What You Can't Say (2004) | Hacker News Reader

What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

241 pointsgeorgecmu232 comments

The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.

But yes, this has also been discussed a lot here before.

Selfishness is devilry, and devils make Truth out as falsehood and spin falsehood as true.

This is pervasive in society right now. It's rampant in politics, advertising, dating... and it seems to be getting worse not better. It's almost like we don't have time to evaluate honesty. Politicians win, not because they will answer a question honestly, but because they will repeatedly deflect and they get away with it.

Why do we allow it?

The people who are working to raise their level of consciousness, and who are willing to let go of ideology and dogma are few and far between, because it's painful and difficult. Just look at the votes that happen to anyone speaking this truth, people hate getting called on their devilry because it makes them look bad so they down vote when really this is the conversation that we need to have to eventually disallow it!

This isn't a matter of selfishness, but groupishness.

Collective ego is also prone to selfishness, an individual can take on a group identity and make being the member of a group part of the identity they selfishly defend.

Unless I misunderstand what you're pointing to?

I'm not sure what you mean by the word "selfishness", but you don't seem to be using it in the usual way. "Selfishness" usually refers to self-interested action that is or attempts to be rational, not irrational action motivated by identity. Perhaps you mean something like "egotism"?

> The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.

examples?

> examples?

Person A is accused of criminal act X.

Person B: "It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place."

Person C: "X-apologist!"

Stallman's resignation in a nutshell.

Are with hunts/trials really a new thing though?

"She's a witch!"

"It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place."

"He defends the witch, he is with the devil!" (an old-timey "witch-apologist!")

I don't know about others, but at least myself I felt there was a kind of "zeitgeist" of the 1990s/2000s-era Internet, that we're supposed to be above witch hunts and other similar stupidity. It feels as if new levels of idiocy were inserted into the Internet over the last decade.

My guess is that that's just normality setting in. Back then, the internet wasn't for everybody, you didn't do "normal stuff" on it, it was a very separate domain. Today, the internet is about as special as a side walk, everybody is on it, you can do anything on it and all the normal people and all the normal problems have come along with the change.

In society, witch hunts have been a thing for quite a while, I think the web mostly just didn't have the opportunities to show its witch hunting abilities in the early, pre-mainstream years.

That's an unintentional effect of the fact that prosecutors only tend to charge people they believe are likely to have committed a crime. Therefore, merely charging someone is to some extent prejudicial. That's partly why burden of proof standards exist. To reassure someone of the efficacy of due process after a charge has been leveled is tantamount to announcing your personal view of guilt, given the nature of the system. It's like looking at a football game between evenly-matched Teams A and B (52-7, 4th quarter, 5 minutes left) and stating that the rules allow for Team B to come back. Well, yes, but my friend would be forgiven for expressing discontent at your implicit assertion that the refereeing has been fair that game.

"Jane got black out drunk around strangers and then she--"

"Wait before you say anything more, that seems like a poor choice, but go on"

"How dare you! Victim shaming is not ok!!"

Good quality debates are becoming much rarer among websites and social media with larger pools of users.

Here’s a very old debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate

There’s a good quote inside:

”Let us ever apply ourselves to the task, feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and by exercising improve our intellectual faculties, the more worthy shall we be, the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God.”

The gist I get from it (not saying it’s 100% right) is that we enrich ourselves by exercising our mental state, which means challenging ourselves, exploring new intellectual points, and having the fortitude to go through with it (and hopefully find meaning).

Instead, the easy way is to forgo such “intellectual exercise” and simply regurgitate the same sentiments back to ‘the group’ and drown out the ‘other side’ with self-serving, dribbling retorts.

With respect to “What can’t be said”, this reinforces conditioned thinking that is black or white with no gray area in between to formally discuss. Instead, the ethos is “You’re either with us or against us”, and challenging that classification is violating Rule #1.

It's not the inverse , but a corrolary: With heretical ideas being purged from each Church, the churches have doubled down on absurdness

Another somewhat related thing is "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs":

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/ZQG9cwKbct2L...

When more moderate, reasonable, or relatively skeptical people leave the group, people who remain are, on average, more fanatical and extreme. Which leads to even more extreme viewpoints, which pushes out more and more people who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation.

> After the [moderate members] escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus somewhere in the “middle.”

> This is one reason why it’s important to be prejudiced in favor of tolerating dissent. Wait until substantially after it seems to you justified in ejecting a member from the group, before actually ejecting. If you get rid of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will become the oddball.

Purity spiraling has always seemed to me to be a good differentiator to tell apart the pragmatic and the purely ideological. The pragmatic will happily tolerate some dissent from their position as long as it gets them closer to their goal (even if they fundamentally disagree with it). The purely ideological will vehemently reject anything that isn't purely their flavor and will happily sacrifice making any advance in their direction if it isn't on their exact terms.

Right. The revolution devours its children.

Not just say things, it seems there's a disturbing trend where any and all behaviour is 'justified' as long as it's someone on 'our side' who's doing it. Especially if the target of said behaviour is the 'other tribe'.

For instance, violence/threats against those with different political viewpoints. Or attempts at justifying actual abusive/manipulative behaviour.

It makes me worry that the goal of civility has been lost, that a depressing number of people actively seem to think they're at war with their opponents and that their goal is not to come to any sort of compromise or get along, but to destroy the other team by any means necessary.

I'd like to think that, like opening paragraph brings up, this piece is an old snapshot that brings some embarrassment today. At the time it was posted I would have been excited about it. 15 years later, indulgently and exhaustively defining the well worn subject of heresy feels pretty dull.

Like most celebrations of heresy, this skips the fact that orthodoxy has its own value: coordination. Parents teach their kids to avoid bad words so that they can coordinate with others. This is not a bad thing.

A better thing still is for kids to understand that words aren't inherently bad but that being conscious of how others feel about them is good. The impactful heretics do the hard work of helping the orthodox world adapt to what they have discovered.

And meanwhile, the vast majority of heresies are authentically wrong. Celebrating being heretical for its own sake, rather than a combination of truth seeking and empathy, had enabled all manner of jerks and frauds over the years. Tech culture needs a more nuanced view of this topic.

The point stands, allowing your mind to roam freely without paying attention to what others might think is the only way to find truth within.

The vast majority of heresies are authentically wrong? How exactly did that happen? The opposite sounds more likely to me.

I used to enjoy PG's writings a lot more than anything that ever came out of YC, that much I know.

> For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

This is interesting. I've heard multiple people say that there have been two political correctness peaks: one in the early/mid 90s, and the other starting from about 2013 to now.

Are we already coming down from our current PC peak? I think we might be, even though it seems weird to say (given that we're still near the peak, so that political correctness is still high). Some evidence for this:

1. There seems to be a larger and larger cultural awareness of the toxicity of political correctness, so much so that it's starting to no longer be counter-cultural anymore, but just a well-represented view. The IDW is becoming more mainstream (which means they need to stop representing themselves as a persecuted group, lest they become stuck in 2017). For the record I'm a huge fan of the IDW. I don't want to see them stagnate.

2. Leftists -- usually blamed the most for political correctness -- are even now able to discuss a few ideas in public that they weren't formerly able to quite as easily: (i) they can more openly discuss the merits of socialism (using the "s" word) and (ii) they are free to question the orthodoxy of traditional free trade. In fact nearly every major candidate for the Democratic nomination has denounced free trade in some way. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago.

