Orthodox Privilege
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
This was never more obvious to me than when I was in college. As an out gay guy who studied Arabic, this seemed to short-circuit the expectations of my peers; being in awe of Islamic art, and wanting deeply to travel to Iran and see the mosques of the world was something that, for some reason, didn't compute to them. "But don't they hate your kind over there?" was not an uncommon reaction. I get it, I really do, but sometimes it felt like I wasn't allowed, in their eyes, to have access to those beautiful things in the world, or else I was considered "brave" for trying to access them. But to me they have been wholly distinct interests from the start, and only incidental that they happen to coexist in me as a individual person.
"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods.
So, for the sake of identity, let's attack modern civilization. This. Is. Fucking. Insane.
Even asking a question, and honest question where I want to hear someone's POV / answer ... and folks assume you're a troll and assume you're the polar opposite of them.... and no amount of explaining otherwise changes people's minds.
Even outside questions I'll say "I agree, I think X too." and folks will still insist on arguing about how I believe Y. Bro I just said I agree...
It's a strange thing and I find myself constantly having to preface my statements in hopes people won't misunderstand.
It's one of many forms of labeling that are easily attached to people and it's one of many reasons why I'll be firmly independent until the day I die. Although I'm sure that has a perception associated with it too.
In fact what you seem to be arguing against is stereotyping based on your identity. This is in fact a big part of what identity politics argues against, and would consider it to be a form of racism or sexism etc.
However a certain type of (usually well meaning, white) college liberal will want to "respect your background" by which they mean what they think you are like, based on various prejudices they have accumulated until then.
It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely.
This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic.
I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness:
> Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.
"If you don't think X, you aren't A." "Well I don't think X, and I am A." "If you don't think X you aren't A." "Well then I guess I'm not A."
"If you don't think Y, you aren't A."
...and so on.
We've seen it with a few specific political groups.
In my experience on any given issue if you were to ask for a simple comparative analysis with 5 points for both sides almost no one can get beyond the talking points of the day from their favorite cable news channel.
And that's just employing sales tactics in politics.
There just should be more than one or two parties, than there will be more diversified supply
This is how marketing works.
Getting really esoteric (and admittedly not thinking to hard about it), I wonder if the prevalence of individually targeted advertising is responsible for amplifying this trend in modern social discourse. How would we study that?
I think identity has been more of a focus of right-wing movements right throughout history, although people frequently refer to it in the context of the current US progressive zeitgeist; identity and nationalism are very intertwined. Identity and what it means to be an American plays a large role in Trump's support, for instance.
My personal takeaway TLDR:
faceted identity is normal.
increasing sorting and polarization somehow coincides with all of our identities becoming much more aligned, aka superidentities.
the novelty is social media activating and amplifying identity.
--
Presumably these social pendulums will swing back. Methinks Millennials and younger will go in the direction of the phyles from Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Where people chose their cohorts, which all kind of mutually coexist.
That's not what it means. That sounds like a caricature of it you read in libertarian media. "Politics" in its modern meaning is about getting votes, not telling people what to think.
Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires, coupled with the fact that people tend to "trust" politicians who have supported those needs in the past. And that's all it means.
So white christians vote republican because of a long history of opposition to abortion rights, black votes have gone to democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act passed, etc... Not everyone, but enough that it makes sense as political strategy to court specific groups via these affiliations.
And they're mutable over time. We didn't used to think of the divide between college-educated whites and non-college whites until the Trump campaign was able to exploit that divide. Men/women is getting larger now too, etc...
"Identity politics" even has the benefit of being so generic, it allows everyone to replace it with the worst example they can come up with: you hate "identity politics" for the one time that <person> invoked <their identity> to get <something ridiculous> (see examples in this threat). But you use it to tarnish complaints about black people dying twice as often from COVID and five times as often from police bullets.
So, please, continue to be outraged by how unwilling others are to, for once, see it from the perspective of a white heterosexual man with a suburban middle-class background. And how unwilling people are to be "free thinkers" like you, boldly telling people on HN that you kinda think women and black people should shut up.
But please stop glorifying reactionary opinions as some sort of revolutionary insight! When people tell you you are wrong, you are extremely more likely to be wrong, and not Galileo Galilei. If in doubt, maybe try to think of something revolutionary in particle physics or plate tectonics, before going all-in on the biological origins of intelligence or whatever it is you're being criticised for.
Open debate and public disagreement is a healthy vital tool of progress when the claims and argument are made in good faith. When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them.
But if you assume all arguments are in good faith, then you leave the public sphere ripe for exploitation. This is what white surpremacists and others have clicked to recently. A bad actor can exploit a presumption of good faith to add legitimacy to their position. "Look, famous person X rebutted me. My claim must be at least significant enough to be worth rebutting." Or they can use it to make the other party look bad by sea-lioning. "I am merely politely asking questions. Why are you so angry? Aren't you able to control your feelings?"
"Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication.
The challenge is that as we get increasingly polarized and tribal and as the bad faith actors get more savvy, everything starts to look like a bad faith argument. And at some point, people start concluding that the only foolproof algorithm for determining if an argument is in bad faith is "does it disagree with me?" And then you start seeing the banhammer swung freely.
That in turn increases polarization and tribalism because good faith dissenters, people with middle ground positions, and people who aren't sure where they stand self-censor to avoid taking friendly fire.
It is a very nasty feedback loop we're in, exacerbated by the already bad feedback loops of social media AIs being trained to show us content we already agree with.
This doesn't seem to be the case. Those who disagree are simply lumping everyone they disagree with into the big "racist" bag, claiming they are arguing in bad faith, dismissing the conversation, and then calling on others to censor it outright.
I see no evidence that contra-theocracy dialogue is being tolerated at all.
> "Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication.
I find this argument to be odd. Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? Are we not adults? What gives you the right to decide for others what they should and should not see/read?
This is the fundamental illogic of censorship. No one should have the right to tell others what to see or read.
Those harmed by the actions that follow from the beliefs of the deplatformed person.
For example, if you de-platform who says that all green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean to drown, you do so to protect green-eyed people.
> Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments?
The argument that green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean is neither false nor true. It is an ought claim, not an is claim. The intent is not to protect people from the argument, it's to protect people that would be harmed if others believed the argument.
In some cases I do think we can and should protect ourselves from arguments for intolerance.
It's really a long winded version "there is no orthodoxy, it's just that there are the right things and the wrong things, and the things I say are right and should we really spend time listening to things that are obviously wrong?", which is a good way to make the point of the essay, ironically.
I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease.
But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.
Of course there are a few key differences between cells and modern humans: (a) we have empathy, and (b) we are are much more interconnected. This means that if a non-destructive entity is harmed, e.g. an unjustly deplatformed person, this produces a signal that propagates to others who were not deplatformed, through the story being shared and empathized with. So the antibiotic-like harm is much less containable.
If we want to use “deplatforming” as a tool, don’t think it’s even possible to effectively do. The high connectivity of human social relations means that there will always be another “platform” for their message to propagate. This is especially true with social technology (printing press, digital social media) although I suspect it was also true beforehand. Not even, say, executing someone is guaranteed to suppress their message. (Extreme example: Jesus/Christianity.)
The final revision of my reply was "Cmd+A Delete"
Good luck being reasonable out there.
