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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

I've noticed this in the work environment lately. It's palpable. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Everyone is basically taking pg's approach, and sitting quietly. It's sad. I don't know what to do about it.

But, man, is it a relief when you're getting a beer with a close friend and can explore some good-natured heterodoxy. That sort of interesting conversation is getting rarer and rarer in public.

When I was young, it was the political right that would shut down heterodox opinions, like flag burning or atheism or same-sex couples on TV. But strangely enough, I feel more free to talk openly around my political right friends today. It's strange that "liberalism" in America today feels so illiberal.

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> When I was young, it was the political right that would shut down heterodox opinions, like flag burning or atheism or same-sex couples on TV. But strangely enough, I feel more free to talk openly around my political right friends today.

I do wonder if it's as simple as you having drifted relatively towards the right (which may not be you drifting at all in an absolute sense; it may just be that the world around you drifted towards the left). There are extremely few people I feel comfortable expressing opinions like "The entire modern system of policing is fundamentally corrupt and unsalvageable" or "Borders are fundamentally immoral and we should figure out how to get rid of them" or "Bernie wasn't left-wing enough and I didn't trust him" around - perhaps one or two of my close friends, but certainly not among people I know from work etc.

I mean a lot of people on the right know Trump is lying and are happy to talk about it, e.g. Scott Adams. Whereas I get the impression that more people on the left seem to genuinely believe that HRC pretending like she suddenly supports gay marriage is somehow different than Trump saying he had the largest inauguration or whatever.

I don't think that's true, and it almost certainly just boils down to who you interact with. I think you'll find a decent chunk of the left (especially Bernie voters) who don't idolize Hillary but basically viewed her as the lesser of two evils.

And it's certainly not hard to find people on the right who think Trump can do no wrong and who will go through some exquisite mental gymnastics to maintain that illusion - there's a rather large subreddit devoted to it, in fact.

I'm not a huge Clinton fan but how is a claim of supporting a position in the same category as something that can (within reason) be counted and measured? How do you know she is "pretending"?

> How do you know she is "pretending"?

I mean look at all her other positions. She was supposedly for the Iraq war until she was against it. Against marijuana legalization until she was for it. For building a wall with Mexico until Trump supported it. For single payer healthcare until Bernie supported it. And so on.

It's normal for people to change their minds as they learn more about things. It's not normal for people to change their minds on every single political issue in lockstep with internal polling. In the same way that things like Benford's Law can be used to detect fraud, she seems to fail some fundamental test of being a real human.

Political stances are mutable. I won't argue your point about whether she should be despised for the rate of her mutability. I'm pointing out the flaw in your analogy. Someone taking a stance that contradicts a past stance is not in the same category as someone saying something that contradicts an observable/measurable quantity, unless you are in a possession of a mind-reading device and can observe Clinton's current belief regarding gay marriage.

Your analogy would work if you said liberals give Clinton a pass for flip-flopping while hating Trump for flip-flopping on abortion. AFAIK, liberals hate Trump for his current stance and actions on abortion rights, not for being a flip-flop (i.e. they'd be fine if the flip-flop happened in the other direction)

> taking a stance that contradicts a past stance is not in the same category as someone saying something that contradicts an observable/measurable quantity

I mean that may be true in some sort of epistemological sense, but pragmatically both are equally ridiculous. The fact that something could be true doesn't make it any less false.

... just to make sure I'm understanding the conversation right, you're saying that not having the same political views over a 20-year period and lying about objective reality are equally ridiculous?

I'm saying if you were to do some sort of bayesian analysis, I think you'd find the probabilities of each to be approximately equal. (E.g. within 5%.)

I'm talking specifically though about HRC believing all of HRC's stated positions, not about a random person changing their opinions over the course of time. The probability calculus there is very different. E.g. the Clintons literally hire people to survey the public to tell them what policies to campaign on, that's how they came up with the idea of adding v-chips to TVs or whatever. The Adam Curtis documentary Century of the Self goes into this in depth.

Why is it always or even generally wrong when politicians in a representative republic are interested in appealing to the electorate? We have a system of government in which a single man is given 4 years of relative impunity to act on the behalf of a hugely diverse population of ~250 million human beings. I don't believe that him compromising to popular opinion is prima facie a net negative.

edit:

> I'm saying if you were to do some sort of bayesian analysis, I think you'd find the probabilities of each to be approximately equal. (E.g. within 5%.)

