Heresy
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
"Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased."
Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit. You don't even need to go back a few hundred years; look at the number of people persecuted by the government (both through the courts and outside of it) for things like blasphemy, subversion, civil rights, sexual deviancy (homosexuality, among other things), etc. just a few decades ago. In the US burning the flag was illegal in many states until the late 80s when the SCOTUS declared it was legal under the 1st (and only by a 5-4 majority).
Yes, there are some developments I am not especially pleased with either, but it's also important to remember the historical context.
Anyway, I liked this piece of nuance.
I think a lot of the issue revolves around us celebrating our differences rather than trying to polarise them.
But clearly scientific evidence (ie lack of witchcraft) also play a part.
The vibe I get from the post is just that, being OK with people having a different point of view without having an adverse reaction. Maybe another component to it is the black box algorithms of major platforms that may magnify differences of opinion or 'filter bubbles' as it were.
It is, today, challenged from all sides. What PG et al. call "free speech" was just the peace of a political moment. In every other era "free speech" is a demand with costs; we should expect that to be the default.
Both of these statements are true in the macro, but if you look at the trends, they point to a very disturbing line.
The call for the restriction of free speech on the right(1) and the left (2) have increased in very different ways and seem to be increasing, both legislatively and socially. The same can be said of gun violence. We reached an all time low in 2018 (I believe - it might have been 2017) but have been trending upwards ever since.
Most (reasonable) people agree that an effort should be made to curb gun violence, even if they can't agree on the best route to get there. The attack on free speech, however seems to have cheering sections from all sides. As far as the government is concerned, sanctions on the first amendment would be a boon, but the groundswell from the populace in the form of right and left "cancelation" (or whatever BS term you wish to call it) hasn't been seen since McCarthy. Given the rise in the public square with social media, and you have national feeding frenzies with public "witch trials" to take our minds off of inflation, oil prices, pollution and multiple global conflicts of questionable national interest.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-free-speech-is-under-attack...
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/566119-for-the-left-a-...
There is also a lot of hysteria going on; that Maus "controversy" which your CVS article cites (among others) is a good example. The concerns were over some nudity and profanity. You may think that's prudish or a bit childish, but fine, it's not really something especially unusual to be concerned about, or a very new "taboo" to be concerned about. It certainly wasn't an attempt at removing any education about the Holocaust from the curriculum, yet that it often how it was framed. With the author of Maus going so far to openly question whether these people might have neo-Nazi sympathies in an interview.
That there are some instances of unfounded hysteria doesn't mean there are also things that are not; but again, it's good to keep some perspective.
No, they were not. The only nudity in it were mouses. It was not erotic. It did not included ressembleable human parts. This was not about prudity, it was about excuse. It was not childish, it was cynical.
> It certainly wasn't an attempt at removing any education about the Holocaust from the curriculum, yet that it often how it was framed.
The thing about Maus is that it makes you feel bad. It is made from point of view of victim. It is not even idealizing the victims, it does not require the victim to be that great perfect person so that you feel bad about him. Maus also does not end with happy end where they lived happily ever after. It shows long term damage.
> With the author of Maus going so far to openly question whether these people might have neo-Nazi sympathies in an interview.
Did you considered looking at who those people specifically are and what other things they said or done? Or did you just rejected what he said, because it would feel bad for you if he actually was right?
[1]: https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...
They're not merely "expressing opinions", they're teaching children "facts" of disputed veracity and appropriateness.
>these teachers are not hurting anyone or disrupting any civil processes
That's the crux of the whole debate, isn't it? By teaching these topics inappropriately or inappropriately early, they are potentially harming children, if, say, transgenderism is a social contagion.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/...
It says nothing whatever about "banning people from talking about certain things". It says (pp. 4-5):
"3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
In other words, it's the government making clear what the standards for "classroom instruction" are in schools run by the government. Exactly the same as the government has always done for schools run by the government. Teachers in public schools are always required to conduct their classroom instruction in accordance with the rules that the government sets down.
Now, let's consider a couple of examples. Suppose a teacher of a 3rd grade class happens to mention the fact that one of the students has a gay couple as parents. Is that violating the law? Of course not. The teacher is not conducting "classroom instruction" about sexual orientation or gender identity. The teacher is just stating a fact.
But suppose the teacher says: "There should be more couples like the parents of student A." Is that violating the law? It might be. If the teacher was very careful to explicitly state that this statement was just the teacher's opinion and was not part of classroom instruction, and if no student's grade on anything depended on whether or not they agreed with the teacher, then it would not be violating the law. But if the teacher made such a statement part of classroom instruction, and gave students assignments based on it, and graded them based on whether they agreed with it, then that would be violating the law.
Note that this is no different from any other area of instruction.
Allowing parents to sue for DJ, or request a special magistrate be appointed, with reimbursement of attorneys' fees, is pretty different.
> If the teacher was very careful to explicitly state that this statement was just the teacher's opinion and was not part of classroom instruction, and if no student's grade on anything depended on whether or not they agreed with the teacher, then it would not be violating the law.
I think this is a very curious and unlikely distinction.
A 1st grade teacher who wants to read "Heather Has Two Mommies" to the class because there's been questions about April's two moms shouldn't face litigation and censure.
Look, there's a lot of benefits to students to mention that not all families look the same and to seek to use inclusive language. The kids who have an absent dad or a parent that has died benefit as much as anyone from kids understanding that families may look different ways and it's OK.
Another key point is that the law affects other situations. Some high school students are experimenting with other pronouns at school, and feel they would be unsafe at home if this was reported to their parents. This law outlaws this practice of teachers respecting students' preference of what they're called and not telling Dad, unless we meet a relatively high bar of being able to prove that it is likely dangerous.
> In other words, it's the government making clear what the standards for "classroom instruction" are in schools run by the government.
Yes, and this is clearly a state power that needs to be used responsibly. The moment we start prohibiting the discussion of certain political and social views, or e.g. evolution, we've lost.
First, the parents have to work through the school district first. The district has 30 days to address their concerns.
Second, giving ordinary people an actual legal channel to pursue a remedy, without bankrupting them with legal costs, is the sort of thing there should be more of. One of the biggest problems with our legal system in general is that it is unaffordable unless you're a corporation or a wealthy individual.
> A 1st grade teacher who wants to read "Heather Has Two Mommies" to the class because there's been questions about April's two moms shouldn't face litigation and censure.
First, the teacher won't; the school district will. Nothing in the law makes teachers legally liable. All the liability is on the school district.
Second, the teacher is not the sole judge of what's appropriate in the classroom. Parents have to have a voice.
> This law outlaws this practice of teachers respecting students' preference of what they're called and not telling Dad, unless we meet a relatively high bar of being able to prove that it is likely dangerous.
Where does the law say that?
More generally, whether the student likes it or not, their parents are their parents and are responsible for raising them. The right thing for the teacher to do in this kind of situation would be to bring the parent into the discussion themselves, so the teacher can support the student directly in that discussion, not to help the student to go behind the parent's back.
Of which the parents are the sole judge of whether their concerns were adequately addressed before pursuing litigation.
> Second, giving ordinary people an actual legal channel to pursue a remedy, without bankrupting them with legal costs, is the sort of thing there should be more of.
Or, alternatively, giving nuisance litigators a way to make money if they find a plaintiff, which is what laws that provide injunctive-relief-plus-legal-costs tend to do.
> First, the teacher won't; the school district will. Nothing in the law makes teachers legally liable. All the liability is on the school district.
The teacher will absolutely face litigation and censure, which are the words I used. They won't have any monetary liability.
> Second, the teacher is not the sole judge of what's appropriate in the classroom. Parents have to have a voice.
You're free to argue that with your local school district's elected body, etc, instead of putting in place legislation which will cow all of these districts into preventing any such discussion.
It's funny how people love to move things to more local levels of government, until those bodies are not doing what they like. Then, it's time for legislative bodies to set standards for the whole state, country, etc.
> The right thing for the teacher to do in this kind of situation would be to bring the parent into the discussion themselves, so the teacher can support the student directly in that discussion, not to help the student to go behind the parent's back.
