence or the denial of rights towards myself or people I care about"
Yes situational ethics is messy, no they are not invalid because they are messy.
I would like the parent commenter to consider how much comfortability they are willing to sacrifice in order to get along with someone who is extremely useful. This is a scenario with real world applicability which is not as easy or convenient to say, “I’ll simply not work with them.”
I’m not attempting to invalidate their stated position, I’m trying to understand how they react when it becomes messier.
Eh. I don’t see how this statement is justified without heavy qualification.
Maybe the word “intolerant” is what you disagree with. I think that word is useful because it forces us to examine situations in which we are reacting as strongly to someone as others react to us. In other words, I think it’s helpful to consider “intolerance” to be a symmetrical position, not an asymmetrical one.
If we take this abstraction and pull it back down to reality: many people are sufficiently intolerant of gay people that they actively work against them having particular rights. Gay people are generally intolerant of this view, in that they actively work against that one.
Now, personally I believe gay people should have the right to get married. But if I initially consider these conflicting positions as symmetrical disagreement, I force myself to rationally derive which one is the “bad” one. “Intolerant” is therefore a helpful, generalizable placeholder for any given pair of conflicting viewpoints, positions, values, etc.
Yeah, you want them to give you a predefined, quantified, model of their behavior.
A quantitative assessment isn’t reasonable here, and I haven’t requested that. It’s fully possible to examine questions like these in an exact manner without getting to a point of precision. Philosophy does it all the time.
There are not grey areas about "usefulness". I don't care if you're Albert fucking Einstein, I'm not going to let you scare off the other high performers or even cleaning crew that make my business productive and livable.
But seriously, how am I supposed to hire and retain anyone if the workplace is hostile? Turnover and rehiring has costs, even if it's turnover of minimum wage staff.
And as a hiring manager I don't have any particular interest either in working in an environment that is hostile towards me. Or are you saying that I have an obligation to spend the majority of my waking hours with people who suggest that I have no right to be alive; or that I belong pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen?
And if I'm not willing to accept a workplace that's hostile to me, how can I ask the people I hire to accept one that's hostile to them?
Okay, that’s a fair position and that essentially answers my question. I don’t really have an argument for or against what you’re saying here, I was just curious to see if there is any level of utility at which you’re okay with someone being disliked by the rest of the staff.
Please leave this sort of thing out of comments on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
Growing up, it was much easier to have conversations of differing opinions because people not only listened more, but they also listened better. (Perhaps that's in part due to the unique sense of curiosity that kids have.)
Today, it commonly feels like conversations involve hearing aids that have been turned off completely.
Einstein is quoted as half-jokingly saying that the greatest force in the universe is compound interest.
I think it's emotions.
That's not even a defense of the behavior, just an acknowledgement that people do bad things. You could say the same thing about any bad behavior, up to and including mass murder. Welcome to Earth, where people do such things!
I’m explaining, not defending. As I already said, welcome to Earth, try to be outraged by the inevitable, only as appropriate.
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
To which the proper response is the ungenerous and sarcastic, "yes, of course it is right to murder your opponents when it benefits you". Because to engage otherwise is to give the sophistry more legitimacy than it deserves.
Clarification: "I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress."
I can see how people might have misunderstood.
Am I placing too much faith in reason?
An issue I take with Sam's initial argument is that it seemed to imply that it is not possible to tell the progressive and regressive apart.
If an idea is universally considered regressive, then usually it doesn't come up. Ideas that people are discussing are usually ones where it's not completely clear yet, to everyone, whether it is a good idea or not. In that case, allowing both sides fair advocacy is critical to making a fair decision.
If we can’t agree that there exist regressive ideas, what are we even doing here?
I haven’t stated what I believe to be progressive or regressive. You don’t know what viewpoints I hold. I have withheld these viewpoints from the discussion precisely because I am trying to establish agreement regarding some basic, primitive notions.
And just what are those ideas? I'm guessing not everyone will agree to them.