There's still a long way down from the peak, but times feel less PC now than they were say in 2017.

What is the IDW?

From Wikipedia:

The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a neologism coined by American mathematician Eric Weinstein, and popularized in a 2018 editorial by Bari Weiss. The term refers to a group of public personalities who oppose what they see as the dominance of progressive identity politics and political correctness in the media and academia.

Thank you. Strange that that article doesn’t at all mention Mencius Moldbug even though that’s clearly where this all inherits from.

How so? Doesn't seem related, except maybe that I'd expect the IDW to criticize Moldbug's ideas.

> two political correctness peaks: one in the early/mid 90s, and the other starting from about 2013 to now.

Could this be related to economic circumstances, and a spread of a sense of defeat among adherents of economic progressivism? Postmodernism came around the time, when knowledge about communist atrocities became more established. The political correctness peak of the nineties maybe reflected changes in the dominance of the Neoliberal End of History way of thinking. 2013 occurred four years after an event that threatened the Neoliberal economic narrative. I mean, the US is special in the way the Neoliberal ideology almost takes a new shape, by itself making political correctness into a useful mask. In the third world, religions such as postmodernism do take a steady hold. I see it as reflection of the hopelessness around the (geo)political and economic systems.

> Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

- Karl Popper, Open Society and it's Enemies, 1945

Embracing Popper's thesis implies the existence of a line separating "tolerant ideologies" from "intolerant ideologies". Who is going to define that line?

Knowing how the world works, I don't suspect, but I know it will be used to suppress things that the mob doesn't agree with, while that same mob preaches ideologies more violent and intolerant than the ones they suppress.

Popper's opinion only makes sense when the person in power (or the mob) is never wrong, and that never happens.

I think that if one were to draw the line between tolerant and intolerant ideologies, that line shouldn't be drawn based on the content of the ideology but rather how that ideology spreads. Specifically, based on this quote

> they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols

The only ideology, the only Belief, that should not be tolerated is the belief that ideology must spread through violent means.

That in and of itself is a belief, but it is a belief that can be discussed through rational argument, and only calls upon violence when all else fails.

1. That line would still be hard to draw

2. I know many ideologies that most people would consider "intolerant" but would fall under the "tolerant" umbrella because there's a rationalization for its intolerance. In fact, any ideology, as violent as it might be, can be rationalized.

While it is also technically possible to discover the underlying, hidden 'intolerance' of an ideology, society at large is not capable of doing that, simply because moral issues are some of the most complicated questions in the world.

We would never achieve a consensus about the underlying tolerance/intolerance of ideologies, because if we could do that, we would have already done it and we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

Certain choices are made which aren't compatible with universal tolerance. E.g., the doctrine of private property, requires suppression of people who don't believe in it.

If we take your argument to absurdity though and say that 'we should never suppress ideologies because we cannot know tolerance vs intolerance', then that leads to things such as allowing cults to operate unhindered, groups that plan murder in the open and so forth.

For example, the KKK. What would be the solution to solve that, if not for society to take an active stance against it? Should we let them continue on their merry way because it's impossible to determine intolerance and morality is complicated?

> 1. That line would still be hard to draw

Perhaps I'm unusually gifted, but I find the line between violence and non violence quite easy to raw. One of the easiest of all lines, really.

Karl Popper argued that we need to use violence to cull intolerant ideas even if they aren't violent. If you think that it is wrong to do that then you are on the pacifists side and not the "We shouldn't tolerate intolerance" side.

> Karl Popper argued that we need to use violence to cull intolerant ideas even if they aren't violent

Incorrect.

Stop spreading lies, exact quote: "as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument"

Important part: "But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force"

And there was no mention that the group were violent, just that they refused to listen. He mentioned that the group might get violent in the future not that they are, so we must strike them down preemptively.

Perhaps you haven't given much thought to the edge cases then. For example what if someone is posting racist articles on the web, are they violent or not? Well that's pretty easy - even if they are not directly violent they may incite violence in others so they partly share the blame. But what if they explicitly say that they are categorically against violence and it will just abstractly be better if certain inferior races would not exist and back it up with a rational-sounding argument? Another example. Is peaceful protest violent or non-violent? Well it is peaceful, nobody touches anyone - it is right in the name. But the protesters will probably bring inconvenience to someone, otherwise they won't be noticed - e.g. a sit-in will obstruct the workings of the target establishment. Is it violence or not? Is public shaming violence or not? It is just words after all, but words that can ruin someone's life. Etc.

I have given it a lot of thought. As has many other thinkers in history. It's not that hard.

1. Posting racist articles is not violence. It's speech. If someone decides to be violent after reading it, it's their decision and their responsibility.

2. Peaceful protest is in general not violent. It might be trespassing and other property crimes. That would give the police or possibly the victims of those crimes the right to use violence against the protestors. But that doesn't make the protests violent.

I can't help thinking the reason the left is so keen on calling speech violence, is that they want an excuse to commit violence against the speakers. Subconsciously, of course. Motivated Reasoning and all that.

> The only ideology, the only Belief, that should not be tolerated is the belief that ideology must spread through violent means.

Interestingly, if you merely outlaw the use of violence, then you have already countered such an ideology. And, thus, there is no need to concern oneself with the beliefs of any ideology.

Only the use of violence isn't enough; you have to ban the incitement to violence. Authoritarian causes never lacked martyrs.

Fair enough. But we still don't need the law to concern itself with anybody's ideology.

It depends on how good the enforcement is. If orbital space lasers were set up to incinerate anyone committing an act of violence within a few seconds, it's hard to see how incitement to violence would work. Comparable examples might be getting blocked for posting too fast and triggering the automated spam filter, or trying to harass someone by mailing them $100 bills.

At the moment police response time is still 15 minutes though, and inadequate for large crowds, so there is some room for incitement.

The bigger problem though is just having laws and having enforcement of those laws; there is too much room for corruption, abuse, etc.

Not sure if you realize the irony of such extreme violence as a tool to counter violence.

Perhaps you don't consider it violence if it is within the law?

If so, is it violence to execute people for homosexual acts? What about ideologues that seek to introduce the the death penalty for gay sex?

Or is such legal actions only non-violence if it is used to enforce the values that you happen to hold yourself?

Violence seems to be an innate animal tendency, of course a system to counteract it would be extreme. I suppose such a system would not necessarily be violent, e.g. drones equipped with tasers are mostly nonlethal. And since people react to alarm clocks in the morning perhaps all that's needed are drones with loudspeakers ordering people around. But since it's a thought experiment I went for the zapper.

I was thinking of an objective definition of violence like causing death or serious injury. The death penalty is rarely used in most countries and seems unlikely to significantly contribute to overall violence statistics, compared to police shootings or natural disputes. The Hiroshima bomb is debatable as it might have caused more radiation deaths than an invasion from Japan would have. But a total surveillance system would not obviously cause any more deaths and could be used to prevent them.

Even if you are toning down your proposal, you still seem to argue for something that resembles an extreme police state.

Strip away the sci fi terminology, replace the space lasers with police armed with sniper rifles, and replace the tasers with batons, and you have technologies that are available today (except for the surveillance needed to identify the offenders, but for that part, you could have the super-AI needed foor the task feed informatino to the police instead of to satelites/drones.)