Sorry-- disagree. Students should be allowed to confide in educators and expect that those confidences will not be betrayed, unless there is an actual acute danger to the students in question. If a student wants to talk to me about not wanting to pursue the career path their parents have in mind, I'm allowed to talk to them, provide information on this, and I'm not expected to "snitch". But if the student asks me to call them "they/them", suddenly things should be super different? Spare me the pearl clutching.
Look, social mores about gender are fundamentally changing, and this is something that is going to happen. You just get to choose how much it sucks for kids in the process.
This law is intended to provide a small number of parents with an implicit veto over what is taught within their local school districts. It does so by placing the judgement over whether a conflict is "resolved" with the parents, and then empowering those parents to initiate a legal procedure that must be paid for by the school district (in the case of a special magistrate) or specifically contemplates "damages", attorney's fees, etc, being awarded to the parent who complains.
As there are no particular limits declared in the law, no school board can withstand a large enough number of attacks being conducted "in parallel", each of which must be paid for by the board.
What I find at least a little interesting is that there doesn't appear to be any contemplation of what happens when a parent sues in the opposite direction -- specifically saying that X and Y are age- and developmentally-appropriate topics for classroom instruction, and to avoid teaching them is inappropriate.
Maybe that's a stretch. But it doesn't really matter, because it's up to the parent to decide if their issue has been "resolved"...and the parent can just go straight to court if they don't like the answer.
Litigation? No. As I've already said, the teachers aren't legally liable. The school district is. So it's the school district that faces litigation, not the teacher.
Censure? By whom? By the parents? Well, yes, if the teacher is doing something that the parents strongly disagree with, they should expect to be censured by the parents.
Censure by someone else? Who? And on what basis? If it's because other people also think what the teacher did is wrong, isn't that, again, just what should be expected? And if other people don't think what the teacher did is wrong, why would they censure the teacher?
> Students should be allowed to confide in educators and expect that those confidences will not be betrayed
I don't see where the law requires a teacher to reveal something the student told them in confidence. The law says teachers should encourage the student to talk to the parents, but it doesn't require the teachers themselves to talk to the parents. (I agree that this means the teacher is not required to do what I suggested in my previous post, to bring the parents into the discussion themselves. I still think it's a good idea if it can be done, but it's not required by the law.) Nor does the law require teachers to reveal something that isn't part of the student's school record--which a confidential conversation wouldn't be. And the school district can't prohibit a teacher from talking to the parents, but it can't require them to either.
> if the student asks me to call them "they/them", suddenly things should be super different?
Nothing in the law singles out this kind of discussion between a student and a teacher. But note that asking the teacher to call them "they/them" in public is not a confidential request. (If it's just in private between the student and teacher and not in the public classroom, that's different.)
> social mores about gender are fundamentally changing
And there are deep divisions in our society about such changes. A teacher might have strong opinions on one side or the other. But as a teacher, they should not be pushing their personal agenda. They should be respecting all viewpoints, and that includes the viewpoints of the parents. If a teacher believes that any parent who objects to their child wanting to be called "they/them" is automatically abusing that child, that teacher has a personal agenda that should not be allowed to intrude into the school environment.
> You just get to choose how much it sucks for kids in the process.
I certainly agree that having adults in their lives who strongly disagree about basic aspects of life sucks for kids. But that strong disagreement is not just the fault of parents who are unwilling to consider change and let their kids explore new things. Ideologues who push their agendas on kids without regard for the viewpoints of the other adults in those kids' lives bear responsibility too.
The teacher will not have to deal with the litigation? They're not going to have to show up to depositions, have their actions scrutinized and mocked by opposing counsel, etc?
In practice, this gives every parent a veto right: they can say they're not satisfied with what the district did, and tie educators up in litigation and cost the district a bunch of money.
> I don't see where the law requires a teacher to reveal something the student told them in confidence.
If Thomas says that he'd like to be called "Tom", this is a longstanding request that we'd have always complied with. We'd also typically ask how he'd like to be referred to on his report card and if this is something his parents know.
If Thomas says that they would prefer the pronoun 'she' and like to be called "Tammy"-- we're going to have to create a record of it. If Tammy then says she does not want her parents to know this, we still cannot withhold the information.
> And there are deep divisions in our society about such changes. A teacher might have strong opinions on one side or the other. But as a teacher, they should not be pushing their personal agenda. They should be respecting all viewpoints, and that includes the viewpoints of the parents.
In general, when it comes to the courtesy of names, and now pronouns: we do what students request. With information that students indicate their parents would not approve of, we keep confidences. If they say they don't want to be a nurse like Mom and Dad want, and are thinking of an alternative path, we advise them as best as we can. If they say they want to be referred to be 'she' and their parents will freak out, we keep it in confidence.
> Ideologues who push their agendas on kids without regard for the viewpoints of the other adults in those kids' lives bear responsibility too.
I don't favor "pushing agendas" on kids. But the kids are talking about gender and sexuality among themselves in terms largely unfamiliar to you and me, and there's major social change underfoot. Kids deserve teachers that will A) respect reasonable requests made by students for how they are addressed, B) keep confidences, and C) help them navigate this new world as best as we can. Pushing these concerns into the dark or being a conduit directly to parents is not beneficial for student safety or mental health. If you think these changes are largely driven by school staff I think you are highly confused.
I heavily disagree with this idea that the parent should be brought into a discussion involving their child when the parent is a danger to their children. This goes against how abuse should be handled in any other circumstance. A teacher should absolutely be going behind the parents' backs when they suspect the child is in danger or is being abused such that they can assist the child in getting out of the dangerous/abusive situation.
How do you know when a parent is a danger to their children? Who gets to decide? On what basis?
The answer for this law is that the state already has criteria for that, and those criteria are to be used. Which means the teacher's personal opinion, by itself, is not enough. And that's as it should be. If the teacher really believes the parent is a danger to their children, they have a process they can follow to get that judgment checked by others, and if necessary acted on. But they can't just cut the parent out of the process based on their personal opinion. That's what this law says, and it's correct.
Surely there's some kind of continuum between "needs to be immediately removed from the home by the state, with all evidence in hand to demonstrate this" and "will be supportive and react reasonably to something the student is expressing at school."
Teachers routinely keep confidences for their kids. We hear about doubts in parents politics, doubts in the choices that have been made for their future, etc. We are expected to help kids express their own opinions and keep those confidences.
Outing some trans kids is going to get them thrown out on the street by their parents, beaten, or worse. That's a guaranteed consequence of this law. I think you know that, deep down.
You are exactly the type of educator this law is intended to target — quite necessarily, as your comments demonstrate.
> We are expected to help kids express their own opinions and keep those confidences.
You should not be keeping secrets from students’ parents in the first place.
You are not the parent; it is not your call.
> Outing some trans kids is going to get them thrown out on the street by their parents, beaten, or worse.
Actual abuse is illegal. Report it through proper channels.
You do not get to usurp parental authority simply because you think some parents won’t agree with your politics.
I'm a parent too. I believe that my kids should be able to be their own people at school. I don't know everything that happens with them there.
> You are exactly the type of educator this law is intended to target
I don't work for a government entity. But nice try at being vaguely menacing.
> You should not be keeping secrets from students’ parents in the first place.
I'm just curious if this is what you really think. Anything that happens at school-- anything kids express-- should be rolled up in journal form and provided to the parent? Or is there any role for discretion?
> Actual abuse is illegal. Report it through proper channels.
Waiting for actual harm sounds bad. And there's plenty of harm that's legal or nearly so: if they want to force the kid to leave home on their 18th birthday because of what I told them, that still sucks.
Before one points out there is already child protective services- functionally, child protective services is overwhelmed, underfunded, and overworked. They are shockingly ineffective through little fault of their own.
>or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards
This could easily, under the US legislative framework, be interpreted as extending beyond the 3rd grade. The law does not, actually, strictly, limit this to 3rd grade or lower. This line, as I understand it, makes it so the law can be applied to other grade levels as well, because they can simply say its not "age appropriate" or "developmentally appropriate" at any level.
I don't think its an accident this line is worded in a way that would allow this.
