What you can't say (2004)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
It seems like there are many social circles where this is expected, not unfashionable. In the world we live in, all these “norms” are context dependent.
It's neat though... it's always funny to hear some duder talking about how he can't even say something that he's saying.
"I think the immigration flows into Europe are over the top, the EU population cannot seriously be expected to cope with them, or with the economic consequences of said flows, without massive protests"
This is not even a racist statement, at least not in my opinion. But it is definitely "something you can't say". Let's see how quickly this post gets downvoted.
One might argue "but surely nobody would be baited out that easily and transparently", right ? Let's see.
I leave myself fully open to being shown to be very wrong here. I'm making it real easy. All that has to be done is that such a statement must be left alone when it's an obvious bait, and in facts repeats 3 times that it is bait.
Let's see.
> the EU population cannot seriously be expected to cope with them, or with the economic consequences of said flows, without massive protests
This statement makes no sense. People don’t like it, therefore it’s bad? Not an argument against it.
:)
or we can go w/ Brendan Eich getting booted from Mozilla.
The list can go on and on and on.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozill...
https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref...
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...
> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
> I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
> I could give a shit less about your respect for me or anyone else's. Build the wall is exactly what the fuck it means: build the wall.
At almost any office job in America this is not an acceptable way to talk to your colleagues. At what programming job am I allowed to call people cucks for disagreeing with my politics?
2. His own testimony was that "John Levy called me and said that because I said "build the wall" I am now removed from the network."
2. I don't know much about this person, but I'm going to need something more than his word on this one. The much more obvious explanation that it was his behavior towards other founders.
Specifically, he resigned due to protest/pressure relating to his 1000 dollar donation in support of prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage in CA).
It seems inconceivable to me that his resignation was unrelated to this. An excerpt from his resignation announcement:
> I have decided to resign as CEO effective today, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of u, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-claremont-marche...
Here's the offending email:
https://claremontindependent.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/...
Just recently, while he wasn't fired, Scott Kelly apologized to an angry mob for daring to quote Winston Churchill.
In one case, that person was upset and ashamed of themselves for having possibly caused distress of people they respected.
In another case, it caused them to dig their heels in to the opposite side of the debate.
In both cases, I can't help but think those were great opportunities to educate those people. Pull them to the side and patiently say, "Hey, what you said was offensive and hurtful and here is why...". I'm certain that the one who dug in their heels would've received that conversation in a more constructive way. As it was, firing that person for such a relatively minor offense created a new Republican.
i understand sometimes people make mistakes, but sometimes those mistakes could've been avoided if they spent any time learning about current issues. in not spending time learning about these things they are putting themselves up to say some dumb shit.
obviously its hard to say what should happen in these cases, and i do think we should try and educate people when they want, but its also not the job of marginalized people to educate others on how what they said was offensive.
Care to name any examples? The only ones I can think of are well deserved (e.g. someone making racist comments and/or descriminating based on race, gender, etc)..
For example: “Women must veil their form to obscure its contours out of charity towards men...To know that women in pants have this effect on men and to wear them is thus a sin against charity as well as modesty.”
He calls a woman’s leaving the home to work “another false promise of the devil come to pass.”
So no he did not resign because of a book he wrote on Catholicism, rather the beliefs he espoused in that book made his job untenable. How could any female student be judged fairly by an administrator who doesn't feel like they are meant to be in the workplace, or even wear pants?
EDIT: Brandan Eich and Lawrence Summers popped into my head as well.
Phil Donahue's popular show was cancelled and he was therefore fired from MSNBC, because of Iraq war opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
Ashleigh Banfield's career was derailed at NBC news and her profile lowered. They didn't fire her but what they did was truly shitty. She said:
> I was office-less for ten months ... No phone, no computer. For ten months I had to report to work every day and ask where I could sit. ... I will never forgive him for his cruelty and the manner in which he decided to dispose of me.
She eventually quit and joined CourtTV(?) because of it.