The latest idea comes from The Lincoln Project, which is funded by a group of anti-Trump Republicans. They read the Sun Tzu quote, "If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him." So they make very strong anti-Trump ads and pay to run them on Fox News during shows Trump is known to watch.[1] They're deliberately trolling Trump. The goal is to make Trump lose it (which he has, on Twitter) and make it safe for Republican politicians to move away from Trump (which is happening).
This is boss level trolling.
I doubt I'll remember it, but I was searching for some term to describe why this essay immediately set off alarm bells. I probably don't know enough about PG to know if he's really writing this essay in such explicit bad faith, but it certainly activated some neurons in my internet-trained mental spam filter. Now I have a name for that pattern
You say "If you mean ... then ... but if you mean ... then ...".
This doesn't apply to everything. But it certainly applies to just-asking-questions. You give both the actual correct answer; and you also say something maybe rude, but behind a conditional.
Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?
On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'?
Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter.
In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them.
I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.
I once had a colleague (who is a nice guy, and we got along) who said during lunch that there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing. I offered one objection off the top of my head (that prices serve as a mechanism for aggregating data, and any price controls serve to throw out data, and we should use as much data as possible when making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources). Before I spoke up, this colleague couldn't imagine that there would be any counter arguments to his position. Another colleague later thanked me for speaking up and sharing that different take.
Maybe that's not a good reason to not have rent control, or maybe it is a good reason, but on balance it's not good enough. The problem isn't the debate, the push back, it's Graham's point "privilege makes you blind." The problem is when there are limits to your imagination that an issue you see as simple might be more complex or that the person you're sharing a meal with might have a different, but still legitimate, way of seeing the world.
I am reasonably confident that I suffer blindness on some important issue. You should be confident that you suffer it, too.
There are definitely going to be examples of people going too far, and making wedge issues out of things that shouldn't be wedge issues. But I think it's worth noting that in general, the opinions that are heavily stigmatized are ones that are insulting or hurtful toward specific people or groups.
Consider the thread the other day regarding the privilege of beauty: it's not bad to be beautiful, and it's not bad to find beauty aesthetically pleasing, but it becomes a problem when individuals are denied access and opportunities because they lack beauty but where beauty should not be a factor.
Pointing out "we don't experience it that way" is a very good instance of the concept of privledge. It is good communication period given that they would lack your baseline that the "nice polite old lady" down the street screams racial slurs at them whenever they pass by. Lacking evidence they would have little reason to think that.
But dismissing a point of view entirely because the source is privileged? Bad. Heck even if the view was laughably naive and wrong like "children work in sweatshops instead of going to school afford candy ans junk food since that was what I did when farm working as a kid" is good to know where their points of view actually came from.
When it comes to privledge sometimes they may really know more and not simply have social status denied to others. Someone with an upper middle class upbringing may result in being ignorant at what bread, milk, and eggs are supposed to cost but know that credit card debt should be avoided whenever possible and how to diversify investments and maintain properly liquid buffers for emergencies. Someone from a poorer upbringing obviously wouldn't have the investing skill set due to lacking the prerequisites let alone the education and experience.
It isn't fair but it is real and knowing that is the first step to fixing it. Pretending sensible investing is just a bigotted social construct of priveledge doesn't help while promoting financial education does.
I think that this is something that people who bear privilege (like me, a currently economically comfortable white man) don't realise. I have this privilege; I'm not a bad person for having it, and someone who tells me that I have it isn't accusing me, only reminding me. I can still be a good and empathetic person, and I try to be. It's just important to realise that what I perceive as empathy, by imagining myself in someone else's shoes and proceeding from that premise, cannot fully succeed, since my privilege means that there are shoes that I will never fully understand what it's like to occupy. I should thus pause before thinking I understand such a situation—that's what "check your privilege" means—and make sure that I listen to someone who knows more, from experience or science, in preference to my genuine, well intentioned, but in this respect uninformed feelings.
Orthodoxy is a numbers game not necessarily an accuracy game. Orthodox opinions may be accurate or inaccurate; what makes them orthodox is that they are held by at least a plurality of people in a given setting.
Orthodox ideas have not necessarily been proven and aren't necessarily parsimonious, so they should not necessarily enjoy the privilege of the null hypothesis. Null hypotheses require a lower burden of proof than alternative hypotheses.
If an orthodox position was never proven but is simply widely held, it should have the same burden of proof as an alternative hypothesis. However the way orthodoxy works its burden of proof is lower owing to its greater popularity.
I just wonder with these discussions usually the issue is that when people disagree it is SO EASY to believe that someone else is 'biased' or in this case using some kind of 'orthodox privilege' .... that's where the 1:1 disagreement often is. We find it handy to believe that someone else is being unreasonable because ... <insert new term for why they are being that way>.
We live in a world where we're inundated by folks who say they're being silenced or etc for all sorts of reasons. This just seems to be a new term for folks to use.
> I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything
Yes, unfortunately.
I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:
"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.
Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."
But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.
He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.
You can find a gloss of this "repressive hypothesis" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality#Volum...
So many people are a victim of being silenced now.
As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...
It isn't necessarily bad. Novel ideas should face a higher standard of proof than orthodox ideas because a lot more is known about how orthodox ideas really work (including their faults) than about novel ideas.
But there are a couple of ways in which this push back can get really pernicious:
1) By focusing on person rather than the idea. If the orthodoxy views the world as filled with people who are rotten to the core but successfully mimicry as decent, it makes sense to watch everybody for the slightest transgressions and attack the person with full strength when you notice one.
2) By emphasizing ideological unity. Suppose someone has an unorthodox idea and the orthodoxy denounces it. In a pernicious orthodoxy everybody must join in with the denouncing. You are already suspect merely if you don't join. If you try to say something like "hey, actually this has some merit", you are the next target. In extreme cases (e.g. Stalinism) you are the next target if you didn't denounce vigorously enough.
And of course the very idea that orthodoxy can be wrong must itself be orthodox! Otherwise from the POV of orthodoxy there is absolutely no point in engaging in real argument with those who question it.
For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired.
Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics.
There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies.
To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
and for politicians, this is the greatest job security they could ever imagine. probably 50%, if not far more, of their votes are gained simply via the letter next to their name. really, does any politician actually care about any national or local issues? why would they even waste energy to think about it. simply follow their tribe's consensus and ensure self preservation, salary, perks, social status and power.
Yes, but that's neither here nor there, if most of public discourse falls along two, at best three, lines.
>To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
On the contrary, it's a very useful proxy, and the only sane way to make sense of a stream of 40% opinions towards one direction, 40% towards another, and some opinions all over the place... You prune the statistically irrelevant ones...
This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true.
If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently.
I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame.
When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group.
But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now.
Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not.
I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.
The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.
In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.
Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things.
The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists
Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.
Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).
TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.
There's plenty of leftist fights. Trots vs Leninists, Authoritarians vs Anarcho-syndicalists, Red Scare vs TrueAnon, etc.
So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges.
Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work.
I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture).
Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions:
1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin)
2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal.
None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people.
The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN.
I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help.
Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right".
It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_.
The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
Universities are always little labs for weird behavior and disputes, it's part of their nature. There's always something that puts conservative farmers or whatever in a twist. In the Nixon era it was anti-war protestors. In the 90s it was affirmative action. Today, it's the various gender/sexuality issues.