> I haven’t stated what I believe to be progressive or regressive. You don’t know what viewpoints I hold.
It doesn't matter. My point is not everyone will agree with your viewpoints.
How do you propose we move forward?
How do we move forward? Do we go straight ahead? Well, dictatorship is always moving straight ahead, because they can easily define what is progressive and what is regressive, by looking at the dictator. If progressiveness and regressiveness is so easy to define, what do we even need democracy for? Let's just find the most progressive person and appoint him our president/prime minister/chariman/king/chieftain, and let him lead us forward.
Unless we can reason our way through ideas, what hope is there that we can find our way out of a paper bag?
Of what intellectual value is common belief?
It’s more worthwhile to anchor the discussion sub specie aeternitatis.
1. Women are inferior.
2. Gays are evil.
3. Whites are greedy.
4. Children are valid sex objects.
5. Hitler wasn't all bad.
6. vi is the best editor
7. Drug users should be killed.
8. Islam is not compatible with western democracy.
...
I also notice that I've instinctively not introduced "scientifically falsifiable" statements, such as these:
1. Global warming is real.
2. Vaccinations cause autism.
3. The earth is flat
4. Evolution is wrong
5. Science is a scam.
6. Putin helped Trump get elected.
7. Light is a wave in luminferous ether.
...
Just to take Altman's example, a jerk might say "I hate those dirty homosexuals, they're ruining marriage for us good heterosexuals Christians". A reasonably articulated opinion might be "What are the social consequences of prevalent homosexuality? Is it possible that some of them are negative? Why is it that the pre-modern civilizations that were hyper-tolerant of homosexuality died out (greece, rome) and were replaced by comparatively intolerant ones?"
IMO the former is not ok. That is venom, and it is unhelpful and should absolutely get you cast out of your job. But the latter is an intellectually expressed idea, an idea that is up for debate and the answer to which may be interesting/consequential. In a society that values technological progress, the latter form must always be acceptable. All ideas must always be open for discussion in that manner. That does not mean that we should tolerate venom, discrimination, or harassment, however.
Edit suggestion: I think you meant that the first is not ok.
In this light, how do we reconcile the position that homosexuals should have less rights with the broadly accepted idea of basic human rights?
Edit: To be clear, I'm a strong supporter of free speech -- I think it is one of our most important cultural principles. It just seems to me that the gay rights issue is very clear cut and incredibly personal. Thus, its opponents receive very strong feedback, which isn't that surprising. I do think calm discussion with hard-hitting questions is the best way to address offensive beliefs, but I also realize there isn't always time for that.
There are all kinds of classes of person who's rights we proscribe. Violent criminals, and those who are dangerously insane, come to mind. It's possible that some of those individuals were born that way - that they were predisposed to that behavior in a way that they cannot be 'blamed' for. Yet we feel no compunction about taking away their rights, because we feel that it's necessary to protect the safety of our civilization. So, in short, it's ok to take away a minority group's rights if the exercise of those rights is sufficiently harmful to society. Now, if you are a religious person, you may believe that Homosexuality contributes to moral decay, and the breakdown of sexual and social norms that serve to promote positive familial and social development. In light of that, you may rationally conclude that homosexuality is sufficiently harmful to society that the rights of homosexuals need to be limited.
Again, I cannot stress enough that this is not what I personally believe. But IMO a person presenting their view in the way that I just did should not be censured for doing so. They should be argued with. We should attempt to convince them that our worldview is better. But they shouldn't lose their job, and they shouldn't be made afraid of expressing their view in public.
If a person is working in a company with foreign customers, employees, or relations, perhaps they may have a coincidental policy stating, "We do not initiate conversations on Taiwan and China." Another company may have a policy stating, "We do not discuss Apple products outside of this company." These are all restrictions on speech which clearly aren't examples of hate speech, and yet they all seem quite reasonable to me in the promotion of a competitive and harmonious business atmosphere.