While efficient law enforcement is important, "perfect" law enforcement is likely to cause more harm than it will prevent.

> Who is going to define that line?

It will be defined through rational argument.

While one would hope that, all evidence points to the line being decided by those who control or can put pressure on The Platforms.

How can fighting intolerance "suppress things the mob does not agree with", if that is in itself intolerance?

The whole point is to allow different ideas to exist.

Look at the history of censorship and look at the current state of affairs.

9 out of 10 times, censorship is just a tool used to suppress things that the one in charge (a person, institution, or 'mob') doesn't like, while that same censor holds ideas equally or more intolerant than the suppressed ones.

I don't want to go into specific examples, because otherwise this thread will devolve into a discussion about those specific issues. But look around and try to analyze things impartially.

> Popper's opinion only makes sense when the person in power (or the mob) is never wrong, and that never happens.

I don't think this is true. The person in power can be wrong (e.g.) 10% of the time and you'd still have a mostly stable and tolerant system.

I think it's the mobs that need to be fought under Popper's thesis.

It's simpler to see if you apply the Paradox recursively. There's a reason for an exception to tolerance. It's made only in case of people who directly want to get rid of other members of society. Society needs to get rid of them first. But if, in your quest of chasing out the intolerant, you extend the meaning of intolerance to anything beyond immediate threats to people, or if you start claiming collateral damage, then you are the intolerant that the society needs to get rid of ASAP.

The groups currently wielding the Paradox as justification for their actions? If they actually believed in it, they'd dissolve.

>I think it's the mobs that need to be fought under Popper's thesis.

So, Popper's idea is basically a way for a minority who "knows best" to impose their will by force upon the "intolerant" majority (which they term "masses" or "mobs").

In might prevent Nazi-style harm (where the masses were pro Hitler), but it's a recipe for USSR-style harm (where the party knew better and lorded over the masses, "for their good", and protesters were labelled "a mob")...

“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”

― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

Every time this topic comes up someone posts this Popper argument.

The problem, in my opinion, with this argument is that it is spoken from a position of moral superiority. When deciding whether to surpress an idea by force, who is making that decision? Why is that person or group correct about the matter?

My major issue is that the people using this argument are usually so adamant about an idea they can’t see any flaws in their reasoning and believe they are correct without a doubt.

Can no one think of a time in the past when the “right” move to surpress or perpetuate an idea ended up being something that was regretted in the future?

Can you be sure that the decision you are making now will be looked back on favorably?

On one side of this argument, I can imagine this being a solid strategy to prevent another Nazi Germany style idea from taking over.

However, on the other hand, I see this being used to conveniently sweep ideas under the rug that are not favorable, but may not be as dangerous as they are made out to be (think Fahrenheit 451 or 1984).

So to summarize, I don’t think people should just drop this argument and call it a day. I’d love to see more discussion rather than ad hominem attacks.

/rant

the decision will be made through rational argument. if you are not willing to debate or argue then your position is forfeit (I.E. you are the one with the intolerant philosophy).

>the decision will be made through rational argument

and what do you do when both sides are at an impasse because they have different axioms?

then the axioms themselves can be argued until a conclusion is reached, otherwise debate can be suspended. the underlying axiom here is that debate can be had, and that people can be convinced through reason.

> the underlying axiom here is that debate can be had, and that people can be convinced through reason

I take it you haven't seen Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit, or even SE lately)? Or perhaps you're referring only to in person interactions here, but I've still never witnessed this outside of a STEM setting (and even then, not always).

A platform that deliberately limits the length of what can be posted to only the most trivial thoughts turns out to be a poor place for debate? Shocking, that.

we are talking about karl popper's open society. not sure he knew about social media :)

I get frustrated at this line of reasoning; how long do you have to debate it? If the person you are debating keeps bringing up illogical arguments, or says non-sequiturs, or keeps making the same arguments over and over, do you have to keep arguing or 'your position is forfeit'?

Do you have to debate EVERYONE who disagrees with you? Do you have to have the exact same argument with different people, because the second person didn't hear your argument with the first?

I have a friend who trolls me by taking advantage of my need to be rational. He will argue with me, but continue to make more and more non-sensical arguments as we go along. By the end, he will say something like "hah! So you admit hamsters are nocturnal, therefore the sun can't rise in the east!"

At that point I realize he has just been trying to get me angry with irrational argument, so I know I just have to stop arguing.

Just because I refuse to debate him doesn't mean I give up my ability to have a position.

popper believed that we can convince people through reason. not sure how he would deal with trolls.

It isn't mechanically executable but it does present a strong heuristic: resist all attempts to dismantle the discussion. You want the structure to remain even if you lose an individual argument.

That's a facile response, because it works for everybody. Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe.

> Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe.

This is 100% not true.

You’ve made an assertion that it is not true - in fact, a very strong assertion. Do you have any argument to back that up?

I know people who do not view themselves as fundamentally tolerant people.

Further, I know people who consider intolerance as a core part of human nature, who would be prefixing their arguments with "everybody knows they are fundamentally intolerant". People who think tolerance is a fake position that people lie to themselves about purely to avoid violence or "ugly truths".

The existence of people like this isn't a position to be taken that needs backing by argument.

The essence of any organised belief system, religious or otherwise, is that some behaviours are virtuous and some are not to be tolerated, the nature of this intolerance may range from scolding to ostracism to execution. Is is this latter thing that is the only variable.

Let's assume this is true...

What do you conclude from this (I'm asking honestly)? That Popper is wrong and unlimited tolerance is the answer?

This strikes me as wishful thinking possibly born of not having had enough conversations with concerted racists. The ones who are not afraid to tell you what they really believe will do so without the sort of equivocation you get from crypto-reactionaries who talk about "free speech" and "tolerance."

I promise I've met worse racists than you have, and if you ask why they believe what they do, they talk in terms of self-defence. That they were minding their own business until group X took their jobs or killed their kin or stole their culture or broke their laws or left them destitute or insulted their people or took over their government. There is always a self-defence reason, and even more inconveniently, the ones with good memories can always cite lots of examples (which is inevitable, because it's a big world, so you can find genuine examples of anything).

Would they use the words "free speech" and "tolerance"? Probably not. But "standing up for yourself after being attacked unprovoked" and "justifiable intolerance of intolerance" are the same argument, with only superficially different wrapping.

I certainly hope you haven't.

But yes I know what you're talking about: that is certainly a behavior of a certain type of racist I've encountered. I find quite often that people with reactionary beliefs feel that they are personally under attack, or at least its important that they nurture a certain type of victimhood. I must insist, though, that there is another type that comes from a belief that your perceived "genetic" (here in quotes because these people tend to play very fast and loose with that word) inheritance make you in some way implicitly superior to people who lack your "genes". It's for this reason that I bring all of this up: no matter what they say, there is a difference between wanting to relegate people of color or gays to a second class in society and the intolerance of those beliefs. It's this relation that Popper was talking about.

I also want to be clear that I'm not trying to say what you've experienced isn't real. There are definitely people like this. My reply was only in the context of the top-level "tolerance of intolerance" quote.

> there is another type that comes from a belief that your perceived "genetic" [...] inheritance make you in some way implicitly superior...

