Paul Graham speaks out against cancel culture | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham speaks out against cancel culture

twitter.com

50 pointsandyxor31 comments

Twitter promotes infestations and festering.

Paul comes with a pretty obvious take and the witch hunters come in and prove his point. It's like they can't stand criticism of their culture. They can't see how detrimental it is. How stifling it is to free expression and exchange of ideas.

To them everything is dogma.

Disagreement with someone's point of view is not engaging in a witch-hunt - which PG himself states in that thread.

It seems like you're the one unable to see past their dogma.

No, the poster is correctly identifying cancel and woke culture as dogmatic.

From their point of view there are two options: You are either enlightened and agree with their cause or you have yet to see the light. There is no difference between this and dogmatic interpretation of religion. The cancel part is a social inquisition carried out by public shaming and a goal of ostracization

This is a mythical view of cancel culture, and it's driven entirely by arseholes who have realised that people are now prepared to call them arseholes.

"I'm being cancelled" they yell, from the front page of a national newspaper.

It's telling that the small number of white people denied jobs because they behave like cunts get all the attention.

The very many people denied jobs because they're women or because they're black or because they're LGBT+ don't ever meet your threshold for attention, do they? Why is that?

It is my interpretation on seeing people (who I don't necessarily agree with) being silenced. I see from the other comments that there is no consensus on the term "cancel culture" itself so that certainly doesn't help the conversation.

I dislike the notion of a mob and public shaming. Regardless of the individual receiving the attention. And I am appalled by the current direction of legal censorship in our democracies.

Hate will not go away by outlawing hateful speech. Racism will not go away by outlawing racist speech. Freedom of speech is, and must be, absolute.

You possibility to get a job should not be determined by the way you look and your sexual preference. It also shouldn't be determined by corporations fearful of reprisals caused by a momentarily stir on social media.

My attention is not an the individual being discriminated but on the downwards slope of categorizing, in ever smaller groups, based on skin color or similar.

I am an individual. You are an individual. I demand to be seen as one and I demand to see you as one.

How in the world has dang not removed this filth?

It seems to me that everyone has a different idea of what it means to be cancelled and what the culture is around that. I can be rebuked (an expression of sharp disapproval or criticism), I can be censured (the expression of formal disapproval) I can be given a fine, put in jail, fired from my job, kicked off social media, or any number of things that could be called "cancelled." The people who have recently exhibited a zeal for cancelling people form a group of some sort. I'm not sure who these people are. It's different for different types of cancelling. I'm confused by the whole issue.

Cancelling is an exercise of power.

What we're seeing these days it how social media can be used to easily create a large angry mob and focus it upon someone by attacking their family, their friends, their employer and anyone associated with them with the intent of silencing or hurting that individual, regardless of any collateral damage. And I really believe the instigators do it because they get off on that exercise of power.

There's nothing good about it, as it can only lead to a chilling effect as no one will feel free to say anything counter to what is a very small minority (a 1%) who are vocal.

As attributed to Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU: "You don’t stop hateful acts by censoring speech. You do so with more speech."

I get it now. Thanks. In the 70's we used to say people were on a 'power trip' and you would call people out for power tripping. It seems a natural result of outrage culture. Some outraged people are bound to want to do something so they organize other outraged people to do something. People learned to 'gang up' on others in grade school. It really is very immature and the opposite of exercising wisdom, control and maturity.

The problem with social media is that it is very easy to find many "like-minded" people throughout the world, regardless of how insane their collective opinion is.

The fact that we have flat-earth groups and so many anti-vaxxers is a good example.

The issue right now is how wide the surface area is. People stand up on global soapboxes, and in turn, something you say on Twitter (or said 5 or 10 years ago) comes back to bite you in places where you never even came close to saying something like that. People take snapshots of what you say and assemble them to try to make unequivocal statements about who you are as a person. And the goal is not usually to "rehabilitate" the person, offering lenience and good-faith, and questioning what they meant to say; instead, people seem to want to see bridges burnt.

There's permanence to what we say on the internet, but there's not permanence to what the culture says you are allowed to say. People are getting retroactively canceled for things that were fine at the time, which I think can be an issue. Remember how people behaved in video games as little as 5 or 10 years ago?

It's stifling, and frustrating. It makes you afraid to have a personality, but at the same time it makes having the courage to have a personality more meaningful.

This is a very valid point, but isn't it kind of the same for most topics? More often than not, well-intentioned people have to move towards more specific, contextual definitions in order to avoid broad, empty statements.

Might be that I'm a pedantic a-hole, but I'm asking "what do you mean by X, exactly?" all the time.