Well, Sam, you didn't say that.
Rather, the totalitarian left, exactly who the article was criticizing, sensed heresy and pounced, without any goodwill or thoughtfulness.
They did exactly what you implied they would do, and now you are apologizing for them doing it.
2017, everybody.
I've been rediscovering libertarian ideas lately and realizing in the process just how profoundly and deeply the discourse has shifted toward authoritarianism across the whole political spectrum over the last 15 years. I really blame 9/11. The West lost its collective mind after that event and still has not recovered. Apparently terrorism works.
Economics is probably the other factor. Stocks are up but the street has not recovered. Totalitarian ideas always grow when people feel economically stressed. I think it might even be instinct, sort of like how chimps get aggressive and raid when under stress. Totalitarianism is about preparing to raid the neighboring tribe.
He literally did say that. Maybe that's not what he meant, and the gist of what he was saying was correct, but he said what he said. But go ahead and vilify the people who took issue with what reads essentially like a utilitarian apology for homophobia.
I am (via sarcasm) stating that being murdered is worse than being fired and if Side A's speech ends in firing and Side B's speech end in 11 black people in in a church being murdered: I'm Side A All-Day-Every-Day.
In any case murder vs bully is a false dichotomy.
The core idea of which was, you would be able to accomplish your goals in a wide variety of adverse conditions.
> I'm a straight white man so I have no clue really
OK, stop and have a think about what you're saying. Because "you're a [sexual preference][skin colour][gender]" you "have no clue really"? Do you honestly have an issue with the original article and yet somehow think that saying stuff like this is OK? Or worse, that it's OK if you're talking about a specific preference, skin colour, or gender?
Edit: Updated parent post is much less incendiary and so I retract my vitriol. Leaving my original response here for reference.
If we accept that we can’t, shall we treat them all as jerks and deman a clean, PC world or shall we accept anything at all in the name of protecting freedom of speech?
Controversy is not a measure of worth or consideration. Instead, we should be considering what impact our statements have on other people. LGBT rights do not negatively affect straight people. But homophobic ideas can and do hurt gay people.
If this distinction is something he understands (which, personally, I believe he does but hey, I could be wrong), could it be that it's not him missing the point?
The parent comment asserts that Sam's premise is wrong: ideas aren't being rejected for their controversy, but rather for their harmfulness. Saying that "it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people" (see his previous post) implicitly draws a false equivalence between civil rights advocacy and bigotry as fair-game "controversial" ideas.
Opinion. Up for discussion.
I do not need any such examples. The point is that any opinion should be up for debate. Otherwise you'll never have your answer.
I do hold opinions on the postmodern x-gender nonsense, but have no illusion that expressing them on HN will have me avalanced out of existence.
But only people? Not animals? How do you feel about thinking, feeling beings being raised through a life of torture only to be slaughtered so that people can experience some mouth pleasure for a few moments?
How about consideration for people whose ideas don't completely align with yours?
Are you really so certain that the mainstream beliefs are, for the first time in history, unassailable?
Engage the point rather than saying he misses it.
A significant fraction of America believes that allowing gay people to marry means that God will deny them entrance to the kingdom of Heaven when they die. I think this belief isn't just false, it's ridiculous - there is no God, there is no Heaven, and even if there were, He wouldn't be so petty as to deny entrance just because you supported other people having the same rights as you to get married.
But if you take this premise as given, then homophobia and all of the backlash against LGBTQ people makes a lot more sense. Which would you rather have, eternal damnation for your entire society or a few deviants being able to live their lives with each other? And I certainly can't prove that God doesn't exist and he doesn't hate gay people - I may think the ideas are ridiculous, but people who hold those ideas think that my heresy is ridiculous (and worse, dangerous - I'm certainly going to bring damnation upon myself, and probably upon those people who tolerate me). I've been told that I'm going to hell by certain more devout relatives, after all.