What would be the dataset and the priors for this Bayesian analysis? Which presidents haven't changed in response to events and changing beliefs and political realities?

I was gonna say that too—I'm sort of impressed that "this politician listens to the people they're representing too much" is a criticism now. Probably came from the same brilliant minds who gave us "she was overprepared for the debate, we need a president who doesn't take their job seriously."

(And I think both of these, the "overprepared" thing and the general insinuation that Hillary isn't human, are subtle propaganda points from the Republican strategists. So it's funny to see it in a thread about how the left wing makes right wing ideas unthinkable when literally the opposite has happened. Here's my controversial opinion that will get yelled at by most people: Hillary is a genuine and kindhearted person who deeply cares about making America better, and she was the best candidate for president from any party for decades—certainly far better than Bernie.)

> she was overprepared for the debate

Stealing the questions from the moderator (and still losing) is now being described as overprepared?

Clinton was described as overprepared for the debate the night of the first debate.

There was some amount of controversy over one such comment, by Chuck Todd (of NBC).

> Stealing the questions from the moderator

You're confusing two separate incidents, Donna Brazile giving one question from the primary debate to the Hillary campaign in March 2016, and Chuck Todd analyzing the first general debate in September 2016 and calling her "over-prepared". So, no.

Again, it's extremely funny how much false right-wing propaganda you're attempting to use in defense of the assertion that the left wing prefers orthodoxy to truth.

> it's extremely funny how much false right-wing propaganda you're attempting to use

I mean it's literally just what happened. Donna Brazille even said the reason she did it was because she didn't think Clinton was smart enough to be President on her own, and that she would be 'blindsided' by basic questions.

> The fact that something could be true doesn't make it any less false.

Again, what do you have that's as concrete or tangible as the inauguration attendance count (or State of the Union ratings) to show that Clinton's support of gay marriage (or for any of her other purported stances) is in contradiction to reality? I'm not arguing that you should approve of Clinton's flaws more than Trump's, just that the ones you cite are categorically different.

Your argument would be stronger if you cited the times that Clinton said things that were shown to be objectively and observably false.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...

... except that in the specific case of marriage equality, she was approximately always for civil unions that were fully legally equivalent to marriage, opposed in 2004 a proposed Constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman (even though the amendment would have permitted civil unions), and "changed her mind" (publicly endorsed same-sex marriages) in 2013, well before the campaign.

In particular, she's a United Methodist (as am I; I go to an ELCA congregation these days but the two denominations are in full communion), and the United Methodist Church still teaches that homosexuality is contrary to Christianity and does not officiate same-sex marriages. (Yes, the ELCA does do same-sex marriages, and no, I cannot explain how this interacts with full communion.) Going from "my religion teaches that it's wrong" to "... but that's just my religion, and the government should give same-sex couples the same rights, but the word 'marriage' is about religion and tradition" to "I support it" is a journey that lots of non-right-wing religious folks in the US, myself included, have gone through in approximately the same time frame as when Hillary did. I think Occam's razor should push us in the direction of believing that she's genuine, or we would otherwise need a reason why she's fake but lots of people of extremely similar religious and political positions have not been fake about the exact same thing.

Going a bit more broadly, I would argue that it is common for people to change their minds on political issues in lockstep with the median of people of similar political and cultural leanings, sort of by definition.

I wonder if we should distinguish the whole political right from those individuals and groups that the news media treated as exemplars of the political right.

The news media seem to cast conservatives and liberals as each having highly homogeneous views over a very large number of topics. But when I talk with people face-to-face, I haven't sensed such a strong, consistent clustering of beliefs within those two groups.

> I've noticed this in the work environment lately. It's palpable. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing.

But how was that different than 10-20 years ago? It seemed back then, people were just as afraid of saying wrong things, especially when the boss was around. Perhaps what has changed is that there are more wrong things to say, but that might be correlated with the fact that our society (from an American perspective) has gotten less homogenous.

20 years ago, calling people "gay" or "faggy" or "homo" wasn't a big deal because homosexuals weren't recognized as human beings. Now they are, and it is not strange to have bosses/colleagues who are openly gay -- but it sure would be if an anti-homosexuality culture was allowed for good times sake.