And Chris Hedges at NYT maybe. Wiki:
> Hedges was an early critic of the Iraq War. In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security."[24] His speech was received with boos and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking.[25]
> The New York Times, his employer, criticized his statements and issued him a formal reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality".[26] Shortly after the incident, Hedges left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and a columnist at Truthdig, in addition to writing books and teaching inmates at a New Jersey correctional institution.
Not fired fired, but perhaps kicked out, or leaving before the axe came. A little more here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/american-patr...
I'm sure there are other journalists I'm forgetting who were fired or had some level of career destruction because of their criticism. 2004 was a truly bad time to have interesting opinions plus a career on the line. And it feels like that again to be honest, though in very different areas.
I also don't have any idea what you mean by "a member of an un-protected class so-to-speak".
Of course, it's also a way to phrase something like "support the war" while being hard to argue with. Like "pro life" and "pro choice". Both deliberate naming schemes to make a position seem hard to argue with.
However, when the pendulum swings it rarely stops in the center. I fear an over-reaction to the right. Really what we need is for people to stop being crazy ideological zealots, regardless of inclination.
I notice two things worth commenting on here; firstly it seems as though you've assumed a position of being unideological, that is to say, you don't have an ideology, but those crazy people to my left and right do. Almost everyone believes certain ideologies, and most people aren't aware of which ones they believe in. Zizek says somewhere that the most successful ideologies are those which do not appear ideological, which are accepted because they do not appear ideological. Liberal democracy, the conception of rights, the separation of church and state, the precedence of the individual who owns property is built on ideology. In fact, I would say this: your ideology is believing that you live in a post-ideological world.
The second point I'd like to make is that denying "crazy ideological zealots" also denies qualitative change. It means you're excluding their ideas because they are extreme and "ideological". Because they seem irrational. But what is rational and irrational changes in time and place. This is roughly the golden middle fallacy at best, and a strong endorsement of the status quo (whatever it is) at worst.
Edit: If you disagree with the Zizek statement and have never listened to him speak, you may wish to look him up.
Your advocation of your belief system lies entirely in characterising any other position as "crazy ideological zealotry". I omitted the "crazy zealotry" part because they don't have very much substance (other than appealing to what you consider to be rational and reasonable), so I focused on the "ideology" part.
>Edit: If you disagree with the Zizek statement and have never listened to him speak, you may wish to look him up.
This is extremely uncharitable. Zizek is a serious philosopher, and people take him seriously. Just because you don't understand the points he's making (or don't agree with them), it doesn't mean he's purveying nonsense. Very few (if any) of his critics and fellow philosophers accuse him of being nonsensical. He frequently talks about topics I can't even attempt to understand, but I'm sure high-level physics can sound like nonsense to people too. He has 164,015[0] citations counted by Google Scholar, and along with Althusser considered important in the philosophy of ideology and socialism. He's by no means a hack.
[0] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=qzuup1UAAAAJ&hl=...
In a way, Zizek and his forebears represent the problem with the modern left: they left reality behind in favour of nonsensical “theory” that intimidates most people because it sounds authoritative, despite being empty.
For balance, I’m entirely certain that you could make similar claims of being out of touch with reality of the right, but they do not, for example, try to couch their ideas in an impenetrable fog of deconstructivism and psychoanalysis.
I wonder to what degree that relates to our subjective submersion for so long into the collective percolated ideas of Hume and Hobbes and Kant and Locke and (with the extent latter-day capitalism has adopted some variant of 'the end of history) Hegel. That is to say, were any of these works being actively purveyed to the public now, rather that forming a sort constituent background radiation in which even the prenatal are bathed, whether the foundation works of what is called western-enlightenment wouldn't be viewed in the same light. (In fact, I would wager one could start publicly reading from any of the above mentioned [excepting Hegel, for obvious reasons] and be sure of getting at least a few denouncements along the lines of 'postmodern trash'.
Also, I'm tempted to say that idea or only penetrable when they're not considered at all, that is, when they are merely that constituent background radiation of our lives. (Much like how we tend to know the answer to something right up until we're asked the question.) And upon the act of engagement, that is trying to understand any of this, we're left with Adam Smith being as seemingly impenetrable as Freud.