I think that this is the sense in which Sam thinks we should be tolerant. We need to be open to other conceptions of what is true, not necessarily what is good (and we need to learn to separate the two of them in our minds so that we can entertain different possible ideas of what is true without automatically endorsing or condemning them). Less than a century ago, it was taken as given within the Western world that God exists and the Bible is His literal word. Ideas that have challenged anything in it - like the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, or that it's more than 6000 years old - have met a violent reaction throughout history. What other ridiculous things do we believe today will be reexamined tomorrow, and how will we ever examine them if we can't countenance the idea that we might be wrong?
And LGBT "rights" by some people's definitions do negatively hurt straight people. For example, some want to force hospitals to perform operations on people, and others want to make rules about bathroom use on private or public property. The right of gays to engage in sexual activities has greatly increased promiscuous straight people's STD risk.
Your statement is both untrue and it's an idea that hurts straight people. I guess I'm supposed to think you should be ostracized from society for expressing it.
At a meta level it ignores the question of "Why is Sam pursuing this conversation?" (the stop digging part which refers to the adage, "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.") which implies that Sam is in a hole of his own making, in which 'hole' is considered a bad thing.
Coupled with the "too wealthy for someone to take you aside" which implies either that no one would risk offending Sam by disagreeing with him like the parent does, or that those who associate with Sam (and associates were clearly targeted in the various twitter tirades)
Combined, this is exactly the sort of dismissive comment that seeks to shut down conversation rather than encourage it.
Overall I see so little respect, and so much vitriol, that I wonder if maybe people are parodying the exact sort of behavior that Sam is complaining about or if they even recognize their own patterns.
When someone says something that sounds to the listener as wrong or stupid or elitist or any number of negative things, is that the speaker's issue or the listener's issue? And when the listener is dismissive they unilaterally give up their opportunity to understand do they not?
After Charlottesville there were a number of journalists that went out and talked with people in various groups who were espousing racist points of view. What I found interesting was that of all the people they talked with and I got a chance to see or read, only two 'types' seemed to be there, one was a follower type person who was feeling threatened in their own life and had externalized that fear/threat as as anger/hate against an identifiable group. And the other were the leader type people who really didn't seem to be invested on way or the other but they could use that fear to get people to do things that advanced their own agenda of acquiring power.
There was an article on HN recently that humans are wired to think in Us vs Them modalities. No doubt it helped us survive in tribes, but we have to set that aside if we want to address the core of the problem, and sometimes if we even want to know what the problem really is!
It is very enlightening to hear the stories of "former" racists for this reason. Many that I have heard started with someone listening to the rhetoric of an agitator 'leader type' person who would craft a narrative that this future follower's problems were the result of these 'others'. And call upon their membership in the group of 'Us' to help stop the influence of 'Them'.
We see this pattern raging rampant in national discourse and local discourse, whether it is races, political party, political ideology, or wealth disparity. And too often that rhetoric is portrayed as the conversation but it isn't. It is the emotion, it is not the issue.
People who are unable to move ahead in their personal economic growth see people who appear to be effortlessly becoming wealthier and the emotion is to hate those people. The issue is structural barriers that maintain high levels of wealth inequality. People who feel their financial security is under attack by the perception that those who would take it from them would give it to people unwilling to work as hard as they do. People use strong emotions to shut down conversations, sometimes intentionally and some times not, but the outcome is the same. Something along "We don't talk about that because it just gets everyone all upset."
And I think that is exactly what Sam was trying to say, which was "getting everyone all upset" is not a useful reason for not talking about a particular topic. You need to look that emotion as a signal that the topic is important. If you ignore these important topics they fester and they explode. Whether it is in divorce or in elections where the very fabric of the government is challenged to respond. And by talking about the topic, you can search for the issue behind the emotion and address it.
I take it from your response that you disagree with that. I would be interested in hearing either how you hoped your original comment would contribute to the discussion or how you think I could have more clearly articulated my issue with it.
Is a direct attempt at suppression.