The politics of universities is such that these movements grow and succeed, then become the power brokers. A family member was a leader in LGBT causes on campus in the 90s -- very much fighting an uphill battle for attention, respect and resources. Today, that org is very powerful and alumni of the 90s version are all middle aged folks in positions of real power.
We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
>Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.
"Orthodox privilege" is, he sees, why some people are not worried about being "cancelled." In his mind, these people are saying what is considered correct, so they don't fear cancellation. Perhaps this is true for some people, but I think that it is inventing (or at least overscoping) a phenomenon to answer a question that has another, simpler answer.
Some people are able to honestly assess their past positions and statements, understand why things could be construed as problematic, and make efforts to better themselves. That, and a sense of what conversations are appropriate for public forums versus informal conversation over drinks, act as pretty great cancellation buffers.
It's McCarthy 2.0 (although not the entire US), driven by employers worried about their brand. Talk of "understand[ing] why things could be construed as problematic, and mak[ing] efforts to better themselves" is detached from this realty.
[0] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...
I can't speak to the case in question, but my guess is that there were other dynamics in play if the "ok symbol" was enough to get him fired.
[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
The fact about some debates not being acceptable on public forums as opposed to private discussions would be fine, if it weren't for that fact that it's being applied extremely inconsistently.
I would like to quote pg's own rhetoric of "is my situation unique?":
> And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.
I suspect that many people, myself among them, think "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I am likely to be wrong." Otherwise I am forced to believe that I am the only person who can see things correctly, a mindset that is at least statistically false, even if it might very occasionally apply to a particular person. This response I think naturally worries a lot of people, since it sounds awfully close to silencing dissent, but there are two things that I think make it meaningfully different.
1. If everyone disagrees with you about your scientific, or otherwise verifiable, ideas, then you definitely should not say "oh well, I must be wrong." You should test those ideas. The risk (failed investment in a test whose outcome was widely predicted) and reward (being the scientific or other leader in a discovery that upends expectations) here are both high, and many parts of science, at least, are set up to reward individuals who decide to make that trade.
2. There is a difference between my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am likely to be wrong", which I think is a good thing, and my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am wrong", which I think is a bad thing. Experiencing widespread disagreement should make me carefully examine my assumptions and biases, not just import opposite assumptions and biases.
* I think that slavery is immoral, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.
* I'm {gay, lesbian, ...} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.
* I think that the Holy Trinity should have {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...} members, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.
* I think that {capitalism, communism} is {good, bad} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.
After 20 minutes on the internet, I have grown so, so tired of reading long, principled, idealistic essays that just so happen to defend racists, sexists, nazis, etc at the end. It's obviously a huge coincidence that he happened to be thinking about privilege, and just happened to come up with this concept of Orthodox Privilege, and by only applying sound logic to this premise, it proves that actually cancel culture is bad mmk. There isn't a chance in the world that he started with the conclusion that he doesn't like cancel culture, and then searched around for some word used by those people that can be twisted into denouncing them. No sir.
And for the record, I felt the same way before getting to the end, not knowing any of this context, because the actual essay is entirely unconvincing. Sampling his other essays to refresh my memory, they're stuffed full of examples to convince you in between each logical leap. Where this essay should have done that, it just vaguely subtweets people disagreeing with stuff he says that you "can't" say. You're expected to fill in the blanks yourself with some noble suppressed truths (ideas... are bulletproof!), when the whole time he's really talking about people getting cancelled (yelling at black people on the internet).
I'm generally opposed to cancel culture but generally can't be bothered to clearly articulate my objections, i.e. search around for the best words to denounce them.
I think it's generally positive that some people, such as pg, are willing to articulate their objections to cancel culture.
See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation/boeing... for the story.
Just to give a sense, at the time more than 50% of Americans agreed with each of these statements: Women should not serve in the military. Homosexual relationships between consenting adults should not be legal. Interracial relationships are wrong.
Today, those opinions are a firing offense. And if you said them publicly, they are a firing offense no matter how many years it has been since you thought them.
I think that his response in that article was appropriate, but I'm also not losing sleep for any millionaire airplane executives that now need to find something else to do with their time.
This is wonderfully sensible when the problematic things in question are unequivocally problematic (e.g. justification of genocide, or explicit racism). For those things that are borderline, as well as those whose problematic nature is in dispute, it's not so clear cut. Herein lies a strategy for silencing a viewpoint - descend on those who express it with vigorous Twitter fury, deprive a few of them of their livelihoods, et voila! Something that has been discussed in public (and perhaps ought to be discussed) is now confined to "informal conversation over drinks". The offensive-to-some viewpoint is silenced, all is well!
Well, not to me. I am a liberal, and thus I believe that discussion and disagreement over ideas helps improve the good ones and helps sink the bad ones. Disagreement is not a chore, it's the fundamental feature that every free society should cherish. But we should probably restrict justification of genocide, and explicit racism.
The substantive disagreement here is whether backing off things that "could be construed as problematic" makes you or the discourse "better."
The ideal of polite conversion is that people who disagree can come to a conclusion, a "truth," that was previously inaccessible to either of them. Asserting "the truth," is a dominator paradigm privilege.
And yet, in your opening paragraph, you described "the truth". "The truth" would be that a percentage of population complains about a certain sound while the remainder of the population doesn't. You might even be able to describe physical properties of that sound, such as the range of frequencies and the amplitude that produces discomfort in a given proportion of population. You might even be able to describe the characteristics of populations that respond to the sound differently (such as, I don't know, socioeconomic status for whatever reason). That would probably bring you as close to "the truth" as possible. Whether the sound in question is called "high-pitched" or not is irrelevant.
It irks me that subjective claims about the physical world are regarded as truth statements about the physical world, and thus my report that I hear a displeasing sound and your report that you don't hear that sound or don't find it displeasing somehow produces two "truths".
How is the power of the speaker relevant to the truth of what they are saying?
Would the presence of a high pitched sound change if the people in power say there /is/ a high-pitched sound, and the people out of power say it doesn't exist?
The way we find truth is to measure the sound, rather than to pay undue attention to anecdotal evidence to one party based on identity.
I found this such a bizarre analogy (responding to pg's point, not directly to you). There can be meaningful difference of opinion and perception on whether or not a sound exists; people literally might not have the physiological equipment to hear it. However, the assertion that "there are things I can't say" (meaning, presumably, "there are things I will experience significant hardship for saying" rather than literally "… things I am physically incapable of saying") is surely proveable by mentioning such a thing. He dismisses this idea, but seems never to explain why he's dismissing it, other than by this analogy, which to me seems false.
If the answer to why you can't say what things can't be said is that merely specifically mentioning their existence brings on the unspeakable consequences, then I would say further: I find it perfectly possible to refer to and defend the right of freedom of speech by defending the expression of ideas with which I vehemently disagree. Hopefully Nazism is a safe enough bugbear to assume that every reasonable person disagrees with it. And yet I think Nazis should be able to speak, and at the same time that they should experience the consequences of that speech; and I feel safe in saying that no-one here will confuse my saying that with support or defence of Nazism. So why can't one of these things that can't be said similarly be named without supporting it?
To carry it even one step further, I agree that, if someone says that there's a high-pitched noise and I don't hear it, then it is rude to deny that they hear anything. But is it rude to ask them what it sounds like (for example, does it sound like something I can hear?), or if they can identify where it comes from, or if they hear it all the time? Maybe that falls under the category of 'demanding' evidence that pg says is rude, but it seems to me to be rather a gathering of evidence that I think is the sort of activity highly valued in this community.
