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Comment by Lambent_Cactus | Hacker News Reader

The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth.

Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling with the effects his memo might have had on such a complex environment, or even sticking to pursuing the empirical facts about his claims, he decided to pursue a career as a right-wing micro-celebrity, only engaging with conservative activists and alt-right trolls. And he's been stuck there ever since, with his fellow culture warriors clapping each other on their backs about what brave heretics they are, instead of getting back to building anything interesting.

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> Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company.

perhaps you missed the part where he was defamed and slandered in international press. his name became shorthand for a crude stereotype of a bigoted tech bro, totally undeservedly, for (very!) gently questioning the policies of a giant publicly-traded company.

I think you can draw parallels between that trajectory and the dynamics of "censorship" (moderation) on big social media platforms.

You compare Twitter vs. Gab or Reddit vs. Voat, and these free speech alternatives get stuck in that alt-right filter bubble precisely because social media moderation has been largely (certainly not entirely) effective at targeting hatred and toxicity. When you only ban a bunch of hateful toxic people from your platform, any competing platform for the banned will be dominated by hateful toxic people, and nobody wants to be a part of that. If Reddit bans cat pictures tomorrow, suddenly there is a huge opportunity open for a competing platform that can appeal to wide mainstream audiences. This dynamic helps keep social media moderation in check.

Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships. If that wasn't the case, then all he would be left with is the path he seems to have taken - align with a camp in the culture wars and seek exposure through identity-based media.

>Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships.

Why would the opportunity to change the organizational system have anything to do with whether there was any truth to what he said?

Just being right doesn't create such opportunities.

It is not enough to know the truth when there are trillions of reasons ($) to preserve the lie.

It is easy: 1. ban inconvenient views on popular platforms. Start with disgusting views ("think of the children" is a great start), when extend (it helps when there are people who can be offended by anything--encourage it) 2. flood marginal platforms with trolls/provocateurs 3. point at the disgusting content your trolls generated and claim that anybody who uses the uncensored services is disgusting by association.

War is peace.

You were right about this for a while, although I sympathized with his bitterness. But now he actually ended up getting into art and he's really good. Check out his Twitter feed sometime.

Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.

I did actually check out his twitter feed before writing this, where I saw that his bio, pinned tweet, and several of his most recent tweets (https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1456653034671517703, https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1453034087036424194, https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1448325924756332546), are all about either the memo controversy or other culture war grist. It's who he has decided to be.

Some of the AI-generated art is nice though, so more power to him on that.

His pinned tweet is great. Never has a simple "lol" more sharply skewered elite hypocrisy. They want your opinion on how to boldly change things, but only if it agrees with their pre-existing orthodoxy on how to boldly change things. They're the exact same as the people they criticize in that article, if not far worse. The author of the piece he QTed is editor of Wired.com, one of the most vicious hate-brigaders and misinformers during the Damore affair.

The other ones you link are a little boring I grant. But I notice you're filtering away all the jokes and art and focusing on culture war things. Interesting choice there given that I was trying to draw your attention to the other stuff.

He doesn't just do AI art. He does beautiful original art. First tweet after the pinned one. It was quite striking to me, but seems you didn't notice it.

Consider asking yourself who is the one blinkered by obsession with the culture war?

>Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company.

How do you think regimes normally deal with dissent? Extreme violence makes for vivid imagery but it’s not typical. Usually, it’s as simple as threatening to fire you from respectable employment and education. This is how the entire Eastern Bloc kept a lid on things.

The Eastern Bloc did ... kind of a lot of violent coercion? The penalty for jumping the Berlin Wall was not losing your job.

Yes, but being shot was not the fate of a typical dissident under late socialism. Gentler states like that of Hungary also managed to suppress dissident and not with bullets. More typical is the following:

>Konrád lost his job by order of the political police in July 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse's aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.

Orders of the political police are backstopped by violence. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing?

Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.

All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?

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