I'm saying you're being hypocritical.
Nothing to see here except someone having the vapors over being told their ideas are shit.
There are some ideas that are justifiably extremely unpopular: racism, extreme religious bigotry, advocacy of genocide or apology for such, etc.
I don't think your idea of "let individual groups of people angry enough to act handle it instead of authorities acting on calmly predetermined rules" scales particularly well or elegantly.
If someone were to make a disparaging remark about Christians, in general, in their workplace, should they be punished or fired for it?
If someone were to make a disparaging remark about Muslims, in general, in their workplace, should they be punished or fired for it?
Disparaging Christianity would be mostly acceptable and would receive a warning at most. I've personally witnessed this, no problems.
I think disparaging Islam would instantly earn you a reputation that you would never shake during your entire time at the company, you would 100% receive a warning at the very least, and depending on your coworkers, might be outright fired.
If you weren't fired, you'd live the rest of your days at the company as a pariah.
That all seems self-evident to me, and I find that pretty interesting. Why is discussing it off-limits?
What I meant when I wrote "in general" was "as a group."
For example, Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek Software, makes a blanket statement about Christians in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/anildash/status/928815535206424576
"No other religion’s followers in America insist on every public official being of their faith."
That is a statement, not about a specific individual or group of Christians, but Christians in general. And it's offensive and ridiculous. I know many Christians, but not one of whom for which that statement holds true. Well, I suppose it could be true for some, but most, I know for a fact, it's not.
It's like someone saying "Jews are cheap." It's a blanket statement that I think is offensive and ridiculous. However, I've had Jewish relatives who were, in fact, the cheapest people I've ever known, beyond caricature, and I said that about them, in particular, on more than one occasion.
If things are said in an aggressive or confrontational and personal way, or, worse, specific actions are taken (being overlooked for a promotion, humiliated by a superior, forced to take part in objectionable behavior, etc), then that crosses the line, and seems much more objectionable, but even then, its not really the content of the speech so much, but the purpose and motivation behind it.
To be honest I would probably not make a complaint, just put up with it, or simply find a new job.
In general, I think we should aim to avoid offending people needlessly, but also to avoid taking offense. I've put my foot in my mouth all too often, so showing others a bit of grace seems appropriate.
The longer answer is messier and depends on context and various factors, but I understand the point you’re trying to get at so I’ll address that. I’m sure you’ve seen this cartoon before about equality vs fairness: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*8GivwZy2RijgvaGryS...
Answering yes or no to both questions would be equal but not necessarily fair. That’s because as a Christian, you enjoy the benefit of being the majority religion (assuming you’re in the US). You get a break on your holidays, nobody questions your traditions, and nobody really disparages you. As a Muslim, you have to work on your holidays, you have to hide your traditions to fit in with the Christian norms, you deal with strangers assuming you’re a terrorist and getting kicked off airplanes, or having your resume ignored because of your name. These disadvantages compound quickly even if each one individually may not seem like a big deal. So when a coworker disparages you further in the office, it should be dealt with more concretely.
In business terms, it’s similar to why it was ok for Apple to make fun of Microsoft in the early 2000’s but would be frowned upon now. It’s ok to punch upwards but don’t kick down.
If that's your perception, you can't possibly have spent any significant time in the USA in the past 30 years. For at least that amount of time, Christians, and Christianity in general, have been openly mocked, disparaged and insulted in popular culture, university classrooms, in casual conversation, and all over the internet. (I'm OK with that, FTR.) For as long as I've been old enough to pay attention, it has essentially been open season on Christians in the US. Among the left-wing, educated class, there is virtually no social penalty for insulting Christians or their beliefs. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It’s ok to punch upwards but don’t kick down.
That's just an arbitrary rule, made up by you. I suspect it's because you want to maintain the status quo I described above, while keeping any public criticism of Muslims a very risky endeavor.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
But I'll defer to your judgement, and not respond again on this thread.
not a very smart man.