I know you're not arguing for the right to yell hostile slurs. But, ignoring the point that anti-gay slurs weren't seen as particularly offensive, just pointing out that being ostracized for being different was plenty pervasive back then, but it didn't feel that way if you weren't in a disenfranchised group.

> But how was that different than 10-20 years ago?

The way the internet has become intricately intertwined with our lives has made the repercussions to become a bit more severe than they used to be.

Whereas before an event like "donglegate" might've blown over relatively quickly 15 years ago, technology fomented the masses and multiple people lost their jobs over a relatively harmless situation (Adria Richards was still unemployed last I checked).

I don't think it's unfair to say that without the global reach of a mass communication platform like twitter, that situation would've been resolved quite differently (probably a scolding by the conference organizers to the two men) and probably to the satisfaction of everyone involved, instead of how it actually resolved to no one's satisfaction (other than the mob seeking blood).

Relatively minor transgressions (like mis-using the word "dongle") become major blowups when people get to dehumanize the parties involved using technology.

I don't think people are arguing that you should be able to use slurs with no consequences, more that it's incredibly easy to take something minor out of context and turn it into a massive blowup using the internet.

Basically: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged"

Sure, but since GP seemed to be talking about militant hypersensitivity against wrongthink at the local level -- regardless of the danger of it being blown up into Internet spectacle, which is a different topic, and a scenario that is far more remote to the average person than being marched up to HR for wrongthink.

For what it's worth (if it's any solace), you're not alone in noticing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evWiz6WRbCA

I think part of it is the fear of becoming e.g. Justine Sacco. It's incredibly easy for something you say to be taken out of context and to become the target of the internet hate machine.

Nuance, complexity, context - whatever you want to call it, it's hard for people to digest. As a result, "celebrities" become either angels or devils.

I don't think this unwillingness to accept complexity is a new facet of society, but it's much easier than ever before to get a mob together for the proverbial witch hunt.

As a result, lots of people (and I'm not claiming to be an exception) are either going over the top to proclaim their piousness lest they be declared witches, or slinking along silently hoping that no one would ever want to accuse them in the first place.

Huh. I have to admit I'm curious about how that skit got planned internally - SNL certainly leans liberal / social-justicey enough that some of the cast members would have genuinely been on the "this was totally reasonable" side of things, right? So I kind of want to know how they handled the discussion / planning of the skit, and also, I am not quite sure the intended message is as simple as "this went too far, we all know that, but we can't say it".

If their message was "there's room for a genuine good-faith discussion about whether this was reasonable or went too far, both of which are reasonable positions to take, and we're all too on edge to have that discussion," I would agree with that. If anything, the fact that a lot of people feel a need to be excessively pious does a disservice to those people who genuinely hold the pious opinion - the excessively pious won't engage in good-faith arguments that they're wrong, because they already know they're wrong, which just ends up hurting the discourse.

> If their message was "there's room for a genuine good-faith discussion about whether this was reasonable or went too far, both of which are reasonable positions to take, and we're all too on edge to have that discussion," I would agree with that

Not to be snarky: I thought it was clear that this was/is the intended message. I certainly didn't get the impression that the skit was taking a stance one way or another and indeed it seems like the characters have differing opinions on it (compare Aidy Bryant's comment with Beck Bennett's).

It's incredibly difficult to talk about these things without thinking extremely carefully about how you word your thoughts - hence all the "careful..." comments by the characters in the skit.

> If anything, the fact that a lot of people feel a need to be excessively pious does a disservice to those people who genuinely hold the pious opinion - the excessively pious won't engage in good-faith arguments that they're wrong, because they already know they're wrong, which just ends up hurting the discourse.

This is indeed a fairly common critique of modern-day "SJWs" (or whatever you want to call that group of people) - that the excessively pious ("virtue signaling" is the usual term) are indeed alienating the more rational and causing the discourse to disappear.

(This is also obviously true in the other direction with the "alt-right", though not necessarily relevant to this discussion).

I think Justine Sacco got a raw deal too, but I don't see this as a simple example of society becoming more sensitive. I sympathize with her -- not just because I think you shouldn't ever send death threats to a stranger because of a tweet -- but because I'm sure me and my friends and acquaintances have made that kind of joke too. And the reason why we don't tear each other apart is because we know enough about each other to assume that we are being facetious/ironic/darkly humorous.