On the other hand, I am pretty convinced that my genetic inheritance makes me "superior" (in some vague, but obvious way) to a cat- and yet I've never harmed or desired harm for cats- I actually like them. Or, to make a different example, while we consider it unacceptable to think of race X to be "superior" to race Y, we have no particular issues in admitting that the individual Albert Einstein was "superior" (again, in some vague way) to many other individuals (us included)- and yet from that doesn't follow we mean those individuals any harm or disrespect.

You don't compete with cats for resources, and you interact with them entirely on your terms. Once an animal enters your life without asking, and reduces the resources available to you, they become 'vermin', and people will do extraordinarily cruel things to them without feeling the slightest pang of guilt on the basis of that same 'superiority' which you feel towards cats.

Exactly- which means that the issue it's not the sense of (even genetic) superiority per se, but that of being threatened.

Btw, we have an entire genre of fiction (a subset of science fiction) in which humanity is threatened by technologically and cognitively superior races coming from other planets- this doesn't prevent us from trying to exterminate them to ensure our survival.

That is because people around you see tolerance as good. I know people who see themselves of guardians of rightful effectively and see intolerance as order.

The Paradox of Tolerance is just a rephrasing of the Paradox of Pacifism. I'm not convinced it brings anything ideologically new to the table.

I'm not a pacifist, and by extension, I don't believe we should tolerate everything. I agree with Karl. But I still get very suspicious of people who bring this quote up, because they're arguing about something very basic that pretty much everybody already knows, and they're not answering the more important question: which things should we violently oppose, and how should we oppose them?

Most people already don't believe that we should tolerate 100% of literally everything, and the people who do are not going to be convinced by an argument they've already heard 1,000 times. I promise that pacifists already know how sometimes violent people kill pacifists. Advocates for universal tolerance already know that their philosophy can be abused. This argument was around for thousands of years, even before Karl Popper was born.

So ignoring the pacifists that will all just roll their eyes when they hear this quote, and assuming that someone isn't a pacifist (ie, the vast majority of people) the more useful followup questions are:

- How do we define the intolerant? Is it literally people who fight against tolerance, or is it about causing harm, intentionally or incidentally?

- Is (in)tolerance fungible? If someone tolerates an intolerant person, should they be treated like a similar liability? How many degrees of fungibility should we go down?

- How long should we wait before we decide that suppression is necessary? Is it justifiable for us to preemptively suppress a community that is likely to become violent in the future?

- What means are acceptable during suppression of intolerant ideas? Are there lines we can't cross? Are we forbidden from using stuff like propaganda?

There are tons of smart people who have smart, interesting takes on those questions. And if you go through history or even current-day events and look at different communities, you'll find that they all kind of come up with their own answers.

So when people pull out this quote, it's like walking up to two people debating whether we should ever assassinate a dictator and saying, "sometimes wars are justified." Well, yeah, but we knew that. Is this particular war justified?

> because they're arguing about something very basic that pretty much everybody already knows

One would think...

Unfortunately, many people believe that all intolerance stems from bad treatment of some kind, and that the intolerant can be swayed, eventually, given enough tolerance.

Out of the vocal people on the Internet, it would seem more seem to believe that whoever disagrees with them is intolerant and subhuman and must be opposed with violence instead of an argument.

Tolerance is acceptance or appreciation of difference or disagreement with the intent to make peace or extend understanding.

That word is often abused by ignorant, stupid, or self-serving narcissistic people to mean something more like conformity or agreement. In this context tolerance becomes an empty meaningless word used as a weapon to attack people with, which is the opposite of its intention. This best description of this internalizing self-serving behavior is hypocrisy. Whether its because such people are dishonest or are simply stupid I despise these people. I would respect these silly people much more if they simply used just words correctly in acceptance of a self-serving nature.

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is not falsifiable.

Are you saying only falsifiable things are tenable? Axioms (which it is not) are also unfalsifyable. If you change axioms you're in a different system.

Or if you don't like axioms, principles.

Paradoxes are by design, not falsifying?

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is an investigation of moral axioms, or principles. It is not Science.

So it's okay that it can't be falsified.

This is quite amusing in the context of the article. 'Rationality' a word which is entirely without meaning, riding on the wave of supposed European 'enlightenment', is little more than first order logic with all it's fundamental assumptions being b based, either on European secularism or Christianity.

The suppression of thought comes about not because of the lack of 'rationality' but from the lack of agreement on fundamental dogmas. For instance how are going to argue with a Christian or Islamic fundamentalist for whom the very existence of others is a prickly aspect; this being served entirely from the scripture ?

intolerance guarantees stagnation. tolerance has more optionality

And who judges what is intolerant, and should therefore be suppressed ("by force", none the less), over simply what those who yield the power don't like, or the ideological fashions of the "good people" of the times don't like?

The problem with Popper’s proposal that intolerant ideologies must not be tolerated is that it fails Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance test. If you really think that intolerant ideologies must not be tolerated, then you should feel comfortable about your political enemies being the ones who determine what constitutes an intolerant ideology. If you feel that things would not go well, then perhaps the idea that we should be able to persecute ideologies which are “intolerant” is bad and we shouldn’t give that power to anyone.

What is scary about this approach is that it tends to favor conservatism. Any change achieved politically can easily be dismissed as a moral fashion (immigrant's rights, racial equality being ideal, same-sex marriage, women's rights).

This is much more of an issue when you use the methods outlined to argue against an idea. If instead you use these methods internally, this is less of an issue.

Neither conservatism nor progressivism is necessarily correct or better. Sometimes conservatism is worse because it preserves things that we should change for the better. Sometimes progressivism is worse because it doesn't fully understand why society arrived at a solution so progressives try to change things in a way they think is better but then there are all sorts of unintended consequences that turn out to be worse that what progressives were trying to change for the better.

For example, at one time progressives were trying to end segregation and promote judging someone on the content of character and not the color of their skin while conservatives fought them on this. Now progressives are trying to reinstitute segregation and promoting the idea that people should be judged on skin color and not content of character while conservatives fight them on these changes.

"Now progressives are trying to reinstitute segregation and promoting the idea that people should be judged on skin color and not content of character while conservatives fight them on these changes."

That's quite a statement. Could you go into more detail?

I believe they are referring to support for concepts like Black History Month or a Women In Engineering group being equivalent to "segregation".

It’s amazing the lengths how reactionaries go to hide what they really mean. It’s most on display when we around and around entertaining their insane notions that acknowledging systemic racism is the actual racism. It’s shocking how often this argument is made.

Progressives used to be pro blind hiring and objective criteria like tests. But after it turned out that blind hiring and objective criteria gets even less diversity than our current methods it flipped, and now conservatives wants blind hiring and objective criteria while progressives wants to pick people by gender and race.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, this is an actual observable thing e.g. https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...

in case you haven't noticed, progressives have long since moved on from the idea of "equality" of races and sexes.

According to whom? The propagandists of their political adversaries, I'd wager.

I'm guessing it's the shift for advocating for equality to advocating for diversity. eg. Harvard admissions where Asians and Whites have a handicap in an effort to increase diversity.

Diversity e.g., in higher education admissions isn't just about what's fair for the students, it's also about what's best for the university and the students.

Universities are naturally xenophillic--both in their desire to understand more about the world and in their desire to influence it. Exploration and openness to new experiences and ideas are also important intellectual values important to develop in students. All of these are enhanced with a diverse student body.

As a more concrete example... $IVY_LEAGUE doesn't gain that much by having its average standard test score go from the 99th to the 99.5th percentile. From the university's perspective, it gains more by admitting students who spread the influence of the university's ideas, enrich and enlarge context in classroom discussions, etc...