Of course, the conventional wisdom in the US as it exists among upper-middle class, college-educated white folk in 2020 is exactly right about everything, but it's interesting to see just how wrong people in a different society can be without even realizing it.
This one, in additional with the previous essay about 2 different kind of centrists really make me curious of what unorthodox opinions PG is holding and can't say right now.
> I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
This sentence usually ruffles some feathers, and is a good, even if weak, example of things you "can't say".
Whether it's IQ or crime demographics, or something more esoteric, we're increasingly entering into a time where you have to toe the line of orthodoxy or risk losing your livelihood. This means we can't actually get better studies into these areas, nor can we propose policy mechanisms that might actually work towards improving reality, because we are incapable of basing policies on unorthodox facts.
I think a lot of politics (at least in my country) also work this way. Simply by not addressing real problems, a politician can look like a winner because hey, there are no problems when they're in charge! Addressing problems not only becomes a political liability, it's in fact hardly possible at all because the majority of people wouldn't believe you if you told them about it and would accuse you of making up problems.
U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other similar fundamental laws were conceived as essentially a way to fix this problem; to keep the minority safe from the majority. You wouldn't be able to solve slavery with democracy. The majority would vote to maintain it.
Can you say that and also still be accepted to ycombinator?
I gather he wants to tell all of these people casting platitudes down on everyone to fuck off, but he could also be talking about the people that want to tell those people to fuck off.
Heh, if you're lucky. Often you get just the downvotes.
> And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.
and then goes on to argue that saying certain things could get you in trouble. I'm sure that the orthodoxy-aligned people at any point in time believed that they couldn't say anything that would get them in trouble as well.
So it may be an unfortunate dynamic, but the post contradicts itself in presenting it as a product of our time. If anything, things got better: in the past you'd be imprisoned or killed, today people yell at you on Twitter and in the worst case you may have to switch jobs.
No. It doesn't. Nope. It presents the phenomenon as something that's always true - recall the discussion of time traveling and meeting the same dynamic with different particulars in each time and place.
Moreover, "the point of this post" is abundantly clear: the more closely your views adhere to the mainstream, the more blind you'll be to the costs of holding opinions outside the mainstream because you don't encounter those costs. It's a good point and not hard to understand.
The basic problems of social media are nothing new to human behavior: tribalism, moral judgement / righteousness, extremist viewpoints.
But I wonder if it's a bit like the moth and the flame. With so many extreme opinions from so many strangers, we begin spiraling to more extreme positions, and taking sides in a more extreme fashion. Under normal conditions extreme opinions can still exist, but they are usually tempered by contact with other people. Even when extremity existed in the past, it at least appeared to be stable over time. ie, you'd have single group with unified (albeit extreme) ideas. People are normally meant to be socially and morally judgemental. (to what degree, and about what is up for some debate, but as an animal we like to make moral judgements.) But, they're also meant to find consensus within a community. Well, the internet breaks down some of that consensus building, while also introducing and amplifying more and more extreme positions. I really wonder that like the moth, social media breaks our normal intuition for social judgement and coalition building.
And lastly, I wonder if it's any surprise that things seem to have gotten crazier since most have been on quarantine -- away from normal people, but glued to our screens. Maybe that's just anecdotal on my part, though.
but that’s not actually relevant, because this post is about “cancel culture”. Should a person get twitter mobbed for admitting that they’re a bigot? probably not! should a person who says “damn that sounds kinda bigoted” to someone famous get mobbed for saying that in public?? No I’d say no to that too.
but we’ve got both sides saying “my mob is good people telling the truth, your mob is cruel trolls running an inquisition” but somehow that devolves into saying “cancel cultures does/doesn’t exist” as if that explained why your mob has the right to wield pitchforks and the other one doesn’t
The premise is not sound. Not everyone who has a conventionally accepted idea has that idea because the idea is conventionally accepted. It could be, for example, that there is some other cause that leads to me having an idea and that idea being conventionally accepted.
As an obvious example, I don’t think that one plus one equals two because I observe that to be conventionally accepted. I have good reasons to think that’s true even if most people disagreed. And I certainly wouldn’t think anyone who disagrees was being discriminated against for having unconventional ideas.
I interpreted this to mean, 'if all of a person's ideas are conventionally accepted, then the source of their opinions are whatever it's currently acceptable to believe'.
Part of why I interpreted this passage the way I did was because this builds on Graham earlier post titled 'What You Can't Say':
> 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. [1]
> For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?
Why “cancel culture” when there’s any number of issues this is equally true for? Why is it only “reasonably intelligent people” oppose it in this example.
This post just seems intellectually lazy. Making sweeping generalizations and then throwing in some appeal to popularity is not a well made point.
The average American is doesn't read Twitter daily, and is somewhere between a moderate liberal and a moderate conservative[2]. These people represent orthodox privilege.
[1]: Case in point: they continue to lose primary elections within their own (ostensible) party.
[2]: On the American political scale, which is uniformly further "right" than European left-right divides.
"Cancel culture" is not a thing, in my opinion, because the things that people cry are "cancelled" are almost universally orthodox!
- Gender critical feminism: the orthodox view that trans men are not men and trans women are not women
- Rape, sexual assault, harassment: the orthodox view that women are the property of men (if you don't think this is orthodox, you should really study the history of laws around women)
- Racism: the orthodox view that those of European decent deserve more and better (orthodox since Europe spent most of the last 500 years conquering and exploiting the rest of the planet)
Because all of these things are orthodox and hurt others, it is a privilege you have to defend them. If you write a national NTY editorial that is explicitly and disgustingly racist, you will be fine! Racism is orthodox! Racists are in power everywhere! The president is racist! His friends are racists! Being "cancelled" is not a thing in this context!
Meanwhile, if you speak out against violence against black bodies (which we know still happens because it never stopped happening!), the government will actively spy on and harass you, and in some cases there is evidence they will even kill you (https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...).
Orthodoxy is not just a numbers game---you also have to factor in reach and institutional support (but I repeat myself).
In elections, of course, you end up asking a lot of people for their opinion, and not just the intellectual, wealthy elite, and I think this is why we are so often surprised by electoral results after having been in this academic bubble where "of course everyone supports migrants and trans people" (which I do, for the record).
But since in most countries, people don't vote on issues directly but through their representatives, which generally align with political parties, I think what is happening is that very vocal, very extremist minorities lead to an increasing radicalisation of certain parties (in different directions; of course the extreme right wing is totally out of control in many countries nowadays), and "moderate" voters, while being moderate, don't really find an outlet for their opinions anymore and just have to settle for the side they find the least bad.
"I used to be able to say anything honestly, now I can't."
The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc.
Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change.
It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth.
I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people.
I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe.
Happy to be wrong about this.
And there isn't one orthodoxy, there are many. The range of opinions that can be expressed in the vicinity of Paul Graham without risking that he won't fund your startup is very different from the range of opinions that an assistant professor going for tenure in a humanities department may express, but it's not clear whether Graham is conscious of the orthodoxy he himself imposes, by his economic power.
This argument seems to generalize not just to large groups but also to small ones. The problem I see is that in the case of large groups the author calls this "privilege" and in the case of small groups he doesn't. Since the size of the group doesn't really effect the nature of group orthodoxy and adherence the argument seems to collapse to "large groups are privileged."