But Twitter is not a bar, or a group SMS. It is a platform on which you can instantaneously broadcast something to an entire world. The world does not know you, and it's presumptuous to think that hundreds of millions of people should have known who you were. Again, this doesn't justify the hatemob -- I'm just saying that Sacco's situation was less an issue of society becoming too sensitive, and more an issue of tech amplifying our reach far beyond what we comprehend.

> I'm just saying that Sacco's situation was less an issue of society becoming too sensitive, and more an issue of tech amplifying our reach far beyond what we comprehend.

Indeed, and you can see that I agree with you:

> I don't think this unwillingness to accept complexity is a new facet of society, but it's much easier than ever before to get a mob together for the proverbial witch hunt.

It seems like you’re just complaining about not being able to have the same conversations with your co-workers that you could at a bar with your friend, after a beer or two.

I dunno, I feel similarly.

Like, I have strongly-held beliefs that span "both sides." But (as an example) I'm much more comfortable talking with a conservative about why I think the death penalty is wrong than I am with a liberal about why I think abortion is wrong.

From my perspective, many younger (or newer, basically under-30) conservatives have been moderating* some of their views, particularly social views like reforming the justice system, race relations, etc. (I mean, just the other night my SO and I were talking about how a significant number of the College Republican state chairs were openly gay. That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago!) And with this exploration comes the welcoming of different viewpoints.

Unfortunately, I see the reverse with liberals of the same age group. And, sure, generalizations suck because everybody will say, "That doesn't apply to my group of friends!" But, I do want to put up a W in the "openness" column for liberals. It's just difficult to do when talking about certain subjects feels like dancing across a minefield.

*: Yes, the alt-right has been steadily moving in the opposite direction, but they're a very vocal minority that have been steadily fading.

> I'm much more comfortable talking with a conservative about why I think the death penalty is wrong than I am with a liberal about why I think abortion is wrong.

I don't think that's a good comparison for weighing the relative intolerance of a political group.

Support of the death penalty is not as uniform among conservatives as abortion is for liberals. Nor does it have as strong of legal support -- states can outright ban the death penalty, they can't ban abortions and have difficulty not having restrictions overturned by the Supreme Court. Most importantly, the death penalty is an administrative action, whereas abortions are seen as personal health decisions.

If you argue to someone that abortion is wrong, that person is likely to see that an attack on abortion as a personal right. Whose personal right do you threaten when you argue against the death penalty?

They’re just what popped on my head. I could replace them with about a dozen other things. Regardless, taking it as a personal attack is a huge part of the issue. We should be able to discuss the efficacy (&c.) of ideas without waking on eggshells.

Exactly.

Not everything "needs" to be said to everyone at all times.

I think things about (some of) my co-worker I'd never say aloud to them - very impolite things. I say "ok" and then bitch to my husband later. And I think things about my customers I never would say to them, but I bitch to my coworker about it later.

I know that the office isn't the place for certain discussions, I save those discussions for the bar. I know my coworker don't want to hear my options about their religion (for example), so I don't give them. I think their fad diet of the week is fucking stupid, but I don't dare say it.

And that's perfectly ok. It's how this thing called "society" operates. People are polite to each other when they need to be and boundaries are healthy and vary with the nature of the relationship. Showing restraint at work is called "being professional."

Indiscriminately running your mouth is not a virtue. It's a good thing people think twice before needlessly upsetting their colleagues, we are living in a more diverse world now. Forced into being cordial and polite with your colleagues and customers should strengthen your outside friendships, as you can trust your friends enough to "tell it how it really is."

It's a good thing that the GP is realizing there's a time and place for certain discussions, it's a sign of maturity.

Do you think the people who formerly "shut down heterodox opinions, like flag burning or atheism or same-sex couples on TV" have become more heterodox in their views? In my experience, for the most part, they have not - quite the opposite, in fact, and the environment you are complaining about is largely their making, as it is that group that has been most successful in making political discourse less rational, and more dogmatic and personal (Columbia professors have almost no impact on public opinion and attitudes, no matter how wrong they are.)

Then there is that quote from Ben Franklin.

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