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Comment by TerminalSystem3 | Hacker News Reader

But here's the problematic part of your statement:

"Politically correct mobs are a form of this - they are ugly and indiscriminate, but effective at shaping culture by stigmatizing ideas that have been used to justify harm".

How do you define "harm"? It seems that the modern edition of "progress" is trying to eliminate psychological harm by controlling people's speech. Is psychological harm really something worth trying to eliminate in our society?

I'd argue no. Our society thrives on free speech and truth, and attempting to silence people for the sake of keeping the feelings of others intact is not a trade off that's worth making. A book I read that was very informative on the topic was "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Jonathan Haidt - I'd highly recommend looking into it.

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I wasn't saying that the harm necessarily comes from just the expression of certain ideas, but rather that the ideas are used to justify real physical harm, not just psychological harm. Ideas like white supremacy are of course used to enact real violence on real people, as well as more subtle grievances. Quashing those ideas has real benefits.

Of course, the issue at hand is defining the boundaries of what needs to be stigmatized. But what's stigma is simply just what society deems stigma, not based on a fully rationalized top-down decision. We are all the mob. It's messy and there's no discrete boundaries of good and bad. It's tempting to therefore conclude that all ideas should be equal, but that's not very satisfactory to communities that have been ravaged by violent terrorism for generations due to certain bad ideas.

There's no clean solution to how things should be, so I think instead of trying to come up with the perfect ruleset that allows everyone to be happy, we should acknowledge that maybe there's no happy state of equilibrium with the given conditions, so we should work to reshape those conditions, and maybe we can reach that equilibrium in the future.

The “harm” is the literal murder of black people, transgender people, gay people, etc. The tweets don’t do the murder, but status quo the tweets are supporting does.

I think some here, when talking about freedom of political speech, lose sight of the actual stakes behind the politics.

I'm definitely against any tweets calling for the murder of anybody, I'll say that. But the "anti-harm" movement is not as benign as you think. For instance, see the firing of David Shor, who merely tweeted a study comparing the effectiveness of violent and nonviolent protests. There's an instance of someone who tweeted AGAINST harm, in that he was advocating for nonviolence. Yet he was still censored.

This article does a good job outlining some of the craziness: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

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