I agree that large groups are privileged but to claim that part of privilege is not being able to conceive of your group as being wrong seems tangential and potentially just incorrect.
Perhaps the author is assuming that people in small groups more frequently encounter other groups which (1) they disagree with (2) they eventually determine are right
but it isn't obvious to me that (2) would be more likely to occur in a small group than in a large group. There have been fanatical large groups and small ones which do not tolerate deviation on certain points.
It's about whether a member of the group will ever have to encounter or understand views that are unorthodox in that group.
If not, they assume they can't be wrong. It's the "way things are" which nobody disputes.
This creates a mental blindness where they can't possibly imagine someone wanting to say something in good faith that was against this "way things are", to them it would be like saying the Earth has no moon or that cats can fly. Why would you claim that? What's wrong with you?
I think you can mine these things by looking at diverse conversations - including those you don't find online. What sentence would you be afraid might be misinterpreted?
Norms change. Nobody knows how but one day something is okay to talk about and the next it’s not.
It's a rebranding of the concept of groupthink which has been around as long as hominids have been in groups and have been thinking. It's not a form of privilege. Rather, it's the nature of our brains. We are social animals. We prefer not being ostracized. We self-censor as a result. This is not a privilege. People who groupthink are not more privileged than those who don't. The only privilege is the ability to say "yes" to the group more frequently.
Things like Agile for instance can’t be discussed unless you have a near orthodox view.
For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.
Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.
Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
(There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!)
(I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)
It's why I worry about the left promoting and abusing cancel/outrage culture.
Ironically, if you want to protect minorities, then liberal values need to be protected because it is liberal values that protect minorities against the _tyranny of the majority_.
As an example, on the one hand, as a European, I agree with banning hate speech if it is well defined, and I think the western European countries have a good track record in not abusing censorship. On the other hand, censorship can easily be extended to "fake news", or it could be interpreted that a critique of religion is hate speech, the same religion that promotes hate speech in the Bible, with organizations behind it that support conservative values, actively pushing for legislation against minorities.
Why do minorities think that if censorship starts to be more common, that it will be in their / our favor, given the entire history of the human race? It's a mystery to me. And I understand the current phenomenon in the US. The justice system in the US is dysfunctional because systemic racism exists, and it's unjust. So people are taking matters into their own hands. With a dysfunctional justice system, the outcome is predictable.
However, that outcome will not be positive. Sorry but I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks; the instances in history where popular revolts worked to enact positive change are rare and far between.
And although the threshold has gone down for new bubbles, it has also gone down for when they get removed. It's become normal to churn through a bunch of different bubbles and seeing which one sticks around long enough.
Agree with him or not, I think it completely misses his point to need to hear his opinions before you decide whether he's correct in the abstract about speech.
If he did that, the near-certain fact that whatever he is complaining about is regularly said by people who are prominent and active figures would kind of negate his point.
I mean, at least, every time anyone else makes the mistake of making this argument with specific examples of things that are supposedly not allowed, that's the case.
But as long as there are no specific examples, the claim is not meaningfully debatable, which is preferable to the one making it, when it is false, than if it is easily falsified.
Ironic: "Why don't you just say it?"
He avoids doing that because as both he and you know perfectly well the Orthodoxy would crush him for his heresy.
Look, I do something called "Reiki". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. I also do something called "computer programming". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. (Being a computer nerd used to be cause for abuse and shunning, now we're celebrated. So it goes.)
My point is, there are lots of ways to rile up the mob and get them to pick up their pitchforks and torches. In some places all you have to do is exist and be black or gay or a woman or white or straight or a man or neither a man nor a woman, or both-at-the-same-time (hermaphrodite), or be both black and white (Trevor Noah's autobiography of his childhood in S. Africa, "Born a Crime", is worth reading, IMO), or be a computer nerd in the locker room at the wrong time, or wear the wrong kind of hat.
Mob-ism, with the pitchforks and torches, is a problem (this is hardly news though, eh?)
When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information
Just one example.
As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go.
This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.
And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist.
And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience.
But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.
Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts.
When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered.
Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse.
[1] https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privile...
Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality.
Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects.
Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years.
The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction.
At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.
I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance.
Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.
No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.)
Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race.
It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.
I guess this is an accidentally in-apt example...? It certainly detracts from the essay (mildly and in oh so many words) pushing against accusations of wrongthink - which includes accusations of dogwhistling.
"If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it."
Even if one is 100% convinced that true statements are 100% safe, there remains the possible beliefs that being wrong is okay to some degree, and that becoming right is a hard process that may involve believing false statements and saying them.
It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues:
1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues.
2. A lack of empathy.
What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians).
While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1]
I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs.
[1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence
I have advocated before for epistemic learned helplessness (https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_...).
> thinking for ourselves is over-rated in most cases. In most cases, for most of us, good science and pseudoscience, good history and pseudohistory are going to be equally convincing. Bayesian logic suggests that sticking with mainstream experts and consensus thinking is a safer bet than rolling the dice on the Galileo Gambit.
So PG seems to be arguing that orthodox privilege is bad and independent-mindedness is important while Scott Alexander seems to be arguing that conventional mindedness should be the default. They're both very convincing essayists. Who is saying something true that can't be said and who is saying something popular but false?
That's not "orthodox privilege". That's fear.
> How do you respond to orthodox privilege?
Wait for the storm of folly to blow over. The nihilistic idiocies that I cannot name shall have destroyed themselves in their madness before much longer, like the French Revolution before them.
> If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.
The best generals are quite choosy where/when they engage. But stand by for the silent majority to weigh in some months hence.
It is NOT orthodox privilege, but the complete opposite we are dealing with today.
Let's remind ourselves what orthodox means: "Following or conforming to the traditional or generally accepted rules or beliefs of a religion, philosophy, or practice."
Well nowadays the non-traditional views are trending, and shutting down the traditional views. So the "orthodox privilege" actually belongs to the NON-ORTHODOX folks who like to push their opinions to everyone else, and have the backing of major media, and academia behind them.
That is the reason why freedom of speech is dying in society today, and is being replaced with conformance, and silence. This is dangerous, and bad for democracy. Democracies require an open, respectful sharing of people's views. When those views are persecuted, the people are cancelled, the companies are boycotted, we have a problem. That problem is UN-ORTHODOX PRIVILEGE.
I don't necessarily disagree, but from reading a few comments here, I believe that they are counter-productive in so far that nobody likes to think of themselves as somebody who isn't independent-minded.
When somebody now reads about something they haven't experienced (having opinions they know they can't share without undue pushback) and then goes on to read that this is because they're not "independent-minded", it'll automatically trigger their ego-defenses, making it hard for them to even accept that the author isn't just arguing in bad faith because their horrific beliefs are rejected, and at the same time makes them double down in the belief that there is no such thing as an Orthodox Privilege.
I'll also just note that the vast majority of heterodox beliefs and statements are not on the list of things you "can't say." A small subset of them, especially relating to race and gender, are risky. Maybe there's a good reason for that?
Nearly everyone, if they wrote out a list of truths, could have that list divided into "universal truths" (e.g. 1+1=2), "group (e.g. cultural) truths" (you flip up on a light switch to turn a light on), and "individual truths" (things only you believe, often wrongly).