> As a more concrete example... $IVY_LEAGUE doesn't gain that much by having its average standard test score go from the 99th to the 99.5th percentile.

Assuming accurate tests and a normal distribution of scores, shouldn't that be approximately equivalent to going from the 80th to 90th percentile?

Given you assumptions, the difference between the 80th and 90th percentile is about twice as big as the difference beteen the 99th percentile and the 99.5th percentile.

According to the fact that discriminatory hiring and college admission practices are deemed perfectly acceptable. You want some sources on that?

> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.

Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..)

Quite the hubris to make that assumption!

There is a certain, je ne sais quoi, gravity to it.

Totally, it’s the classic blowhard man of science attitude: “I think what I do is more difficult than any other human endeavor and though I’ve never attempted the grand feats of intelligence I claim to be capable of...” there’s a reason actual polymaths and polyglots are rare occurences in history.

The very attitude itself shows that what someone has in specialized knowlegde they clearly lack in wisdom, which makes it highly unlikely that such a person is actually capable of their prideful delusions of grandeur. He has a point about the sokal hoax but the proper conclusion from that is that there are issues with the academic system and structure around work in the humanities—not that physicists are “smarter”—we’re talking about a system thats largely free-form vs one that’s inherently rigorous—theres no reasonable way to derive any strong claims about general intelligence based on this. The only reason physicists wouldnt get tripped up by hoax is because theres a centuries long system of rigor around what they do that makes it very hard fr them to let anything bogus slip in—its proceedure—they have a way better instrument backing them up, it has nothing to do with the intelligence of individuals, only learned behavior and functioning within prescribed systems.

It’s hubris that’s a product of our age. Technologists, even more so than scientists at this point, are supossed to be the priestly class capable of miracles (while in reality the vast majority of them, even the brightest, have at best a passing knowledge of the humanities just like humanists have scant expertise in the sceinces! In fact such a reality is practically deterministic due to the hyperspecialization of knowledge)

Paul Graham’s writings, at least what I’ve read, annoy me. No matter how much studying he may have actually done in reality, he always comes off as an individual that assumed he could play at philosophy and cultural critique just fine while maintaining a total disregard for the tradition and without ever having engaged with it in a deep way. Makes for literature that sounds very self-assured and pompous with little to back it up. Kind of like reading the incredibly naive thoughts of a cocky teenager with slightly more life experience. This essay for example, covers subject matter (moral relativism, bleeding into relativism in general, as well as the engine of history) that has been examined to death in the history of philosophy, yet paul graham doesn’t cite one person from that tradition. Why? Because, at the time, he was totally oblivious and had a superiority complex that wasn’t at all critical, self-reflective, or intelligent, which probably kept him from engaging with people that might’ve pointed outthe vast history of exploration into the topic that he handles as though man discovered history yesterday. Of course this doesn’t actually matter, because his target audience is totally oblivious too (people who, through no fault of their own, have been pushed into a very narrow specialized sphere of life—note this isn’t a sufficient condition for “smartness”), and we’ll all remain blind and blundering until we really introduce some cross-disciplinary study back into schooling and life itself.

You described how I’ve always felt about Paul Grahams writings except maybe the startup or programming ones on which I defer to him as more of an expert. He is sometimes an engaging essayist and doing what I guess essayists do which is describe the world from their perspective without letting too much rigor get in the way of an interesting story. I just get turned off by making a point like “we don’t say fuck around kids because of our precious taboos and because we want to think of kids as innocent” which is not particularly wrong but so oversimplified as to be not really worth saying except to imply that the writer is more enlightened than the rest of us.

We can pretend to be outraged by it but he’s very likely right. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s unacceptable to say that people have different levels of ability or that some professions require more than others.

(And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)

But it’s a very naive and limited conception of intelligence that equates intellegence strictly with mathematical reasoning (and perhaps experimentation).

There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing.

And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. Hardly skeptics. In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.

Yes, I equate intelligence with reasoning. For me, and realistically most everyone else, intelligence is the ability to reason, formulate solutions to problems and to quickly grasp concepts.

There are a host of other skills that are worthwhile and desirable and whatever else, but why pretend that they are the same thing as intelligence?

I’m not sure I understand the relevance of your skeptics comment.

Edit: you added this since I wrote my reply:

> In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.

I’m afraid you now just sound like you have a chip on your shoulder.

Your differentiation between "intelligence" and "other skills" partially refutes Paul's point in the article. If we were to take your definition, Paul's saying that physicists, because they're better at ratiocination should be good enough at french literature to get a PHD, but based on your claim french literature involves a host of abilities that have nothing to do with intelligence (not strict ratiocination or problem solving) so how could we possibly conclude from the fact that physicists are better at ratiocination that they're therefore better equipped to learn about French literature than french lit profs are to learn about ratiocination and subsequently physics?

It's also predicated on an imprecise and singular use of the term "reason". Do you mean calculation? Or do you mean analogical thinking (the construction of metaphors, "grasping concepts"), for instance, both of which could be called forms of reason but both of which are very different.

It's a totally inane question.

Claims like Paul's are just the intellectual equivalent of chest puffing. Don't get roped into the stupidity. This kind of attitude causes divisions and turns you into a prideful douche. It's indicative most of all that the author takes an extreme pride in whatever he takes to be his "intellect." Goliaths' waiting for their Davids.

As for the skeptics, what I mean is that working scientists usually can't engage in radical questioning--this is left to mathematicians (in the pure sense) and philosophers. They need to have faith, just like everyone else, that their systems work. While the application of reason provides probabilistic assurances around certainty you leave the realm of complete, inviolable certainty as soon as you exit the heaven of pure theory and turn it into practice.

> Claims like Paul's are just the intellectual equivalent of chest puffing. Don't get roped into the stupidity. This kind of attitude causes divisions and turns you into a prideful douche. It's indicative most of all that the author takes an extreme pride in whatever he takes to be his "intellect." Goliaths' waiting for their Davids.

Do you not see yourself in this paragraph?

Anyway, I’m sure French literature is a noble pursuit.

To some extent, yes. My delivery has certainly been agressive and douchy--but all I'm advocating for is a broader acceptance of the value of other's intellectual pursuits--are the pursuits of physicists extremely impressive? Undoubtedly so. Does that mean we have to initiate a dick measuring contest about the respective intelligence of the members of different academic fields? No. It's totally useless! At least in my view.

> the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis.

This is of course true. But if you think this is an any way unique to the hard sciences, I have some humanities departments full of people I'd love to introduce you to.

Fair point. I wholeheartedly agree. The issue is, it is not the humanities profs, in this case, or at this time, that are claiming intellectual superiority. (funnily enough, it's not even a physicist that's claiming the intellectual superiority for physicists, but rather a venture capitalist computer scientist--this should be nice flag as to the dubiousness of the claim).

One of the very awkward things about things you can't say is they often come in opposite pairs.

So for example, you can't say that physicists are on the whole clearly working with more intellectual horsepower than literature majors. You also can't say that STEM folks tend to be some of the most blindly religious (though not about "religion") and closed-minded folks in the academy, with some of the most strongly held unexamined beliefs at the core of their epistemology and personal identity. Despite being unsayable, both these things are true.

