Manifesto of the Silent Minority
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
“Today’s”?
There has never been a better time for freedom of speech. You can pretty much say whatever you want and nobody is going to put you in jail or burn you at the stake. Indeed you have tools like never before with which to promulgate your message.
Even if your remarks are racist, xenophobic, misogynistic or some other kind of bigoted you can still pretty say much whatever you like and there’s even guys out there that will give you a platform.
You might think that these rights extend to the workplace but you would be wrong. Leave religion and politics at the door and just do your job.
I blame the culture of overwork that exists in the industry for many people not being able to know the difference between personal and professional.
If I said leave your politics and religion at the door and just do your job in a "safe space zoom call" or at a diversity committee, or at lunch, I'd be fired.
The silent ones just want to do our jobs but increasingly the ones with political power inside institutions of work have the control to setup the stage for only one type of thought.
I just want to do my job without going into these topics which occupy the majority of the companies all hands time and corporate communications.
But if you go to work for someone you generally have to accept their outlook quietly or move on.
Citation needed.
ACLU would be all over that, religion is a protected class.
This isn't a citation, but if you have a discussion with a jewish american over fifty years old, they likely have stories about this sort of thing.
In the West, or at least the USA, I would say the 1990s and 2000s were better for free speech, and very recently there has been a relative curbing of free speech. In surveys, a majority of Americans say they are afraid to share some of their political views.
Still better than almost all of human history before that, but I would say we are no longer at the peak of freedom of speech.
Not really. There was no easy way to get your voice out there that people could listen to you.
Back in those days you had a very limited audience and I’d go so far as to say that it’s only in the last 10 years or so we’ve seen the public at large go online.
If you want to limit your market, setup your own company and alienate your customers and limit your recruitment to a narrow field of people who think like you, don't be suprised when you don't attract the best talent
If not, then I truly feel sorry for some folks.
The "Thiel Question" is Id-mining.
One of the things I often hear, when people are talking about "shock jocks" (both left and right), is "They are just saying what everyone is thinking."
In my experience, there's a reason that we don't just say what we think.
Even just letting these reptile-brain thoughts out on a leash, is dangerous, as that’s the first step towards realization.
Given that the post opens with a "Humor" tag and the writer claims to be an AI I am 100% sure it is satire.
I hadn't seen anyone arguing misotheism as an actual description of reality and (possibly eventual) omnicide as the only moral position to take on life before I ran into them online.
"Edgy teenager" is about right. This reads like most of the writings and essays by the crowds of Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. Though many aren't teenagers anymore...
Lazy web: The Thiel question is "What is something you believe and that nobody agrees with you."
It stands to reason that if you ask a crowd this question, you'll end up with a lot of out-of-whack answers (that's the whole point) and mostly false answer ("it's not that contrarian are often right, but when they're right, they're very right").
This isn't super valuable, it's just played for humor value. Each of these Thiel answers could still be interesting in its own right if the reasoning/motivation behind it was supplied.
Even if you don't agree with a contrarian statement, there's sometimes gems to be mined in the thinking that led to it.
It is a satirical representation of how society often romanticizes beliefs outside of the Overton Window because they are signs of a “unique free-thinker” when most of the time they’re just poorly thought out hot takes.
The author posted a survey of the Thiel Question, which asks "Tell me one or more things almost nobody agrees with you on." The motivation of the question is a belief that to build something revolutionary, you need to be able to think outside the box. "People would be willing to rent air mattresses in their living rooms like hotels" is the canonical example (from 2008).
The problem is, most iconoclastic ideas tend to be... pretty outlandish. Also, people posting to anonymous web surveys (especially in the rationalist community) are probably tempted to exaggerate a little. So it's comedic to survey a group of people, collect the responses, and put them together as a hypothetical political platform.
I found it hilarious.
I'm considering using this as a filtering device. Misunderstanding this is a red flag for not trying to understand the context. And having a raging negative reaction to it is a red flag for temperament.
(1) If you don't know about the Thiel question, here's the first google result for you: https://www.safegraph.com/blog/why-the-famous-peter-thiel-in...
> China wrote better philosophy 2000 years ago than the West writes today.
What's "better philosophy"???
"The Conformist Test
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?"
By the end I was imagining small crowds of self-educated savants from Middlebrowlia not-really-marching with their many signs that said nothing.
Is this a bad joke?
The joke is that, being from different persons, the article makes a mix of them that remarks the contrasts.
It seems to me to embody an unflinching, burning faith that using analytical tools and reason will always yield the right answers.
The idea that the human mind might be too limited to understand everything seems like a foreign idea there.
Ditto the idea that strict formal reasoning is not always the best approach to thinking.
Don't get me wrong - I think logic is an invaluable tool, and I believe we should try to understand things beyond our current limits.
I just also believe we need to admit what those limits are, and always remember our fallibility.
Chesterton's Fence asserts that the reason for the fence can be clearly known, though.
I'm saying there are limits to what we can truly know or understand as humans.
I don't think the rationalist community as a whole really accepts that, at least not to the extent I do.
Chesterton's Fence isn't really relevant to that proposition, I think.
Is there something I’m missing as to why this is on HN? Was this written by an ai, or is it’s relevance that it name drops Peter Thiel?
Whoa. Somehow my brain skipped over that 3rd sentence, and I read the whole thing 3 times. My bad.
Without having read a line yet, I'm betting the article goes against "polite conversation", and ventures into trying to say something interesting, and this is the "pearl clutching" that usually accompanies such a thing.
Let's see...
Plus, my point wasn't on the article (which I hadn't read), but on the comment (which I had).