(NOTE) Agree with Zizek / Chomsky or not, that terminal paragraph is just such a fantastic burn.
It's interesting how asynchronous this kind of thing can be. To me, and I think many other people that have been overexposed to relentless criticism of the radical left for years now, it seems to be becoming unfashionable again. For me, that's because you can only deconstruct something so much before continued deconstruction becomes boring (and a convenient harbor for crypto-rightists) and before you start pining for some construction instead.
The pendulum swings (in a limited sense, that is; I feel more charity toward the radical left rather than some awakened sympathy for the right).
In the Me Too social justice movement, for instance, Things You Can't Say come in two varieties: Just as men feel their nuanced opinions are misinterpreted and shamed, women too feel their experiences are doubted or ignored.
I think it's also important to note that exactly one of the two "sides" of this movement has historically been a marginalized group. That in of itself is not sufficient to make an opinion, so do your own research of course.
According to social justice ideology.
Is your belief that women have never been marginalized? Or that they used to be, but in quantitative terms this group by now in 2018 has attained an equal amount of power?
And? I didn’t have the right to vote until I immigrated to America.
> Is your belief that women have never been marginalized?
Throughout history lots of people have had a shit time. Some groups worse than others.
I think there is a lot to unpack in your statement.
Marginalized as compared to who?
The poster I am replying to claimed:
> important to note that exactly one of the two "sides"
I.e. they were making a mutually exclusive claim.
Because otherwise, I still don't understand your point.
Which group do you think black men belong to?
You've neatly sidestepped addressing this on the times that I've brought it up, which is why I keep on harping on this point. There are two possible reasons you're doing this: one is that you legitimately didn't realize that marginalization has multiple levels, in which case maybe you should take a moment to think about the history of the world and the various forms oppression has taken, and the other is that you're deliberately making a bad-faith argument. I'd certainly hope you're not arguing in bad faith, because that would be incredibly rude, but I wanted to make sure I called out what you were doing (and failing to do) to make it clear to anybody who wanders by and reads the argument.
No. My argument is that some women have used their privilege to falsely accuse men in the past and that assigning privilege based on social justice groupings is both stupid and immoral.
I literally cannot follow your reasoning at all. I’m the one saying privilege is both relative and context specific.
You seem to be trying to apply some strange kind of privilege averaging?
Ok let’s back up a bit then:
Why exactly, in the context of the metoo movement, is it important to consider that on average women have been historically more marginalized than men?
What does historically lacking the right to vote have to do with the veracity of sexual assault allegations?
Who, when, and where? Have you seen who's running the U.S. government lately?
Has anyone actually collected a whole bunch of information on this?
In my head I'm imagining a table, with the columns being cultures (i.e. 1990s America, 1850s Britain, etc) and the rows being contentiously debated actions / ideas (i.e. age of consent being "low", male students having sex with female teachers, etc), and each cell representing a boolean "yes, this culture is OK with this" / "no, this culture is not ok with this"?
I'd be really interested to see something like that.
Or perhaps they thought there might be something there, considered it for a bit, and decided probably not. How often did their eyes pause at sites that turned out to be totally benign?
> You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century."
> This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact.
I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label (socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of capitalism etc.)
So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic:
>I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.
This immediately jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government does, the more socialist the country is".
I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s, 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists.
On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they investigate its cause and name technological rationality. Unlike PG they provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a major demotivator, it seems to imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves. But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates.
PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques.
[0] I'm not saying getting rich is bad.
It's been said before that if you're not risking downvotes, you're not contributing to the conversation.
It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions.
Times change, trends come and go, but humans are largely the same today as before we invented the Atlatl[∆].
Perhaps meaning: “Have it your own way, you old buzzard, what do I care!”
Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
- William Wrigley Jr., 1931
Assuming they already exhibit the behavior of respecting people for whom they strongly disagree. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble and no upside.
The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.