Skepticism, self-awareness and self-doubt, leading to contemplation, thoughtful uncertainty, wisdom or enlightenment... it may be just as possible to find all these things through pure mathematics or physics as through comparative religion, literature, or philosophy, but it surely isn't as common. Regardless, wherever you look, they will be rare.

Paul's response to this:

"Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.)

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?"

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

Pretty high - has he updated his response yet? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...

This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what happened here.

That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.

It's good analogy and it's really much simpler. Physics is grounded in reality. Literary criticism isn't. This is because most of the former is experimentally verifiable, or follows from experimentally verifiable results via a chain of rigorous formal reasoning[0]. In other words: you can't bullshit others as much in physics as you can in literature, and more importantly for being smart, you can't bullshit yourself. You have constant feedback from observable reality, which lets you refine your thinking abilities much better.

[0] - You'll note that the weirdest, most nonsense things in physics happen in places that are furthest from any experimental verification.

Okay, but there are two responses inline with mine that show physics literature as easily bullshit-able.

Also, no, it's a really bad analogy, for the reasons stated.

Thought experiments like this may reflect our own attitudes more than reality.

Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences. For example, peer review in CS seems to be highly random, often biased (depending on reviewer and author rather than the paper) and only weakly correlated with quality and impact. Moreover, there seems to be a problem with reproducibility (as well as data accuracy) of many published results in the biological sciences, medicine, and psychology. And "not reproducible" in science may very well mean "not true," and can have harmful consequences such as prescription drugs that don't work.

I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling and usually requires an unimaginable amount of reading (in multiple languages, usually) as well as writing a massive and highly detailed book for a very limited audience. It requires committing yourself to years of intense and often solitary effort for minimal reward and low pay, so I think you have to have remarkable dedication and "grit" as well as a passion or affinity for the discipline. Moreover, actually getting hired into a humanities faculty position is an astonishing achievement in itself.

Will the skills of physicists transfer trivially to the humanities? Perhaps, but I think it would be an interesting study to see how well both sides do switching disciplines.

>Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences.

to what extent? surely it's significantly less than that of math and "hard sciences"

>I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling

working in a sweatshop is grueling work. when you're in a factory for 12 hours a day what's being worked is your obedience, your self-control. not necessarily strength or intelligence.

There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually,in lower-to-middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it.

The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair happened in 2002, before Paul's article in 2004.

As long as the French literature professors are allowed to publish on string theory, they're probably fine.

The follow up [0] to this essay tells how he didn't want to explicitly claim anything as an "unsayable truth" today, but that he snuck this one in anyway. It's...controversial, not PC and quite possibly wrong, but it has some chance of being one of those truths.

> Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up...

> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

Statements like these are STEM vs. Non-STEM version of "why does Twitter need 4000 software engineers? I could make that in two weeks!"

Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?

There's a Dan Luu essay on that subject: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

That’s a rather poor example as you can say all this stuff: https://github.com/twitter

Also, Twitter does not have 4,000 total employees let alone software engineers. It’s core software was initially built by a tiny team, with the company only growing to 130 people in total after two years.

Such statements aren't about "4000 software engineers" but "4000 employees", and the answer always is, "3960 of those are in administrative or sales and marketing roles".

It’s a sign that we are in crazy times when people even think his claim is debatable. Come on. Whether it’s divisive or insensitive is irrelevant. It’s true.

There is the concept of a polymath. There is overlap in that group with autodidacts (people who can teach themselves about anything if they only want it badly enough).

I think Paul may be falling prey to a correlation issue here.

If you are an autodidact and a polymath, are you more likely to end up as a scientist or engineer, or as a professor of French Literature?

Very few people in the CS program understood why I was contemplating 300 level French classes (I placed out of 4 semesters of french, and that left 2-3 200 level classes and then you were into the hard stuff). A lot of them could not have 'suffered' through twelve semesters of French, no matter how much you bet them.

If you're saying that more polymaths are likely to end up as physics professors than French professors, doesn't that actually support the point he's making?

Proving that it makes sense for anecdotes to exist doesn't suddenly turn them into data.

Polymaths are physicists does not even mean that physicists are polymaths.

No, but "polymaths are smarter than non-polymaths" and "polymaths are much more likely to go into physics than French literature" combined essentially prove PG's point.

It appears that nobody in this thread has gone and tried to find it, but I believe there is research showing that hard scientists do actually tend to have very strong verbal skills in addition to their strong quantitative skills, whereas non-quantitative academics tend be strong only with verbal stuff.

This quote is eerily prescient:

> I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

It's especially powerful when paired with this question:

> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Combining the two yields an odd idea. The group likely to have the most things they're afraid to say out loud will be the group that was recently strong enough to enforce taboos, but is not now.

One such group is white, straight males in the US.

Later, Paul Graham comes with the following variation of the above:

> What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress?

Which I think is better. The difference is "weak enough to need taboos" vs "nervous". The group just needs to feel their power slipping away. This makes it a lot more applicable to your white males comment too. Whether white males' position is "weak enough to need taboos" is much more up for debate than whether some are nervous that their power is slipping away.

Which group is countering the strength of straight white males? When one looks at the faces of the powerful in America, what do they see? Gay black women?

It’s the most currently socially acceptable way of agreeing with the argument. Which is in itself a wonderful way of highlighting what you can and cannot say, not to mention the punishments doled out for doing so.

Different arenas.

You're talking about representation among the powerful in mainstream America, but OP was talking about accepted speech in tech/academia.

You can both be right.

No, he has a point. "Accepted speech in tech/ academia" is supposed (in pg's theory) to be enforced by a group that has recently become more powerful than the previous power holders. But if you look at tech, or academia, or politics, or economy, they're still overwhelmingly dominated by white males. Which falsifies pg's theory.

American politics is strange, tech people tend to be more right wing in Europe where the right is usually scientific instead of religious like in America. So in America you have the choice of either being on the side of religion or the side of progress, and the side of progress just happens to be the same side as all these movements against white, straight men.

I don't see how being for progress makes one against white straight maleness. I'm a very technical person and all for progress, but I also see political correctness as a religion from medieval ages.

My comment was that accepted speech and representation are different things, so saying "but representation" isn't really speaking to it, imo.

And you're not even right about the demographics unless one ignores east and south Asians. Plurality != Dominance.

In either arena, which group is the rising power against straight white men? Latinos? And what are the straight white women doing in this portrait of power? Where are women in this narrative?

What moral taboos are enforced by straight white males?

Ideas suggesting that being a straight white male might give a person advantages.

That idea does not seem to be taboo in academia.

The majority of homeless in the streets are straight white males. The majority of people doing dirty, dangerous, low paid jobs are straight white males. The majority of deaths at work are straight white males.

It’s not taboo, it’s factually wrong to claim that straight white maleness is a guaranteed ticket to an easy life. The truth is that everything else is a rounding error compared to class.

And it is wilfully delusional to respond as though anybody says "straight white maleness is a guaranteed ticket to an easy life" or that it is in any way a valid interpretation of what I said.

I personally find this idea pretty weak.

The main problem I have with it is that these taboos are enforced precisely by the members of the group that would be the "weak" group now. As the most recent and obvious example, the #metoo movement has thrived with the fundamental support of powerful white men. The taboos of religion are, or were, not imposed by a powerful group of priests to a subjugated population, but instead they were enforced collectively.