It's not that you "can't say" a unorthodox statement (one that runs counter to one of these truths), but since all of these truths are held roughly at the same level, it will be the equivalent of saying "1 + 1 = 3," and you'll be dismissed and seen as crazy. The reaction will be visceral and abrupt. There will be little interest in hearing your side of the story; you're just talking nonsense.
I'm not a fan of Paul but he's right here. If someone says, "humans didn't go to the moon," it's extremely hard for most Americans to hear that. Their reaction isn't, "Why do you think that?" but "When did you lose your mind?" and all willingness to discuss it is off the table. That's not a normal reaction. The person poked an accepted truth, and in doing so, committed heresy.
"The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time."
For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.
Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?
What does this even mean? Like, how can someone not be "legitimate"? Does it mean "illegal" as in illegal alien? Is anyone claiming that trans citizens should be deported? Or does it mean "imaginary"? Trans people obviously exist.
JKRowling is simply pointing out that the word "woman", which used to have the clear and simple meaning of "female human" (or sometimes "adult female human"), was now not only redefined & politicized to basically mean "opinion" (or "a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition) and is used for Orwellian speech control.
Rowling's statement is true if your experience leads you to prioritize the orthodox. It's patently false if your experience deviates from the experiences that created it. The struggle in the conservation of orthodox values (e.g. sisterhood of women) and the visibility of heterodox experience (e.g transgender issues & the lived experience of women who's bodies don't conform to the stereotypes being used) has a lot of truth on both sides.
I've read (one of) JK Rowlings' latest blog entries, and while I don't personally agree with her statements they seemed far, far more reasonable and debatable than what the internet made of it.
The internet made it seem like she was going to war against transgenders...
edit: for anyone looking to read it as well, I read this one: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...
You can't accurately construct a message about someone elses mental state without talking to them at length. When you assume people imply things, you're actually sharing YOUR mental state. When you take a message to mean significantly more than what the words themselves mean, you're not filling in the gaps with reality but your perception of reality.
It's absolutely fine that you disagree with JK Rowling. It's also fine that she disagrees with you. Talk about it! Don't throw slurs at each other. Don't make personal attacks.
The word "women" has always referred to female assigned sex, there is nothing wrong with that inherently but it wasn't entertaining some deeper truth about the world.
Based on Pew polling, most Americans agree with Rowling[0].
>Overall, roughly half of Americans (54%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, while 44% say someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Any ideology that considers truth to be unacceptable is a menace. Feelings cannot matter more than facts. Anyone who tries to tell you different should be immediately and permanently suspect.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...
There used to be a word for this as well; we called it "putting words in other people's mouth".
One can criticize aspects of a movement without being against the whole movement, or the people in the movement.
>one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society
What hubris.
For an example of a Nazi speaking from orthodox privilege in 1943: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36...
"The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not. ... We also know our historic responsibility. Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. One cannot overestimate the danger. ... The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe."
For an example of Athenians speaking from the Most Orthodox Of All Privileges in 431 BC: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm
"right ... is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
Wake me up when this is over. I will do a last effort when things stabilize so I get on the same page with everyone or basically the general consensus.
I can very well admit that some cultures (in a very broad sense of the term) have agressive characteristics perceived by people used to others and, to the extend the advantages are greater than potential drawbacks (which are often not even present or can be short term, granted), try to be careful about that in hopefully a benevolent way. Also, people classified as privileged might also perceive tons of things as aggressive against them, and mere injunctions to stop or act as if not in all regard, are not productive -- it does not really matter who is "wrong" or "right" if an action is de-facto antagonizing and polarizing over and over (well, from an individual ethic pov it does matter very much, but from an outcome that's debatable...), unless you are ready to escalate, and that seems a terrible idea.
So I don't believe people with characteristic X or Y shall be approached all the time as if they are a mean representative of their "group" and shall as a result apply a parody of Bayesianism blind to all other traits, and blind to individual variance, and blind to the knowledge of themselves.
I don't see why, from time to time, there would not be people who are "true" about things they won't even say, but that does not seem a very powerful thing to act upon. I just don't know what to do with that, and especially I'm not sure I understand where to go from that to the conclusion.
Some intelligent people think X and other intelligent people not X?
Yes, that happens. Very often. Extremely often.
But is there even an absolute truth when "cancel culture" is concerned, and what even is the precise definition? The wording is typically used to talk about things believed excessive. For example it's one thing being associated with Epstein and people not wanting to work with you anymore; it's another thing to be fired because you told a silly joke to a friend during a conference, and a third party ears it.
Absolute truth in social subjects is rarely to be seen, especially when we talk about blurry concepts.
(edit: typos)
Having already dismissed the common people's ability to process unorthodox beliefs, he then goes on to complain that people shouldn't speculate or make assumptions about those beliefs that he keeps alluding to?
He further asserts that people who advocate open discussion must be dullards, whose minds are only filled with the opinions of others?
I don't agree. What should a rational, Bayesian person conclude about someone who keeps alluding to beliefs they can't say? What's the most frequent such belief?
Conservative: I have been censored for my
conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting
lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
Caveats: I'm not saying that pg holds any particular views, racist or otherwise. I don't know what it's like to be someone in his position. I expect there are a lot of people who are eager to take his statements out of context and that can be wearying. And although the above tweet is a pithy illustration, I don't think pg qualifies as a conservative either.
But I'm pretty sure that pg is not hiding a belief like "Amazon should be broken up", or "recycling is mostly a sham" or "actually nuclear power is green" or even "I oppose reparations for slavery". The beliefs at issue these days on social media tend to be about _personhood_ - acceptance of trans people, the acceptance of certain identities as oppressed, and so on. Someone popping up in the discussion and saying that he holds beliefs he can't say - well, what am I supposed to think?
And if I was being generous and assuming they were constructive views that were inexpressible right now, what am I supposed to do? What action does pg want us to take to fix that? I don't even know what direction pg wants the discussion to go in.
I don't know whether he holds any problematic opinions. Those essays sounded more like PSAs to me, essentially "hey, Robespierre, before you start going after those people, remember that you might not be right on everything, so having an opinion that differs from your own doesn't really mean that somebody is an evil agent of the reactionary forces".
Something like... I think the coronavirus reaction is way overblown. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the media would lead you to believe, and wearing masks is basically ineffective and is just a thing to make people feel like they’re doing something.
;)
The problem is that, unless you're speaking to someone with whom you have a great deal of trust, that second part -- the earnestness of their unorthodoxy -- is difficult to prove.
I think that's why he specifically said, uttering things that are unorthodox and true.
Also, was anybody else bracing themselves for what "unorthodox" was code for while reading? I think I'm so used to seeing this argument used in an attempt to justify stuff like blatant racism, antisemitism, etc. that I'm sort of conditioned to look for that.
By the way, not saying that's what's going on here, but it was just an interesting reaction I noticed in myself. Ironically, similar to what another commenter posted, the whole article is one of those things which is obviously true, but may completely miss the point depending on context.
(Edit: I should add that I also enthusiastically agree with what he's saying here.)
I'm having a hard time parsing the logic in this sentance. Is there something like affirming the consequent going on here?
Then I caught the reference in the second to last paragraph. Clever.