The or makes it quite clear this is the intent:
> Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3
So, no instruction in K-3 is permitted.
> or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
And in 4-12, it may only be age appropriate / developmentally appropriate as determined by state standards. (E.g. it's not an independent finding of fact by the court as to whether what you said to a bunch of 11th graders was age appropriate.)
Hence, the layman’s one liner of “Don’t Say Gay”
Why on earth the Republican Party and it’s voter base is so concerned with non heteronormative information making it’s way into classrooms, where what is suppose to be the fundamental place where our youth are suppose to learn about the world and what things are, has always baffled me.
It’s a disservice to children and adults frankly. It’s not like these things just disappear because people disagree with them.
> Of course not. ... The teacher is just stating a fact.
A lot of "classroom instruction" is stating facts. You're instructing the children about what these facts are. The law seems very vague on where this line is going to fall.
(The other issue is the extreme lack of consideration of the possibility that parental-abuse is the problem you're now required to inform the parents their child has complained about in the other sections of the bill...)
If "no", how do you square that with "teachers can say anything they like"? I mean literally no employment is like that (try publicly saying your employer is evil, see how long you last...). Private speech != employee speech.
To your point, though, the law is not about porn; that's already illegal. The law is about literally telling children that gay people exist; unless you believe gay couples are somehow inherently sexual in a way that straight couples aren't, you're off the mark here.
It doesn't even make sense. Teach your kid curiosity and general respect for those different from you and let the rest fall into place. Politics only tarnishes your ability to make this common sense observation because regardless of truth you have discarded half of your audience.
Except pineapple pizza people. They deserve everything they got coming to them.
It's worth noting that the Florida law, under some readings and I think under its intent, would make it illegal for a teacher to point to a student and her same-sex parents and say "those two women are married and are both raising this child." It's perhaps the most absurd anti-free-speech law I've ever heard of.
> Except pineapple pizza people. They deserve everything they got coming to them.
My boyfriend was a pineapple pizza person and he is now, no joke, allergic to pineapple. They're an accident waiting to happen.
As someone who likes pineapple and jalapeno pizza, I find this remark very offensive.
These examples would be relevant if there were factions who vehemently oppose people with sleeveless shirts or who prefer broccoli, and want to make sure they can pass that opposition on to their children.
The bill doesn't prohibit "saying gay".
The bill prohibits discussing sexual orientation. Straight and gay alike. Personally I think that at those ages basically all discussion of sex should be off limits (except strictly in a biological sense "this is where you pee" or "naked boys look like this drawing and naked girls like that drawing").
Also your argument is a nasty bait-and-switch. Your original comment was about "limiting freedom of speech of teachers is bad" but then you switched to "of course we should limit freedom of speech for teachers, but not in this specific case".
To use a different example: a public bus driver shouldn’t be fired for an offhand comment. But they have to drive the routes the government tells them to drive. That’s not a “freedom of movement” issue.
We expect teachers to be robots when we want to chastise them, but we expect teachers to be surrogate parents when they're helping turn students into productive members of society.
An interesting nuance to this particular case is that it is the state government that is imposing the requirement while it is a local (city, town or county) government which hires the teachers.
Besides, I bet I can think of a looong list of human beliefs once held dear by many people you'd strongly object to being taught in public schools. It's not a free speech issue, because it's paid for by taxpayers, and kids are forced to attend it.
While I agree that the people should have a say in what gets taught, and that includes culture, in certain cases that say is (and needs to be) inherently limited. For example, if 90% of people would vote that some 10% minority should have limited rights, they should not (and do not) get a say about that, that minority deserves equal protection from state action no matter what the taxpayers or voters want.
And arguably (though the exact details matter) "don't say gay" legislation violates that by having state agents (i.e. teachers and administrators) apply unequal discriminatory treatment to those employees and students who are gay.
If you really look at it, the left/right dichotomy in US politics seems designed (evolved?) to serve much the same purpose.
When we all calm down on the partisanship, often it's amazing how much shared ground there really is.
Efforts by the ruling class to pit the working classes against themselves have been noted in Western capitalist societies for at least 150 years.
1. "Fuck Jesus, fuck America, kill all men."
2. "Fuck BLM, fuck diversity."
Which one do you think would get me cancelled?
Conservatives have comically little social power. Further, you can basically say anything you want around them, while conversations with the average liberal are a careful affair.
Perhaps though I am blind. Are there contemporary instances of conservative driven cancellations? The definition I like of cancellation is: removing privileges from a person when their qualities do not predict harmful use of those privileges.
For example, in the CBS article you linked, with regard to the parents, schools, CRT issue: I acknowledge the parents are restricting speech, but I don't think it violates the spirit of free speech. Teachers can say whatever they like, and parents are free choose what their kids listen to. On the same note, I think it is fine for schools to be forced to omit creationism when discussing evolution.
On defining cancellation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30770206
My personal axe to grind on left driven cancel culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977399
Fox is comfortably the most popular cable news network in America -- and that lends it a lot of social power among people who get most of their news from cable. They don't care what idiots on Twitter are saying, except as filtered through the news they consume.
I talk to conservatives who get furious at the suggestion that Joe Biden isn't a pedophile, or trans-women are women and not also pedophiles.
However, this is my bubble --I don't know which is "real".
Does their reaction have any odds of extending beyond your discussion with them into your friendship with them, other relationships, your job, or your public reputation?
> The problem with this kind of argument is that it's very hard to be sure you aren't trapped in your "bubble"
It definitely could be my bubble. A lot of the strength behind my opinion formed while living in Seattle and mingling with the locals.
An anecdote: I once was at a friends birthday, and was seated next to a mutual friend I'd had for a year. She asked if I had been to the women's march, and I said "sorry no, I didn't have the time." She said "everybody has the time" and I said "I feel uncomfortable at marches." She said that's not a reason. I said "Okay, the real reason was I didn't have the hat." After that we were no longer friends.
Interacting with the left in the southwest has been a significantly better experience.
Would teachers being fired merely for being gay count?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gay-teache...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/10/27/gay-...
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-teacher-i-was...
(three different ones there, there's more in the googles.)
> Teachers can say whatever they like
Except to say that they're gay, it seems.
Fired for discussing sex and gender with students: debatable.
Fired for being gay at a Catholic school: much like I'm fine with Hasidic Jews, Mormons, or Muslims doing "backward" things to maintain their enclaves, so too am I fine with Catholics doing it. Do I want all of society to be like this: please god no.
Whether all of this changes my opinion: no, but I will keep my mind more open. I think more examples, especially ones in public schools could change my mind.
I can also hear an argument against enclaves of the sort I spoke of above having less freedom. I don't have a great one in support of it to begin with. The topic is very messy.
Colin Kaepernick is the most obvious.
Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.
I think Graham is slightly missing the point about our period. It's not that heresy is on the up, so much as it's on the move. Outrage is a homeless beast. We're in an Orwellian age where it changes with the seasons, so what is heresy in one place and time is a tepid platitude only next door the following week.
Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik. It would have once been "dangerous" (at least in a fairly pedestrian job) to say that Google is a crappy old search engine, Facebook is a threat to democracy and Microsoft are corrupt criminals. Today it's practically de rigueur to cock a snook at jaded icons. It's practically a credential.
That’s an interesting, because I suppose at the moment that group would include all through have been historically or currently disadvantaged or discriminated against.
Today’s axiom, at least in liberal countries is ‘you can punch up, but not down’ somewhat different in totalitarian regimes.
Well said and true.
> it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik.
Pretty sure this modality of power has been with us since ancient days. (The beast may be homeless but there is always a beast master.)
There are different types of power, and what I think we're seeing is that whip traditionally those different types of power have rested in the same individuals, that's not so true anymore.
Financial and political power is still mostly where it's always been. Social power has been democratized far more and far more quickly in recent years, to the point that those same groups that have the financial and political power no longer mostly control it.
I think the mercurial appearance of how that power is wielded is also easily explained. Like any revolutionaries that take power, they are often unrestrained in it's use as they are not used to the problems of wielding it.