There is a taste, a natural instinct, for just conforming with mainstream opinions, not out of fear but with sincere conviction, sometimes beyond any logic and reason. Once some ideas get enough traction, and non conformity is met with enough execration, then people just tend to join in with real devotion.

My belief is that people believe whatever they want to believe. If you are liberal it is because you want to be liberal. Alternatively you might just not want to be conservative. Same for the other direction. Naturally formed beliefs are just an afterthought. It goes without saying that this might not apply to everyone or to every belief.

For the record, I recognize that perhaps I believe this belief strictly because I want to believe it. I also think many people don't want to believe it.

I'm not sure it's that simple. As Mr Graham points out, we are shaped by our echo chambers, the chorus of voices that shout out against our fellow "heretics". As children, those chambers come from our families and religious / community institutions, as dictated by our elders. As we reach our rebellious phases, sure - we scrabble around and find beliefs we want to believe in - but the effort expended in doing so is difficult and the reward is little. From a social perspective, a little deviation acts as a differentiator - we are made interesting within our peer groups by our rebellions - but too much heresy makes us "other". As we get past that, self-realisation comes in waves; nestled between desires of belonging in a new group, we find moments where we are invited to re-evaluate some deeply held truth. Rarely is the re-evaluation self-driven, and almost never is that belief so different that a nearby echo chamber is not crouching nearby, waiting to nurture our newfound "chosen" belief in it's warm, corroborating belly.

For the record, I want to believe your belief. I recognise that this autonomous self-truthing could be the pinnicle of what we as humans could become. I also think the very concept of society becomes a meaningless nothing if it were possible.

How does that theory explain large scale social changes over time? Why do peoples attitudes change in sync?

FWIW, I think that a huge amount of political alignment in the U.S. derives from aesthetic sensibilities.

The thing last year where Trump ordered McDonald's for the college football team that was visiting him because the White House cook staff was not working due to the government shutdown is basically the perfect example of this. The left though it was the most gauche, trashy thing that ever happened, as in, "I can't believe someone would server toxic trash food to a guest in their own home." And right wing people mostly though it was totally normal, as in, "Of course you would order McDonald's if something came up and you couldn't serve a home cooked meal to a guest."

Feels like topsy-turvy land. The right, as the defenders of monarchy and aristocratic taste, should obviously be horrified that the King is eating fast food, and the left, as the voice of the people and universal equality, should be delighted that the Chairman is eating the food of the common folk.

> Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist"...

This made me remember the essay "Against Murderism" by Scott Alexander. If someone would like to read a somewhat similar article to what's posted here, written by (in my opinion) a devastatingly better essayist than Graham with a lot more knowledge about human psychology and understanding of how culture works, I definitely recommend it and Alexander's popular blog, "Slatestar Codex," in general.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

And if you would like to visit a place that is tacitly backed by Scott Alexander as a place to discuss cultural phenomena with a wide variety of backgrounds, visit https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/

That's not at all how he described it in his Scott alexander-length blog post on the matter.

Why don't we pull up a direct quote, then?

> At this point this stops being my story. A group of pro-CW-thread mods led by ZorbaTHut, cjet79, and baj2235 set up r/TheMotte, a new subreddit for continuing the Culture War Thread tradition. After a week, the top post already has 4,243 comments, so it looks like the move went pretty well. Despite fears – which I partly shared – that the transition would not be good for the Thread, early signs suggest it has survived intact. I’m hopeful this can be a win-win situation, freeing me from a pretty serious burden while the Thread itself expands and flourishes under the leadership of a more anonymous group of people.

Not sure that proves your point.

Sorry, I thought you were implying something nasty.

I like TheMotte, although there's a few opinions I see that make my blood boil.

> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

> If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told.

I’ve never quite understood this argument, because it seems to imply that people’s beliefs are or should be a random, unpredictable process, and that any regularity in the data should be treated with apprehension. But if beliefs are not in fact random, but can be guided by some common forces, then it wouldn’t be strange to expect people’s beliefs to in some cases largely converge. Should I “stop and think about” the fact that I oppose murder, even though my parents and all my friends and even most of my “enemies” hold that same belief?” Of course not.

If someone claimed to have done detailed fundamentals analysis on which stocks to buy, and the recommended portfolio they came up with was exactly the S&P 500, you'd be dubious that they'd actually done the analysis, right? If someone was doing a book report and came up with exactly the same analysis as a well-known essay, you'd be sceptical that they'd read the book themselves. Of course there's an underlying reality and you'd expect everyone to come up with the same broad themes. But there's enough noise that you also expect individuals to come up with some idiosyncratic differences.

There are obviously different levels of detail. I would be suspicious if two book reports contained significant passages with the exact same phrasing. I wouldn’t be surprised if two book reports for the same book noticed very similar themes.

I'm confused about the comments section, maybe it's better to keep taboo comments to myself, or consider HN my confidants and enrich my belief.

You mean like, there are only two biological genders, and you were either born a male or female?

Is this something Paul Graham has said?

Honest question, has anyone ever been fired, imprisoned, or killed for saying that?

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/teacher-fired-refusi...

I don't know what really happened but assuming he just refused then I assume that will in the future more been like a teacher who refused to stop calling his black students negroes than an example of PC hysteria.

But who knows

This is not an example of someone being fired for saying or believing that there are two genders. This was someone deliberately misgendering and ungendering a trans boy (not non-binary) in class after having been ordered to stop.

The teacher felt strongly that the student's gender was biological and not something the student could arbitrarily choose to change. The teacher felt that using a pronoun other than a biologically consistent one was "lying", and it was against the teacher's religion to lie, so the teacher would not use the student's chosen pronoun. Did I miss something?

What in the world is a biologically consistent pronoun?

A pronoun operates in a purely social context.

Your response to my comment was flagged, but you seem to be laboring under some misconceptions here. While biology is what it is, the mapping from biology and other factors to social categories is determined purely socially. Categories and labels are not true or false, they are socio-political processes that can uplift or oppress minorities just like other such processes.

I would recommend reading "THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

My brother in law was fired from a law firm for stating (at a casual drinks night) that he believed that, legally speaking, people should not be allowed to change their gender on their birth certificate.

He had worked there for six years as a para-legal, soon to be lawyer. I don't think his cause was helped that the director of said firm had a transgender sister (or brother). He was unaware of this.

EDIT: Typo.

I think there is a law in Canada against mis-gendering people. Lot of popular tech companies have explicit CoC guideline against mis-gendering. StackOverflow recently fired a moderator for proposing to use gender neutral pro-nouns instead of individual preferred pronouns, even when there is no official CoC defined as such.

The Canadian Human Rights Act states:

> Every person who is an employee has a right to freedom from harassment in the workplace because of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression by his or her employer or agent of the employer or by another employee.

(there is also a similar paragraph for landlords)

> “harassment” means engaging in a course of vexatious comment or conduct that is known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome

How do you view intersex people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

Fair point. There are two genders, and you were either born (male or female) or (with a medical condition).

Exceptions do not invalidate categories. We do not say that humans have between 0 and 2 hands because some humans are born missing one or both of their hands. Such people are exceptions.

The statement "there are two genders" is only controversial because it is said in order to suggest that trans people are invalid or not real. If you accept that there can be exceptions, like intersex and trans people, then no one would disagree.

FWIW, that trans people want to transition seems to support the stance that there are only two genders, since they are seeking to switch genders, rather than exist at some intermediary point. So stating that there are only two genders does not seem, to me at least, to be a statement which invalidates the existence of trans people.