Concerning "canceling" specifically, I agree there's a lot of fluff, but there are also valid points and concerns behind it all.

I'm confused by the whole issue.

You aren’t the only one, partly because the people complaining about it the most are pretty obnoxious in their own right (PG excepted).

Agreed. I always assumed the term “cancel culture” was a partisan broad brush created and wielded by right-leaning media to tar young people with honestly-held but perhaps loudly and annoyingly-expressed convictions about the appalling state of the world and our toxic public discourse in the age of Trump and Twitter.

Seeing Rupert Murdoch come out against it all pretty much settled the question for me: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25/fox-mogul....

I think if someone starts talking to you about “cancel culture” like you’re supposed to know what that means, it’s a fair bet that they’re leading into a partisan political position.

EDIT: Haha, I’m being cancelled

At this point the term has been abused by the right-wing in its persecution complex narrative so thoroughly that literally any disagreement, criticism or social activism which can be interpreted as "progressive" is interpreted as "cancel culture." It's just a catch-all pejorative for any opinion publicly expressed by any "leftist," anywhere.

Ironically, this is currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565861. Calling for both RMS and those who allowed him to rejoin the board of the FSF to be removed.

Cue people calling for PG to be cancelled in 5, 4, 3...

By speaking out about cancel culture, he is technically defending those who have been cancelled - thus he is only 1 hop away, and by his own equation, should be cancelled.

Well, there's an attempt to flag him off his own site, so...

Well, this conversation was flagged already like 5 times (at least)

The problem with cancel culture is the same as with any other topic nowadays. It is being hugely polarised to a point where one cannot have a nuanced view anymore.

Cancel culture is real, but the opposite is very true as well.

Not everyone who has lost their job has been a victim of cancel culture. If someone has sexually harassed someone else or was verbally or physically abusive to people then of course they will lose their job. That is a simple matter of being held accountable for their actions. People who do wrong must be held accountable and take responsibility for it.

However, there are also real cases of cancel culture. Cancel culture is clear when people are not allowed ever rehabilitate after having made a mistake. The fact that Kevin Hart has been forced out of the Golden Globes because of a mistake he has made more than a decade ago is cancel culture. The fact that people want to force Kevin Hart to repeatedly have to apologise for a mistake which he has already taken full responsibility for and apologised when it happened is ridiculous. At some point people must be allowed to look towards the future and not grieve forever in the past.

If we cannot forgive people for mistakes and allow them to participate in society again then why don't we just execute everyone who has ever done a single mistake? What's the point of further living when the cancel culture brigade wants to shut down someone's life entirely? If people are never allowed to be hired again then what shall they do? Shall tax payers pay for them or shall we literally just let them starve to death?

Not allowing people to move on from mistakes is really dangerous. If anything we should empower people who have learned from their past mistakes and give them a voice so they can teach new generations to not repeat their own mistakes. Shutting someone down who has taken full responsibility, learned from their mistakes and moved on is not helpful at all.

To me cancel culture is the act of people wanting to shut someone down not for correcting the original mistake but to harm the individual person out of spite and hate. Hate doesn't have an expiry date which is why the cancel culture folks can never forgive someone who has made a mistake. We need to be careful that we don't give too much power and voice to the people who act out of hate.

Kevin Hart is a good example of why many people don’t believe in “Cancel Culture” as a widespread phenomenon. Despite having a visible consequence for something he once did, he’s doing better than ever:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxbusiness.com/features/ke...

A politically incorrect interpretation of cancel culture is that it's like a religion, except for the forgiveness being missing.

Those screaming about nuance in situations where people are cancelled are quick to paint "the mob" in the least nuanced light possible. Not surprising why.

Probably because those who scream the loudest influence the view on the following group. Is this different than any other situation such as Trump and his supporters?

I suppose not. I guess the homogeneity of opinion on this forum is a little surprising to me is all.

This is super important. And like he said, people who stand to defend those falsely accused, they get targeted and cancelled.

all rational persons should agree that cancel culture is cancer..

Like any rule, this too can have an exception.

However, this exception needs to be specified objectively ahead of the incident. And it should be uniformly applied.

When folks see that this is not done, it gives rise to speculation and lack of trust.

@dang can we fix the editorialising in the HN post title please? (Currently "Paul Graham speaks out against cancel culture")

I'd suggest "PG on signs of a witch hunt" or something similar?

Is this true, though? I don't think there was ever "I saw Joe Bystander selling a loaf of bread to Goody Proctor!" in historical witch hunts, whether the Salem one or the McCarthy.

I mean, sure, it might be a sign of poor judgment, but why is it a "characteristic sign of a witch hunt"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com