Whether the status quo can ever develop into a more restrained arbiter if social justice remains to be seen. As long as the young are the majority of the social scenes used in the decision process (the social networks of the moment) I doubt it, but the demographics of these networks are shifting year by year and those that have been using them longer are learning the trade and solidifying their bases, and those ones making enough money to also join the other power structures. Perhaps in another decade or two this will just be viewed as another period of large change, like civil rights and woman entering the workplace, and the social narrative will again be controlled like it traditionally has.
For most I imagine that thought has parts of both comfort and dread.
Yes. What we see as mob rule now may mature into something not unlike a real polis. But (see my recent comment on vigilante speeding cameras) technology may give us a civil arms race that just drives a wedge further down the middle.
That doesn't work if/when a value claimed by those in power is to turn the other cheek. At least if it is followed, then this wouldn't be accurate.
The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi who was using this quote to claim that Jewish people run the world.
It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work, but autistic people clearly aren't running the world through some secret cabal.
This is called the Genetic Fallacy, it is completely irrelevant who said anything as long as that thing is true and/or useful. Nobody owns words. Aristotle supported slavery, you don't interrupt every logic lecture with "You know the source of those funny terms is a literal slavery supporter?" do you?.
>It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work
This common retort completely misses the point, voltaire's rule of thumb is just that, it's a heuristic, an extremely good one for detecting and finding hegemonic ideologies, but not an algorithm. A necessary but not sufficient condition.
The kind of offense is also different, nobody rages at you and assembles a mob because you made fun of an autistic person, at most you will get a cold stare and get ignored. Voltaire was talking about a different kind entirely of "Not allowed", the familiar hysteria coming from the fanatically religious when you speak ill of their idols, he was probably speaking about the church, but the wisdom is just as relevant to the new religions.
I'm well aware of the Genetic Fallacy. The post I was responding to was falsely attributing the quote to other sources. "Hey, somebody else said that" is relevant information. Discussion of fallacies is also largely worthless in ordinary conversation since we aren't actually making formal deductive arguments. It is completely reasonable for people to reason through other means than pure deductive logic.
And further, my post did not stop there.
> voltaire's rule of thumb
It is not Voltaire's rule of thumb. We just discussed this.
My point is that is irrelevant, it's the equivalent of correcting a misspelled comment in an open source repo and calling it a contribution, it is indeed, but a very minor one that makes little to no difference.
You also didn't clarify that the quote doesn't belong to voltaire, you simply stated that the other quote paraphrasing it is from a Nazi.
>"Hey, somebody else said that" is relevant information.
Only if you don't want to discuss the thing that is being said itself by vaguely referencing the heretic who said it and implying that discredits the thing being said in and of itself.
>Discussion of fallacies is also largely worthless in ordinary conversation since we aren't actually making formal deductive arguments
It's the exact opposite in fact. Fallacies are literally called "Informal Fallacies", they are coined to give names to common sloppy reasoning tactics and rhetorical tricks in informal everyday conversations and arguments.
They are worthless in formal deductive arguments because they are completely dependent on content and have no syntactical forms, unlike - say - deductive arguments like "If P Then Q, P, Therefore Q". Their usefulness is entirely in this kind of conversation where charged emotional words gets thrown left and right.
>And further, my post did not stop there.
Correct, it continues on to a naive misunderstanding of the quote.
>It is not Voltaire's rule of thumb.
I think you established that quite satisfactorily already, you can move on to other points.
Which groups can you "not criticize" in the US? Or, at the very least, criticizing which groups will generate the most backlash? I have my own perspective on this list, but I'm very interested in hearing yours. And then I'm interested in hearing you describe how these groups in particular are "in power."
I can never answer this question from a personal experience because I don't live in the US and never have, but I can give a noisy estimate from my experience of the (quite US-dominated) internet and global media ecosystem.
Here are groups you're not allowed to criticise on the internet without being held to much higher standards than most things :
- Gays
- Transgender people
- 'Progressive' ideas in general, which includes the above two as special cases but also things like feminism and racial minorities.
Those ideas are 'in power' in the sense that they are the semi-official ideologies of the public-facing institutional machinery of western countries: The EU and Euro-American news corporation will worry about the bigoted treatment of lgbt individuals even as an entire country of millions is threatened with an invasion, the UN has specialized bureaucratic organs for "Empowering Women" but not so for men, "Kill All Men" is a funny ironic joke you can make on twitter but "Kill All Women", or even the much milder "Good Morning I Hate Women", is a big bomb to blow anywhere, reddit admins - regardless of the subreddit - will routinely lock or delete any thread that even mentions that trans people are not the coolest thing since kittens were invented. I can go on and on.
Unless there is some actual secret shadow government operated by women, gay people, and transgender people, the existence of "Kill All Men" as a joke on Twitter is a rather intense indictment against the merits of the quote.
So in addition to being originally coined by a Nazi to argue that Jews secretly control the world, the quote is idiotic on its merits.
False distinction, people are machines inhabited by ideas, just like how programs inhabit computing machines. Ideas can't be in power, just like programs can never actually be "ran". Both are electromagnetic patterns in the physical medium of some computational architecture (mammalian brains/Von Neumann processors), "Ideas In Power" was a metaphorical shorthand by me, what's in power are people inhabited by those ideas, and the obvious result is that they mount strong resistence to any opposition and make it quite costly to criticize or make fun of their ideas.
>I think it is plain to see that gay people and transgender people are definitely not "in power" in the west in any special way.
They are, in the sense that their identities and thought patterns motivate and emotionlly charge people in institutions ranging from the white house to mega corportations to do things they might have otherwise not done, sometimes to the detriment of the institutions.
Your implicit argument seems to be:
- for a person to be in power, he/she/it has to wear funny clothes and be referred to with funny titles.
That's a very naive view of how power works. The catholic pope in the middle ages was never directly in charge of more than a small principality's worth of land and people (although he did wear funny clothes and was referred to with funny titles), yet he had immense power that spelled the downfall of the byzantine empire, demarcated the whole world between 2 other empires, and ignited a series of civil wars that killed millions. That's because his "Ideas were in power", i.e. the papal way of thinking and typical thought patterns inhabited people of immense power and motivated and charged them to behave and say as the pope behaves and says.
Ideologies essentially assemble people believing in them into super-organism, just like an ant colony can be a force to be reckoned with while an individual ant is a trivial organism; In the same way, one can say that gays, transgender people and feminist women/men are in power but none of them - individually - necessarily holds any special power.
(Note the 'feminist' modifier on women, it's quite disingenuous to equate women with feminism, one is an ideology, the other is a natural subset of humans whose vast majority haven't even heard of the ideology or care enough about it's first world problems).
>Unless there is some actual secret shadow government operated by women, gay people, and transgender people
That's quite a funny cartoonish version of the argument that you have constructed for yourself right here, the "secret" and "shadow" modifiers also serve no meaningful role other than to evoke a general vague sense of ridicule.
It almost never works like that, when communism were in global supremacy in the 1950s and the 1960s it wasn't a secret shadow government that controlled the world behind the scenes, it was a bunch of (sometimes contradictory) ideas that inhabited various powerful people and motivated and charged millions to live and work and die. Communism was in power. You were allowed to criticize Stalin or Lenin in plenty of times and places, in fact in some of those times and places you were even suspect if you didn't criticize them, but you were never allowed to criticize the Ideas in power, which were all a variant of communism.
The quote never actually says that
- The people in power are a single monolithic entity that is omniscient and omnipotent
- The people you aren't allowed to criticize are the same as the people in power
Which seems to be 2 implicit assumptions you keep making. It's most obvious interpretation is "When there are disproportionate costs to criticizing some idea or group or lifestyle, that idea or group or lifestyle is that of people who have dominion over you in some way or another". This is almost tautologically true: People in power will not be pleased to see anyone criticizing something they believe in.
>the quote is idiotic on its merits
Not the quote, the peculiar interpretation of it you have, which seems almost constructed to be easily refuted. The natural interpretation is so obvious as to be trivially true, which is to be expected of an aphorism.
This is an extremely strange definition of "in power." I donate a lot of money to the local food bank. This doesn't make it so that starving people are actually running my life.