I could be mistaken in my understanding, though. It’s hard to keep up with the latest developments in the gender identity space.

Some trans people (so-called "binary" trans people) do indeed transition to being male or being female. Other trans people present their gender as neither female nor male but somewhere in the middle, and they are called non-binary. So both types of trans people do exist.

The "there are only two genders" people, in my view, are trying to invalidate all trans people because the statement is usually accompanied by, "and they're determined by your chromosomes." Even without that second part (which is a rare case in my estimation), the statement attempts to erase non-binary trans people, which other (binary) trans people do not agree with.

For someone who doesn't know much about gender identity, you are hitting on a relevant and interesting issue for trans people: the slightly conflicting desires of binary and non-binary trans people. A binary trans person will often want to embrace the stereotypes and norms of their gender as a tool to help them be seen as the gender that they identify with. This means, for women, wearing things like makeup and dresses, and for men, growing a beard and dressing in more masculine ways. However, non-binary trans people are in a sense defying and blending gender norms to reinforce that gender is a spectrum, not a binary. While both groups of trans people generally have similar views on gender (I think nearly all would say that there are more than two genders), in their personal lives they tend to skew in two different directions.

This is also relevant when it comes to gender pronouns. Non-binary trans people often advocate for everyone to share preferred gender pronouns rather than assuming, while some binary trans people would prefer to have their pronouns assumed, so long as the assumption is correct, because such an assumption validates their gender identity. There was a recent controversy where Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints), a binary trans woman, expressed her preference for gender pronouns to be assumed while acknowledging and supporting non-binary trans people's desire for no assumptions, and she was widely criticized (wrongly, in my view) for this.

If you adopt more accurate terminology by substituting "gender" for "sex" you shouldn't have an issue.

I mean, there are some extremely rare, extremely weird biological corner cases, but for the overwhelmingly majority there are only 2 chromosome configurations: XX and XY

Yup, you're referring to "sex" also.

Having seen many articles on this topic show up on HN, and this one in particular recur like a comet every year, I’d like to note a trend I feel like I see in the HN comments every time.

First I see a highly upvoted top-level comment talking about how tragic it is that thoughtcrime is such a capital offense these days, and lamenting that surely the HN thought police will be coming for their head, but they still feel the need to speak their mind about this because it’s true despite the surely inevitable downvoting.

The most upvoted reply concurs with the GP, adding a corollary about how the current social justice climate is particularly nasty because of “X”, and of course this miasma is so thick in the Bay Area that you simply can’t escape it. Then their most upvoted reply is also someone shaking their head about how no one is willing to question the SJW status quo.

Soon, a crystalline structure emerges: layers upon layers of contrarians agreeing with each other, reflecting forlorn looks and awaiting the scythe of politically correct criticism that is surely coming any minute.

Folks, let’s take a breath.

To be sure, there exist people on HN who hold liberal or leftist beliefs, and there exist similar people in the Bay Area. But you know who else lives in the Bay Area? Paul Graham, the guy who wrote TFA! Peter Thiel! A veritable army of libertarian crypto enthusiasts!

I won’t deny that political conflict exists on HN, in the valley or elsewhere. I just wish people would stop acting like no one agrees with them.

>sure, there exist people on HN who hold liberal or leftist beliefs, and there exist similar people in the Bay Area. But you know who else lives in the Bay Area? . . . Peter Thiel!

Uh, he moved to LA " — a move his camp describes as a bid to escape the political hegemony of the San Francisco Bay Area":

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-peter-thiel-20180215-...

Womp, fair enough.

That part notwithstanding though, I think the overall point stands.

PG moved to England, afaik.

Yet we are governed by a clown posse of low intellect and corrupt officials. Sherriffs who sell Concealed carry permits, legislators who outright run guns, senators that grease their family businesses, a board of supervisors that ignores real issues in favor of voting on symbolic gestures, and a governor who not surprisingly slept with his best friend’s wife. Somehow i was unable to squeeze in the current senator running for president who got ahead through blowjobs and being the venal-worst human through zealous prosecution of anything she didn't like or anything she thought would move her personal career forward in the sentence above.

We may a few free thinkers and intellectuals but increasingly it seems we live in a bad and watered down version of “The Death of Stalin.”

It's possible that such comments are popular here specifically because there are a lot of people who feel they can't say it at work. Catharsis behind pseudonymity.

But you know who doesn't live in the Bay Area? Most of HN. The site has a global audience now.

What about the people who aren’t afraid to provoke their peers? They seem to neither fall into the “stay silent out of fear” or “you just believe what you are told” categories.

The Norm is changed by the trouble makers and impulsive people who don't think about the long term consequences. Being selfish I don't want to be one of them but i am very glad they exist.

Most active recent past posting, 120+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18221049

(Edit: just to be clear, links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted! Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so—this is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Had this repost had been a bad one, we'd have marked it as [dupe] in the title instead. The purpose of linking to previous threads is that readers find those interesting.)

Also, from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956884

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581050

Those are the big ones.

> links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted!

I didn't say, or even imply, that. I just thought reference to past discussions would be useful.

Oh, I didn't in the least think you did. I meant that bit to apply to the link you kindly shared as well as the ones I listed. I added it because another commenter in the thread referenced that this had been discussed a lot before. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

I still don't know a reliable way to briefly link to past discussions, or mention linking to past discussions, without it coming across to many readers as an implicit reproach. Which is not at all the intention.

Maybe the site should just automatically include links to past discussion. Perhaps hidden behind a little [+] next to or under the title in the comments view.

Then you wouldn't have to spend time posting them or feeling awkward about it.

I'm reluctant to clutter the HN UI. It's simple enough that when X comes up, nothing seems more natural than to just build in X... but there are many Xs.

Automatically finding links to good past discussions is harder than it sounds, too.

What about the things you can't say on HN

Just look at all the comments that got turned to grey. I bet there are patterns, and if looked over a long period of time, would seem like fashions too.

But the comments that got turned to grey are things that people can and did say.

Things you can't say in the tech world, 2019: * global warming is junk science * there are approximately two genders * Trump is a great president * the US is not a racist country * Apple sucks

Edit: If you're one of the many downvoters, who presumably disagree with this, I dare you to say any of these things if you work for a tech company.

"Apple sucks" got 1000 upvotes yesterday on this exact website.

downvoters proved that rather quickly

African Americans consist of only 13% of the population yet commit over half of the crimes.

Asians and Whites score much higher on IQ tests than African Americans and Latinos.

Women have innately different interests than men.

Researchers are able to correctly classify human skulls into black and white Americans a vast majority of the time.

So?

People are trying to destroy Race, and it is scientifically defensible. This is important for the reasons why people want to destroy Race, which are inherently political.

* 2 + 2 is a color * there is a worldwide market for about 6 computers * by the year 2000 we will all be living in space.

I don't think you're wrong - I just think that your examples are about equivalent to mine, and nobody is upset by the constraints of society refusing to listen to those.

>Edit: If you're one of the many downvoters, who presumably disagree with this, I dare you to say any of these things if you work for a tech company.

"Apple sucks" is pretty safe to say. The other ones are dead on, though as evidenced by the downvotes.

TL;dr Progress only happens at the borders.

This long piece of wrongthink is such a great handbook for the 2010s

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