The overton window is constantly shifting, and in regards to American politics it seems like it's shifting faster than ever. In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military, today such a law would be viewed as archaic. The timeline from when the first state legalized gay marriage to the supreme court decision is also very short in compared to other movements (abolishment of slavery, womens rights, etc.)
No, it wasn't.
It was, when it was announced, seen as a betrayal of the gay community by the Clinton Administration.
At any rate, you are looking at policy changes, not dialogue changes, that tells you about something moving, but not the Overton Window, which need not move in the same direction as policy (though one would expect a sudden backlash if they moved in different directions long enough, but then that's not inconsistent with observations, either.)
But that's more difficult, so all I'm giving you is yet another opinion.
Ideas are told and spread by unsourced summary outputs. Best case, they can be justified by some archetypal experience.
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908
In Bruce Schneier's book Click Here to Kill Everyone[0] he mentions how it took him two years to write the book because of a false start.
In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs / strategic threats.
I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1]
I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic threats I can update my priors and partially relax.
But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this:
Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize, but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to it being around we're all convinced someone else surely has figured out how to mitigate the downsides.
(It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!)
[0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up. I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy a copy for every MP in Canada.
[1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class / domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves out of it.
> Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true
I'm interested... are there some good historical examples of people getting in trouble for expressing ideas that didn't turn out to be correct?
This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? The central idea is that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. Especially when it comes to different attitudes about gasp their intelligence, even in groups specifically selected (at least partly) for their intelligence.
Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.
Kind of depends on who is judging the papers.
> This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ?
Nope.
It's not even a forbidden statement.
It's not even a statement.
Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error.
> The idea that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements.
This is not an uncommon idea in social justice circles, though each specific versions of it is controversial with different supporting and opposing groups.
Heck, the entire idea of group privilege as a basis for distrust frequently found in such circles is exactly a form of this idea.
> Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.
Since, on top of not being a statement, the implicit axis of differentiation (assuming an answer other than “neither” or “it depends”) in the hypothetical has nothing to do with race, that seems improbable, and may say as much about your thought processes as about theirs.
That would mostly be physics phds and professors versus literature phds and professors.
But if you want other examples, the group of people who keep failing to distinguish others' bullshit from "real science" thing are the social sciences [1][2][3]. And if you consider management "science" as a social science, there's roughly a century of this (most higher institutions do consider management science a social science) [4]
At least French literature is studying fiction, whereas the social sciences claim that they're a valid science studying real, repeating (non-fiction) phenomena.
> It's not even a statement.
Unless a statement is very different from what Google answers when I type in "define:statement" I'm going to go with that it is a statement
And judging by the downvotes, it's indeed not allowed.
> Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error.
This sentence does not parse. Could you perhaps rephrase it ?
I find the statement by Paul Graham obviously defines a "total order" [5], which means I could even translate that statement into logical symbols if you like.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/10/03/33299646/academi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project [4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order
Writing original papers about French literature would probably require being able to read French, which few people do.
The French professors have almost definitely had basic introductions to physics, the scientific method and mathematics.
Why not just ask which group would score higher on an IQ test? Because then I'd have no problem guessing that the physicists would, on average, have higher IQ scores. I don't think that's a controversial statement though - Stephen Hawking was often touted as the smartest man alive for his accomplishments in physics.
I think this even works in previous ages. While medieval heretics did not deserve the punishments they received, the majority of them were probably nuts and believed things that were at least as irrational as the dominant paradigms of the time.
They called Einstein crazy. They also called Otis Eugene Ray crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
Would you have considered letting Otis Eugene Ray go from an engineering position if he started arguing for his bizarre stuff?
They also called Willis Carto crazy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto
How about those heresies? Would you want him on your staff if he were outspoken about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Jews are responsible for all the evils of the world?
Seems to me that a great many of those being excluded from present discourse are being excluded for arguing for very strong forms of biological determinism coupled with a naturalistic fallacy (if it's natural, it's therefore good) argument for the legitimacy of racism and sexism. Those are dubious ideas with a demonstrated recent track record of motivating acts that cause tremendous harm to a lot of people. They're not heresies of the beneficial sort.