Feel free to keep your conspiracies to yourself.
Is it? It's a rather straightforward one in my view, power is the ability to influence the real world. Do you have a simpler or more convincing definition?
>This doesn't make it so that starving people are actually running my life.
This is because donating your money is an entirely voluntary action to an inanimate object that only affects yourself. If you were donating the money of someone else, or if you were donating the time/work of someone else, then the starving people who benefit from those food banks would be indeed in power over you. They affect (through a complex indirect chain of cause and effect) the world so that you do things you have no good reason to do, that's power. But voluntarily donating is not like that, you have very good reasons to donate without being coerced, power only happens when you do things against your natural incentives, i.e. Coercion.
The actions against people criticising the "Sacred Cows" of western progressives are neither of the 3 things :
- They are non-voluntary as there is quite a bit of consensus-manufacturing and lobbying that those groups or groups affiliated to them engage in
- The actions are typically done to humans (firing, censoring,...) and affect a lot of people
Therefore, these Sacred Cow groups are actually in a lot of power, they bend the incentive landscape in their favor in a way that other groups do not. That's a very clear power differential.
>Feel free to keep your conspiracies to yourself.
I advise you to know the definition of words before using them. Conspiracies are unproven and unlikely non-falsiable stories about the world, the fact that you can't criticize the list of groups above is one you can trivially verify for yourself on any social media website.
Is it irrelevant, though? I mean, there's a reason you haven't edited your post to say "Kevin Strom, a noted white nationalist[1], is credited with". (Or even just "Kevin Strom is credited with", with no reference to his politics at all.)
Notably, you're employing a fallacy as well -- "Tacitus or Voltaire" functions as an appeal to authority here. These famous people said this, it must have merit. A resistance to correctly attributing the quote suggests that the mantle of authority is the point.
(I don't care about debate fallacies, really. I just like to bring up when people complaining about them are employing their own. Petty, I know.)
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/30/fac...
Yes, it's as irrelevant as Aristotle's opinions on slavery is to his work on formal logic. The words bear no evidence whatsoever of the author's opinions, therefore it's fallacious and irrelevant to bring them up.
>there's a reason you haven't edited your post to say
Correct, and that reason is that I don't care. I'm entirely ok with quoting a white nationalist, I have quoted worse human beings.
>Notably, you're employing a fallacy as well -- "Tacitus or Voltaire" functions as an appeal to authority here.
I think you're overreaching here a little bit to fit my words to a fallacy rather than the other way around. I don't care one bit who said the words, you can attribute them to whoever you like, go ahead and attribute them to Einstein or Ghandi, that won't increase or decrease their truth value. It's a tautologically true aphorism, anybody can say it and it would still ring true.
>A resistance to correctly attributing the quote
No such thing, I immediately conceded that point when it became clear to me it's a misattribution, the reason I haven't back-edited the comment is that my comment doesn't depend on it, you can substitute "X" or "Santa Claus" for "Voltaire" and you would still get a comprehensible argument that you can either side with or oppose.
>people complaining about them are employing their own
Eh, I wouldn't say your rather stretched interpretation of my words are evidence they are an appeal to authority, sounds to me like you really just wanted to use the words "Appeal To Authority" in a sentence.
Regardless, if the mention of Voltaire annoys you, remove it from your mental cache of the comment and I will defend every single word of the resulting argument, provided you didn't remove or add any other thing.
>I don't care about debate fallacies, really
You should, they are convenient names for extremely common and sometimes-involuntary logical shortcuts that people take all the time which make arguments and conversations blurrier and less fruitful. Me naming a fallacy in an argument doesn't automatically mean that argument is invalid, it just means the argument defender wants to hide something (possibly from themselves), it's not a gotcha to catch your opponent doing then declare victory, it's a "code review" tool to make conversations clearer, more honest and consequently better.
The concept seems facially valid to me although incomplete in that it seems to have an assumption of singular power rather than many different power domains. Taken further, an hallmark of power, prestige, might be defined as those things which seem so natural that criticism would not occur to the larger portion of people.
Biden is currently one of the most powerful people on the entire planet. Yet people happily chant "f--- Joe Biden" in public, put stickers saying this on their cars, and put up signs on their lawns saying this.
Down this route is the precise conspiracy that the original Nazi who spoke these words was pushing.
The original idea here is that because denying the Holocaust is social suicide and illegal in some nations, Jewish people must secretly actually run the world.
> I'm not sure it was about criticism of the powerful.
Are “the powerful” not “who is in power?” The comment of the g-g-g-parent did not mention the Holocaust or any other act of genocide. Unless there is some anti-Semitic hidden message the statement is nearly a banal platitude.
Also, your Biden analogy is as flat as your example of workplace ridicule of people affected by autism. A contrary example might be that the jeers of crowds are allowed for so long as they are not truly threatening or subversive. In the lead up to Biden’s election the news of his son’s laptop was suppressed. Effective criticism is not allowed.
There is. The original quote is from an actual literal Neo-Nazi who used this statement to argue that Jews secretly run the world because Holocaust denial is ostracized.
Yeah, so the people in power currently are Ukrainians.
Look, i agree with the rest of your analysis, but this Tacitus sounds stupid (I am pretty sure Voltaire didn't write this). It's ignoring that most pamphlets and songs actually targeted people in power, historically (yeah, thinking about it, no way it's Voltaire). And people mostly take the dominated/wronged side.
What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's -- but because they're on the receiving end for once. This could be a good thing in the end, by leading us to a more complete model of civil discourse, but it's going to be painful for a while before that even has a chance to happen.
In democracies, society has moved a bit into a direction where many harmless things said will trigger an upset in some very uptight people.
It's enforced socially rather than by the government. Back when you could not say things openly against governments, at least you could speak your mind on anything else.
Today, you can say whatever you want against the government, they are so far detached they don't care.
Free speech is a stupid political term, it has never truly existed an never will.
Edit: fraud, incitement. Who knows how many others?
No need to imagine, the law never left.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/seditious-conspiracy-real-domest...
Not in the countries I guess we both live, but in some authoritarian places, definitely, unfortunately. Your point still fully stands though!
But of course, it is purely a hallucination.
This is the danger of an overly political SCOTUS.
I am not aware of this history. Is there any data or document? What kind of jobs, private? governmental? academic?
He still gave a presentation, it just wasn't on his stupid "anti-vaxxers are just like Nazi Germany" nonsense that was beneath both him and the university.
But please, do go on about the "Bush-era evangelicals." I'm sure they've totally calmed down since then.
> Check out any state abortion laws lately?
This mistakenly assumes that opposition to abortion is necessarily evangelical in nature. By requiring the availability of elective second trimester abortions, Roe mandates an abortion regime that extends significantly beyond what most people can stomach. Most Americans think elective abortions should be prohibited after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... But highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland also restrict abortions after the first trimester. Most of the developed world draws the line for elective abortions at "when the fetus has a face" and not viability like Roe does. So you will continue to see things like Mississippi's abortion law (which imposes a 15-week ban with exceptions for health of the mother and baby) regardless of the strength of the evangelical movement.
> How about something called "teaching actual history?" And the best one "we didn't want to teach kids about gender differences, so now teachers are going to ignore gender entirely" in Florida.
It's not only or even mostly evangelicals that are worked up about the effort to normalize folks like Robin Di Angelo and Ibram Kendi in schools, or to teach young children about sexuality.
On these issues, the left thinks it’s relitigating issues it previously won, but in reality they’re taking up again issues the far left lost in the 1970s: racial preferences, racial separatism, breaking down social notions of gender, etc.
No, I'm not. The opposition to abortion in the evangelical community didn't begin until Republicans bundled the issue with black civil rights and trickle down economics. Both Roe and her lawyer were Southern Baptists, and there were editorials published in Baptist and Evangelical periodicals affirming the decision as the right thing. Religious opposition to abortion rights should not extend to our laws. Oklahoma just passed a 6 week bill with no exceptions for rape, so please, spare me the hand-wringing.