Then you start to realize that while the slef-aggrandizing, implicit, unstated analogy is to someone like Galileo—the mytho-legendary figure of “unconventional wisdom”—the sage that rose us out of the muck—the actual analogy falls apart very quickly because the stances being defended, generally when people rage against “cancel culture” are not progressive, scientifically backed, or methodologically carefully won informed positions, but rather regressive values, such as arguments for the subordination or mistreatment of certain classes of people, the objectification of people, etc.
Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.
If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.
pg seems to want to ascribe some inherent moral value in being heterodox without actually questioning the contents of that heterodoxy—which is really foolish. It’s a view that abuses history by viewing it in the abstract in order to, at worst, build up extremely flimsy defenses of bad behavior, and at best, state nothing more than the extremely obvious “some people in history were right when the majority of people were wrong”
I also think right and wrong are the completely incorrect categories to use in this context—going back to Galileo—it makes sense to say he was “right” in matters of science while the church was “wrong” because science is rigidly defined, verifiable, etc.—politics and moral questions are not rigidly defined and there is no completely agreed upon system for working out binary categories of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to political and ethical matters—people subscribe to tons of different moral systems many of which yield incompatible views over the same issue—pg seems to assume everyone operates using the same moral/political calculus—it would be different if we were discussing matters of science but its very clear that the intended topic zone here is political—pg just never states these things explicitly since being concrete about it would demolish his position and reveal how ridiculous it is.
> If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.
Replace "whiners about cancel culture" with "counter revolutionaries" or "reactionary forces" and this could have been written during the stalinist purges or the cultural revolution.
How come, if the internet makes anonymous publishing so easy and safe?
Well. This kind of hit a snare with me... I'm the kind of person that would say this to people. I'm not entirely sure what to think of it as a whole, the letter. I might have to read it again later.
Recognize that this is probably a combination of: (1) your opinions aren't as unorthodox as you think, they're just a little controversial, and (2) you're the kind of person who can just "say this to people" without significant repercussions.
Both of those traits constitute the state described by the linked article: you're "privileged", to use the vernacular. It's not something true of everyone.
In fact, were something you said to produce a real, big reaction from offended people, you'd probably be really upset. You just don't know it. Probably 90% of the "cancel culture" paranoia we're seeing on the right is exactly this: people used to being able to exercise their "Freedom to Offend" suddenly finding it's not so fun when the other side hits back.
White privilege and male privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies (1988) by Peggy McIntosh https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/white-privilege-and...
I don't really think the solution of being polite is working for anonymous internet comments for obvious reasons, but for other places it has been the classical solution.
I've read it a couple of times and am still a bit unsure of what new idea it's getting at.
-- a blind admin/coder
It comes from BOTH SIDES. The right wing also cancels people with social media. A few well-placed articles by right-wing publications and their targets will have a months long harassment campaign of people trying to break into their social media and bank accounts, constant death threats and hate messages and photographs of their house, insults, harassment at their place of work. Convenient that always gets left out of the "cancel culture" discussions.
We need to stop acting like conservatives have no power in this country. They do, they literally run the country and arguments like this are just people getting in additional body-blows against liberal opponents. You want to see what "performatice victimhood" looks like, look at the extremely rich Paul Graham whining that people get mad at him when he says things we don't like. We do not like the way we are treated, and we are going to continue to speak out. If that gets you fired: GOOD.
I understand it is frustrating, and I have said before: I don't like the cry bullies and woke-scolds on the internet. I do not think they actually care about the cultural movement, and I think they should go outside and get a life. But I honestly believe the progress we have made in the cultural consciousness for gay, trans, and people of color has been phenomenal, and it arises from the new "woke culture."
I think the cry-bullying and woke-scolding days are numbered, they are starting to eat their own and even allies are getting sick of it.
One example would be Tulsi Gabbard. We do not hear what she says. We hear from a New York Times columnist who went to exclusive prep schools and then to an Ivy League college (where she tried to "cancel" Arab professors by testifying against them that they were antisemitic) before landing her plum role, that Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". After years of throwing mud from her aerie, she herself finally feels some criticism come in, and quits her job in a huff, with ramblings about the end of freedom.
Hillary Clinton not so indirectly implied Gabbard was some sort of stalking horse of Putin's as well. Saturday Night Live joins in. This is all not considering canceling though. It's not, in a sense, the notion that the US should not have military bases all over the world was never out there on the corporate controlled media channels . There's nothing to cancel - that show was never allowed on to start with.
Pushback against this mudslinging is considered canceling though. This is the threat to freedom we hear Sturm and Drang about.
The channels of media out there all blast forth establishment views, benefiting a minority of privileged people. They are born upper and upper middle class, white, and are American if not by birth then by coming to the US. Other voices are excluded. All that is left and that can finally be faintly heard is some criticism of these establishment narratives. That this pushback is causing demonstrations around the country and criticism of the establishment narrative is very distressing for these people.
(A tangential example - in the days after 9/11, the New York Times published excerpts of an Osama bin Laden statement. As the whole world seemed to be pivoting on this dialectic, I tried to find the full statement somewhere. I was unable to. I could not even find it on the net. Perhaps it has surfaced in the past 20 years. It reminds me of the old Irish republican cartoon of an Irishman with a British gag over his mouth representing BBC voice bans etc. When the gag is removed a dove of peace comes out. NATO bombing Serbian press is not considered censorship. Satellite installers jailed for installing al-Manar is not censorship. Privileged people who tried to cancel Arab professors getting criticism is considered censorship.)
In the current dialectic, we have to-the-manor born, white, more or less American establishment types suddenly having to contend with voices who are not necessarily white or American, who went to public schools and grew up middle class or working class or poor, who are finally having their voices heard and who are challenging the establishment hegemony. I know which side I am on.
"Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it."
Wow, talk about a word-salad to defend privelege.
Who would suspect more wisdom on privilege from proud sexist Paul Graham.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-...
He's STILL complaining about "things you can't say" in this article:
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
And completely missing the boat on "right to free speech" != "right to no consequences".
He's learned nothing. Not a self-reflective bone in this man's body.
This is the straw-man of all straw-mans.
---> Nobody is disagreeing with this statement.
There's 'no point to miss' because it's not even a point of discussion.
Everyone agrees that 'speech has consequences' and everyone agrees that someone 'calling a Black man the N-word in a derogatory manner' is terrible.
But we are arguing of people can dress up and play characters of another race or identity, or if we can mock people who do bad things by having characters do bad things or if we can literally use bad words while intellectually discussing bad words.
Or how much 'racism' is in the 'out group' using bigotry to attack the 'in group'.
Etc. etc..
The cancel culture arguments are at the margins of hate, not knee-deep.
If someone was doing Vaudevillian Blackface acts to mock black people, there would be 99.99% common agreement that this should be 'cancelled'.
But whether or not my corporation should be putting BLM on their website, that's complicated.
This is a great example of Cancel Culture. You attack someone's character, rather than their argument.
This is the definition of arguing in bad faith.
"I'm on the right side of history, and for other people like me, here is how to navigate this trying persecution".
It's also clear that you can replace the term "orthodox privledge" with "perspective" and the good parts of the article would make complete sense while excluding the rather uncritical parts, since their substance largely hinges on the rhetorical value of this weaponized spin on the term privilege.
What's funny is he has no idea this entire elaboration can be perfectly applied to himself since, again, the whole thing lives-or-dies on the implicit perspective that he, or whatever persecuted idea(s), is on the "right side of history. Like, which perspective is defining orthodox?