> It's not only or even mostly evangelicals that are worked up about the effort to normalize folks like Robin Di Angelo and Ibram Kendi in schools, or to teach young children about sexuality.
You ignored the part about "teaching actual history," which includes teaching kids about the effects of slavery and Jim Crow and how that permanently damaged minorities because it might make little white minds evaluate the damage their ancestors did and how that continues to harm minorities today. That Florida bill had nothing to do with teaching kids about sexuality, and it backfired and will continue to do so. There is zero way to word those bills that will not result in malicious compliance because they are plainly meant to be discriminatory.
The opposition to abortion was an international phenomenon happening around the same time. Within a few years of Roe, high courts in Canada, Germany, Italy, and France heard abortion cases as well. All except Germany determined that it was a question for the legislature. Germany determined that legalized abortion violated the basic law. To this day, German, French, and Italian abortion laws contain several restrictions that Roe doesn’t permit, specifically limiting elective abortions to the first trimester. Those counties must be full of evangelical Baptists according to you.
Also, nice job projecting the abortion movement’s eugenics roots onto conservatives.
> In response to a question on access to abortion and restrictions on Medicaid coverage of the procedure, [Justice] Ginsburg said, "Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe [v. Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion."
> You ignored the part about "teaching actual history,"
Virginia didn’t just vote for Glen Youngkin (including half of Asians, who are almost all in liberal northern Virginia where I grew up) because they oppose teaching “actual history.” It’s because Fairfax County paid Ibram Kendi $$$ to come lecture to teachers.
> which includes teaching kids about the effects of slavery and Jim Crow and how that permanently damaged minorities
That doesn’t sound like “history” but pseudoscience. Racist pseudoscience at that, conflating Black people with “minorities” and implying they are “permanently damaged.”
> because it might make little white minds evaluate the damage their ancestors did and how that continues to harm minorities today.
“Little white minds,” lol. Gee, I can’t imagine why people think you want to teach White Fragility and inherited guilt (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi...) and that “actual history” is just pretext.
> That Florida bill had nothing to do with teaching kids about sexuality, and it backfired and will continue to do so.
The law is literally limited to “instruction” about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Prior to fourth grade, it’s prohibited. After fourth grade, it must be “age appropriate.” If you think it’s just evangelicals that don’t teachers instructing their kids on human sexuality in third grade, you need more POC friends.
Are you so unable to conceive of a person holding a principle that you need to create an alternate timeline to resolve the cognitive dissonance? It's always truly horrifying to be reminded that people like this exist.
Citation required.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/23/opinion/inter...
Politically Incorrect was literally the name of that show, and it wasn’t cancelled by leftists.
The Dixie Chicks are joining a growing list of brands, entertainers, and artists making changes in wake of the racial justice movement happening now. Like many, they "want to meet this moment" in history, which is why the country trio will go by The Chicks from this point forward.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a3297240...
Only in banana republics like the USA. The patriot act went quite far in that direction
Restrictions to free speech used to be in place to protect the Most Powerful - the Kings (still do - in places where there are kings), The Party, even The Government (in places where democracy is but a sham)
In Western democratic nations, new restrictions to free speech are being considered to protect the Most Marginalized - the most weakest, most discriminated against, lowest represented members of society.
It is ludicrous to look at this movement and compare them like-for-like. There is no backsliding here, there is no slippery slope here. There is a very distinct difference between who is protected and who is exploited.
This whole crusade is just a charade.
As long as they're actually democratic. My qualm is with oligarchies and plutocracies. A capitalist system should allow for the wealthy and it is inevitable that wealth can be used to acquire power. But political systems need to be firewalled from this MUCH more than they are in society today.
The thread is about free speech, and my comment was solely focused on speech. I'm not a free speech absolutist in way that you or Paul Graham might be, because I don't believe words and speech is like physical violence. A bullet is egalitarian. It doesn't care who fires the gun or who it's hitting, it will still do the same damage whether it's fired by a billionaire at a homeless person, or the other way around. Words are not. Words need a medium. The medium's control is asymmetrical.
But regardless of what we think about asymmetrical implications of free speech, ultimately my point was that those who's free speech we are talking about protecting shifted 180 over the last century. Pretending that is irrelevant is naive. Is there a difference between a Russian Soldier killing a Ukrainian Soldier outside of Mariupol this week, and a Ukrainian soldier killing a Russian one? Of course there is. And so there is a difference between restricting the speech of a person to criticize the government, vs restricting the speech of a government to criticize a person.
P.S. Using "SJW" as a pejorative falls in the same category as using "woke" in that way. Mike Godwin himself (of Godwin's law) has the right take on it: https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1504687870006620163
Try to give in UK an opinion regarding the State of Israel not matching the Pro-Israel lobyy diktat and you will find yourself in trouble. Ask Jackie Walker.
Scalia and Kennedy were in the majority (broad speech rights) in both cases and Stevens was in the minority (narrower speech rights) in both cases.
So, I guess (loosely speaking) if fire is speech, then money is speech too.
and you state: Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit.
It can't decrease and remain at an all time high. You are disagreeing with him, not finding a nuance.
This is an (aggressively?) conventional idea that I have an (I guess) heretical opinion about. I'm somewhat persuaded that there is a recent outbreak of intolerance for differing ideas and ideals (though I suspect every generation expresses a version of this opinion as they get older and become out of step with cultural evolution), but I don't think it has any particular political valence. I have to watch my tongue just as much around "aggressive conventionalists" on either side, they just have different conventions. It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right, to express opinions like "immigrants are good", "the 2020 US presidential election ran smoothly and had a clear victor who was duly inaugurated", "gender is a social construct", "people who are attracted to others of the same sex are normal and should have the same rights as anyone else", etc. etc.
Honestly I think this whole thing is as simple as, people just have different views and lots of people of all stripes don't want to agree to disagree with the people they spend most of their time with.
If you're getting news from strongly opinionated talking-heads, then that might explain the disconnect.
Bills that restrict voting rights in America along racial lines are all over the news, even outside of America. That leaves only two possibilities. Either your range of media isn't as wide as you think, or you are in denial. You've already dismissed another commenter’s response, so I'm leaning towards the latter.
I'm not aware of any such bill. What's its name? And why is it not dead on arrival due to the Equal Protection Clause?
Differently put: everyone knows what these bills are except people who are in denial of institutionalized racism. You've used an argument structure that is reminiscent of that used by people who are in denial of institutionalized racism. Therefore, it is assumed that you are in denial of institutionalized racism, and thus, there's no point telling you about the bills because you're just going to be in denial about them anyway.
Meanwhile, anyone who is not in denial can just use any random search engine and find articles like this one:
Will a lifelong religious devotee be dissuaded of his faith by one argument with me on hacker news?
I think the lot of you are naive, and unaware of what really motivates your views (its not logic).
It's not dead due to work by the Roberts Court to gut the voting rights act, which was the law that prevented this kind of shenanigans.
And now the "plausible deniability games" begin in earnest. It is entirely possible to write a law that is ostensibly race neutral while making it apply discriminatorily. For a non-racial example, consider preferring tall candidates or military veterans as a proxy for men.
Similarly, things like requiring a drivers license or travel to an in-person voting location prevent working class people who don't own a vehicle and who work 9-5 from being able to vote without sacrificing wages (or perhaps at all!)
I agree it's possible, just not that this bill does so.
> requiring a drivers license or travel to an in-person voting location
But the bill you linked to doesn't require either of those things. There are explicit provisions for people without driver's licenses in it, and it didn't ban absentee voting.
Right, it just makes it significantly more difficult, which means more people are required to vote in person.
> There are explicit provisions for people without driver's licenses in it,
Right, which you need to be familiar with and be able to assert your rights about.
Here's three questions:
1. All else equal, will this law decrease turnout by predominantly black working class voters?
2. Did the bills drafters intend this?
Three answers to both of those are "yes". Which brings up the third question: why isn't that discriminatory?
Being allowed to vote without an ID isn't good enough, because some people might not know it's allowed? And why would you need to "assert" your rights? If this bill were to pass, wouldn't pollworkers be aware of the new set of rules?
> 1. All else equal, will this law decrease turnout by predominantly black working class voters?
> 2. Did the bills drafters intend this?
> Three answers to both of those are "yes". Which brings up the third question: why isn't that discriminatory?
If the answer to both of those questions were actually yes, then I'd agree that the bill were discriminatory. But you've just asserted the answer is yes without providing evidence, and I don't agree with your assertion.
That depends on your race. The fun thing about arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions like this is that they can be enforced only against some people, something that the VRA explicitly prevented at the policy level until it was gutted.
The answer to the first is yes, policies like these result in voter suppression that has to be countered by additional gotv efforts for equivalent turnout (among predominantly black, working class, democrat voters).
The answer to the second is also yes. The Republican legislators aren't dumb. The theory that the election was "stolen" by the Dems, which led to this law is functionally that too many Democrats voted. And the point of this law is to prevent that, under the guise of blocking "illegitimate" (working class black democratic) voters.
The question isn't "staying in good graces". While people should have friends with whom they disagree, the topic here is heresy. Heresy leads to punishment that goes beyond social consequences.
At this point, it's hard for me to know how to respond to people who remain skeptical of the thesis here. The NYT editorial board has acknowledged the problem. If you're still a holdout, you're probably part of it.
Potayto potahto. I was talking about the same thing that the article called "heresy".
My claim isn't that shunning and social pressure doesn't exist or isn't a problem. I'm just a bit skeptical that it's a lot worse now than in the past, and I'm a lot skeptical that it's only a problem on one side of the political aisle. I don't even think it's really a thing with a political valence, I think it's just a human thing.
The essay does claim things are worse than 10 years ago. But 70 years ago? Things are better now than during McCarthyism.
> I don't even think it's really a thing with a political valence, I think it's just a human thing.
It's definitely a human thing. However, like I said, if you deny the political valence that currently exists, you're either not a clear-eyed observer of the present or you're part of it. And of course no one is saying "in 2022, the right never cancels anyone" just that present day punishments for heresy in the US are clearly politically-valenced.
So anecdotal evidence to your point. If any of the deplatformed people has had a worst experience, I'd love to hear it.
I haven't seen any examples of those specific ones in the news and I don't have examples I'm personally familiar with. But the "Parental Rights in Education" bill is a handy example of the same phenomenon coming from the right; teachers will certainly lose their jobs or be forced to resign due to having the wrong beliefs in the wrong profession in the wrong state (and other states will almost certainly pass similar laws soon). Maybe that is an isolated incident, but I'm skeptical.
Frankly, I would really like to see someone try to gather and present data on this. It's really hard because the definition of what you're even looking for is wishy washy and most of the information is private; there isn't a public database of reasons why people didn't get, were forced to resign, or were fired from jobs.
Anyway, after 30 seconds of googling: https://www.canceledpeople.com/about
I'm not demanding empiricism, what I'm saying is that I find this whole debate to be overly influenced by high profile anecdotes, which people cherry pick to tell their preferred narrative.
That project is a definite step in the right direction, and if people start citing analyses of it when writing articles like and OP, instead of just throwing out definitive statements as unsupported premises, then I'll be much happier with those articles than I was with the OP.
One interesting thing to note is that that project has an explicit list of heresies that are beyond the pale (section 3 under "what is not included"). I think that's intriguing!
- the fact that it's heresy takes priority over the question of truth or falsity
- it outweighs everything else the speaker has done (I would add that the implication of that is "disproportionate punishment").
By this definition, yes, getting excluded from your family for stating some opinion is proof that said subject is taboo/ said opinion is "heresy" in your family. But, all kinds of families are broken in all kinds of different ways; surely you can find fascist families in USA - that doesn't make the USA society fascist. You can find atheist families too! (and nobody would claim the US is atheist). The question is: is the concept of "heresy" making a come-back at the level of the entire society?
> the "Parental Rights in Education" bill
Didn't know about it (I'm not a US citizen), and yes it's a dumb and wrong law by the sound of it. Even so I think it falls a bit short of fitting the definition of "legal enforcement of heresy" unless it extends outside the classroom (to opinions stated - privately or publicly - by teachers in their spare time).
(btw, I am not claiming heresy is only enforced by the US left. However, this fact only makes things worse, not better - it's sad that this practice is excused by "the others are worse" mantra. Even if/when it's true, and "the others" really are worse.).
To the rest: I agree that the definition used in the article was broader than just people getting fired. You asked me for examples of that specifically, which made me think you thought the definition being used was that more narrow one.
In that article, Popehat talks about the need to define cancel culture and understand how the free speech rights of the first speaker intersect with the free speech and association rights of people that respond.
I think the most useful aspect of PG's article is that he does actually define what he means by heresy:
> Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done
PG doesn't give any examples, but I do think that trying to be clear around definitions in order to be able to say "is this an example of heresy at work?" or "has this person been unfairly cancelled?" is a valuable exercise.
FWIW, my main reason for commenting is that I find Popehat's article to be a valuable addition to the conversation because it's specifically addressing the "cancel culture" terminology rather than trying to swirl a new term (heresy) into the mix.
From that perspective, canceling/labeling heresy could potentially be thought of simply an act of automation. People identify reoccurring patterns of arguments, classify their adversary, and use a cached response. Thus, instead of spending the costly time and energy to respond to every argument in detail, you tag, use the appropriate function, and move on. And because modern society is so polarized, those functions tend to be fairly absolute- who wants to get dragged into another argument they’ve had before?
The problem is that modern discourse just can’t scale.
But "modern discourse just can't scale" is a bit of a defeatist mindset. Surly there is a solution out there for reducing polarization.
Well, there's compassion. But that's always been rather difficult, and seems to have fallen out of fashion...
Maybe you meant a technical solution though.
So, for example, adding qualifications can show uncertainty and humility, yet adding "often works" is longer than "works" both from a character limit and a typing it on a phone keyboard.
Another example, saying "that's annoying" can be quicker than "that annoyed me" or more so "that annoyed me and may annoy others like me."
As much as I try to catch myself taking these linguistic shortcuts, I still may give in to the quickness of them, especially when I'm in a rush, and sometimes, especially online, conversations can move so quickly they put me into a heightened rush state.
Anyway, I'm grateful you pointed out this element of efficiency and scalability. I think these conversations can scale better by taking a little extra time to communicate than by always taking the shortcut. Maybe akin to how code can become more legible, and thus easier to maintain and scale, if the developer takes the time to more precisely name things. The name may be longer but may be more precise and prevent future problems.
I was accused of saying something I didn't say at a bar, by a black woman I was talking with. She complained to the bartender who, without having heard any of the conversation, called me a racist and threw me out.
I was very distressed by this. On hearing the story, a friend brought up the fact that bartenders don't have the time or training to resolve every dispute between customers, so they just make snap decisions that are often wrong. He also said that in days gone by, the black person would have been the one who got thrown out in a dispute, and so this is a form of restorative justice. I found this a helpful idea, because it implies that people still aren't treating each other any more equally or listening to both sides, or weighing things wisely or on the merits; and that's what needs to be fixed if we want to have any kind of discourse at all.
There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture that you didn’t defy very easily.
I'm a bit surprised how easily people forget these things.
There _was_? I'm not sure what field of engineering you're in, but in software, hardware and electrical engineering which are the ones I have the most contact within 3 countries in Europe, this is the norm today. Through friends in mechanical and civil engineering I get the sense it's even worse there.
Heresy to me sounds like it comes from an intolerant society. At least in regards to LGBTQ+ rights it feels like society has (thankfully!) become more tolerant. How many people would be fired from their job today if they said they are gay compared to 30-60 years ago?
Maybe PG is talking about specific contexts like academia, media, or tech companies though?
If they were still co workers, it wasn't treated as a fireable offence like the modern heresies
Barack Obama couldn't openly support gay marriage in 2012 or 2008 due to political repercussions.
Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard)
In my 90s high school slurs like f*g, etc were commonplace. It cropped up in popular media like Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (where now its bleeped)
just sayin'. maybe 1985 sucked a lot for a lot of people that weren't paul graham.