There's a lot of rhetoric without any actual argument. Unless you are a mind reader, I would suggest refraining from speculating on other people's mental states. Self-reflection is not a trait unique to people who agree with you.
If you think consequences for saying what you think are okay, it's no different than defending dictatorial goverments, where you just "dissapear" if you say something agains it. Or Galileo being forced to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun.
So where do you draw the line?
At what point do I owe someone something for being less privileged than me?
I'm Chinese, the topic was about educational fraud in China and I made a negative comment associating corruption and Chinese culture in general:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781696
I felt the reaction by dang was out of hand and overblown especially given the fact that he likely has no actual first hand knowledge about the topic. It's also a reaction that I feel is unique to the culture in the United States. Definitely, there are racial issues in the United States with issues like Floyd, but I'm not commenting about that issue, I'm talking about freedom of speech and when it's appropriate to say things that are the result of "orthodox privilege."
The united states is one of the least racist countries in the world. This is a very commendable trait that every citizen should be proud of but every citizen should also be aware that in being the least racist country in the world, the United States, as a result, also has one of the most irrational opinions on race and equality.
A black person is generally bigger, taller and stronger than an asian person. Black people are so much further to the right with the bell curve on these traits that the olympic gold medals in strength based sports are typically taken by people of African descent while even rich countries like China with targeted programs to win gold medals rarely bring home gold for strength based sports. These are just biological generalities that are true and that are accepted that not all people/races are equal from a physical standpoint.
However if I say an one race generally has higher biological IQ then another race... I crossed a line. What black magic allows people to be biologically different physically but doesn't allow them to be biologically different behaviorally or mentally?
Sure, maybe none of the IQ differences are real and there might be research somewhere that normalizes racial IQ scores when you account for things like socioeconomic background... However, the backlash for even bringing up a topic on biological and racial IQ is outright vicious and as I said before: unique to the United States in terms of the level of intensity.
There's definitely government oppression in China in terms of what you can and cannot talk about, but there's none of this irrational touchy touchy equality stuff you get in the United States. Speech in the united states is regulated by culture and society rather than centrally like in China.. It Changes the overall nature of what is censored and what you can and cannot talk about...
For example if you're born with a big nose in China, that basically becomes your nickname in China. I literally have a friend with a big nose and everyone just calls him "Big Nose." I also have a friend in China who's fat and his Chinese nickname is Fatass. People just call him "Fatass" by name and it's considered slightly derogatory, inline with "Big Nose" but otherwise not a big deal because it's also the physical reality. This is in stark contrast to the states where there's a whole Body positivity movement is trying to change reality as we know it.
I'm not going to comment on whether being obese is healthy or not, it could or it could not be... but I will say that the Body positivity movement exists not because of there's scientific proof that being obese can be healthy... it exists because people are so scared of being insensitive and having their precious feelings hurt that they want to rewrite reality into viewing fat obese people as culturally normal. Again this phenomenon is uniquely prevalent in the United States and not only unique to race and weight. Another example of this occurs in gender pronouns but let's not get into that, I'm sure you already get the point.
I have a different conclusion than Paul. I would say that you're conventional minded if you're afraid to talk about or think about very real yet hard to stomach taboo topics that are True. Cultural biases caused by guilt from past injustices in the United States has taken hysteria and fear to unreasonable levels. I would tell Paul and anyone in a similar situation to take a good look at themselves. If you can't comfortably have a scientific conversation about biological IQ, weight, gender and race without fear of losing your job or offending someone how is that different from the christian religion making you feel uncomfortable talking about evolution and natural selection?
The cultural biases and conventional thinking exists in the people who are incapable of talking about truth, not the other way around.
I hear this line of argument repeated all the time, delivered as if it's a bona fide mic-drop discussion-closer.
Apparently those making the argument don't even consider that it's not-at-all established that behavioural/psychological/mental aptitude qualities are exclusively or even majority biologically predetermined.
It's well known that human qualities very significantly in their degree of heritability. There's nothing remarkable about the suggestion that qualities of the mind will have a different level of heritability to physical traits like height and facial shape. We've all observed that siblings can be far more different behaviourally and cognitively than they are in appearance. And we should expect this to be the case, if we assume that the very purpose of consciousness is to enable us to adapt to the conditions we experience.
Here's a different hypothesis to consider: for the majority of people, physical brain function is pretty consistent, the way eye, nose, kidney, liver, heart and spleen function is pretty consistent, particularly at birth, before the wear and tear of life has had an impact.
But behaviour becomes more variable as a person develops, due to different conditions and experiences, causing certain kinds of emotion and cognitive function to be enhanced, and others to be diminished. E.g., somebody who grows up living with fear and anxiety due to lacking a sense of security will develop enhanced amygdala activity and chronic sensitivity to threat, and thus a reduced development of other brain parts and forms of cognition.
Extrapolate all the kinds of differences in conditions a developing person will experience, and you end up with great variability in people's cognitive "tuning", and resultant personality and aptitudes, that has little to do with their genetics.
Something like "Fat people are a burden on a healthcare system" is true and won't get you cancelled.
Something like "Trans people are currently the gender they were born" is a philosophical opinion and might get you cancelled but whether its true or not is a sort of Ship of Theseus problem.
Something like "Donald Trump has a low IQ" may impede your work progress but that has its own implications about cancel culture that aren't what we're talking about.
So please for the sake of argument, show me an actual truth that will get you cancelled. Seriously looking for examples...
On the Far Left, we have cancel culture and accusing others of racism... Those on the Far Left will not be castigated by their own orthodox community, because the far left is collectively agreeing to see racism in more places than it is likely to exist. Those within the moderate left are then punished by not conforming to the extreme orthodoxy for saying not all implicitly racist actions are done by racists.
Similarly, those on the right will be castigated by their own orthodox community of religious or gun/freedom figures who place devotion to those causes most highly. Any GOP figure is taking a great risk criticizing Trump now, because there is a great amount of orthodoxy behind his policies and the packing the courts with judges...in order to ensure the country is more conservative for longer, at any cost (even Trump).
Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.
If you don't see that those are actually two sides of the same orthodoxy, and that the truly unorthodox opinions are outside of either of those two, I don't know what to tell you beyond "you should check your orthodox privilege". ;-)
When it comes to realpolitik, the Democrats and Republicans are basically only different in terms of the speed at which they implement neoliberal policies and fight neocon wars. The general direction of "progress" is the same.
But yes - on HN, supporting Trump is a big no-no, no matter what the reason (even if roughly half the country voted for him).
-- a blind admin/coder
Exactly! Like for instance, the vast majority of people, who believe they can objectively identify mindless orthodoxies, while somehow remaining immune to them.
a) The exception in the 13th amendment for criminals is bad, currently used to legally shield slavery in American prisons, and should be repealed.
b) All Americans, including minors of all ages, should be allowed to vote.
Seeing the difference in reactions to them has sharpened my conception of precisely what orthodoxy is, and what social purpose it serves.
[As a historical note, Nazis displayed art they hated at prominent museums, specifically to encourage people to mock it for how terrible it was (of course, almost universally art created by Jews). Ben Shapiro would be out of a job if the people he mocks were _actually_ silenced -- not because he'd have nothing else to talk about, but because the format would be boring. Same for Chapo Trap House, etc etc etc.]