Have you considered the possibility that oppressing gay people and firing people with unpopular opinions are both wrong and should be opposed?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shor
There’s one example of many of a thing that supposedly “doesn’t actually happen”.
Your dude david who "serves as head of data science with Blue Rose Research" is barely a blip.
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-wor...
I'm not in an oppressed group, and I've done my fair share of foot-in-mouth. But my sympathies are with the ... subaltern..., not generally with people claiming to be treated as heretics because they got censured (not censored) for using their public or corporate positions to pick on people or support picking on people.
Yes, there are excesses. I don't support them. But I'm glad I'm living through an era where it's becoming less acceptable to be a prick in public.
I don’t think his assertions are wrong but I don’t think castigating people as “aggressively conventional minded” is the right approach. In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It’s not enough to have an opinion, there has to be a bad guy or an evil group of people intent on destroying society.
I’m not sure how to solve this problem — open to suggestions and brainstorming, it’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.
That means that, yes, we kind of do arrive at an us-vs-them mentality - even you do, if you think a step or two further.
Now, you could be pleading for the Christian "love the sinner, hate the sin" idea - people are doing these things, but we need to not "other" the people. And that may be a real point - if "othering" is what they are doing, and we think it's wrong, then we need to be careful not to "other" them. At the same time, while we try to figure out how to help them not destroy society, we still need to keep them from destroying society.
An aside:
One thing I love about VCs is the perfectly fitting, memorable terms they coin. This is a perfect example, I can't stop laughing.
What could help solve this? Real reconciliation of the different perspectives. There’s a common overlap: we all want to live, and we all have nonzero ignorance.
The tragedy is that the inordinately rich like paulg continue to divide with these self-serving essays instead of helping other to grapple with the K-shaped recovery we’re in now. The place to innovate now is not in blue-sky futurism but to innovate the recovery of those who COVID hit the hardest.
See his words: "Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. ... You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired."
People on the political right have moderate discussions and they are banded aggressively. Here are two examples:
* James Woods had 137,000 subscribers removed in two days, by twitter admins
* Ron Pauls' entire YouTube channel was censored and removed.
This is the "Heretic hunting" point Paul Graham is making.
When he writes about Lisp, or (for the most part) about startups, or about being a dad, he seems happy and well-adjusted (I'm looking for a better term but let's roll with that). When he writes about cancel culture, or maybe really culture of any sort: different story.
He should take a break from this stuff and write about teaching his kids Lisp.
Is there anyone at all who writes "happily" about cancel culture? Even SJW's themselves can only give an impression of being perpetually angry and frustrated; they try to present their inner frustration wrt. the world at large as some sort of zeal for superior justice and universal social liberation, but don't quite manage to convince anyone.
I did not get that impression
Don't let me sound like I'm psychoanalyzing the guy. I'm sure he's fine, probably saner than I am. I'm just talking about the writing.
His classic piece “The Submarine” is negative on its subject, but it's quite engaging and not evasive the way this piece is. And there is a reason for that.
Though Taibbi writes for a different audience that probably makes that easier.
I don't hold out hope that this perspective will ever become mainstream, but because it's an alternative to "us-vs-them", there's more opportunity for redemption, communion, and joy.
Much of "Scott Alexander"'s following came from the readership of a blog named literally 'Overcoming Bias', that's devoted to descriptions of how all humans are often remarkably petty and prejudicial in obscure and counterintuitive ways. It's definitely not taking a mainstream perspective, and the 'redemption' in it is quite subdued, but it does seem to avoid that particular pitfall.
> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era
Talking about PR[1] isn't wrought with intellectually-dishonest landmines in the manner that it is for talking about what Graham terms "heresy-hunters". This is also obvious to even anyone who's paying a mild amount of attention to the cultural changes he's describing.
[1] the topic of "The Submarine", for those who are unfamiliar
But the clunkiness you're saying is in my comment, not his essay. The essay includes the words "heretic hunters", but it's only used once:
> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era
Personally, this single usage and less-clunky grammar doesn't strike me as especially bad writing.
It's a piece about identifying 'PR hits' that misidentified something as a 'PR hit'. There's a microscopic 'correction' at the bottom but the fact the correction undermines the premise of the piece - that you too can learn to identify 'PR hits' from Paul Graham - is just ignored.
I presume you refer to the avoidance of examples in the article. Your comment suggest he was correct to do so. Some people will be desperate to disprove that modern heresy exists, and highlighting forbidden opinions would help negate the entire article.
>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago, and even those who are happy about this would have to agree that it's so.
Not only bears no resemblance to actual lived reality, because the penalties for speaking out against orthodoxy (or even just being trans or gay or a bi-racial couple) were far worse than simply being kicked off twitter, and virtually none of those had any impact on anyone else in the same way that refusing to mask up or get vaccinated does today. They'd have fired their asses in 1918 too.
It's so frustrating when a cis white male pretends there are more risks associated with opinions these days. There aren't!
We could just point out that they're not really concerned about people getting "cancelled" as much as who is doing the cancelling and who's getting cancelled. Somehow it was a good thing when governments and corporations were able to cancel people based on race, gender, vaccination status, and sexual orientation... but now that they're being cancelled on the basis of being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and... well, at least vaccination statuses have remained consistent... suddenly there's a problem. Suddenly the all-knowing overlords of business that people trust with their retirement accounts and their political landscape are WRONG. LOL.
And usually the cancellation doesn't even have anything to do with a job. It's freaking social media for crying out loud.
It is something that, like the Devil, exists primarily in the minds of people for whom it is a central part of the opposition in their mythological construction of the world, so no.
I could imagine that even unhappy or poorly-adjusted people might sometimes have worthwhile things to say.
> He should take a break from this stuff and write about teaching his kids Lisp.
What would be the main benefit from doing so?
You see how that works?
I selected "feminists" as an "across-the-aisle" example.
Instead of trying to explain things to you, I am going to ask questions and you can try to answer them.
1) Have you ever heard the phrase "across the aisle?" Consider this in the Congressional sense.
2) On what side or in what political party would you say that most of the feminists, despite their myriad combinations, would reside?
3) What side are the people who are against "cancel culture" on, generally? Again: as a trend.
4) Combining the answers to the first three, can you diagram out where the aisle is, where #2 is, and where #3 is?
5) What is the purpose of selecting an example from "the other side," generally?
And you didn't answer a single one of my questions.
As my great aunt (born circa 1899) said, "Sometimes the 'You shoulds are the shits.'"
I'd like to see more on topics of enduring interest from Paul than on the ever-evanescent fluff of tech. That his concern lies with teaching his kids not to be social gangsters rather than teaching them some current tech meets with my approval.
Admittedly this is probably cultural on my part; growing up in a working class Canadian family bestows different social ideologies. It’s a complaint I have about Canadian culture (not individualistic enough) but I do think a problem with American discourse is it can err so far on the side of individualism as to become misanthropic: the extreme being the sentiment, “I, and people like me, are the only group that matters.”
That’s not what Paul is saying here at all. I just think discourse about “social heresy” might be more productively framed as — what do we all agree on, how can we focus on channeling that energy productively, and how can we accommodate the people who disagree? Generally speaking capitalism can be a force for good here if you pick big, juicy problems everyone is excited to solve. Climate, energy, etc. And I think Paul is funding some of those companies!
Here's my counter backstory, I grew up and live in a very collectivist society and I'm a very individualist minded person by nature, and it's like hell on earth for me, and to spare you the sob story and to get straight to the point, when I come across pieces like the ones authored by PG in defense of individualism and critical of collectivism, it always hits home and I experience a momentary feeling of relief knowing I am not alone in all of this, and when I see how the militant collectivist crowd is wreaking havoc in the West and making people's life a living hell, it really upsets me and I feel helpless reminding me of my own personal circumstances, and that's why I have strong reactions regarding this issue, and why I feel that something must be done to counter this destructive force and stop it in its tracks.
PS: I don't view every collectivist movement negatively, that would be extremely absurd and I believe that some currents of collectivism can be very beneficial for society and the entire world but I'm still a staunch defender of individualism and will ever be.
This, incidentally, makes the movement seem much bigger than it is.
It's just plain old tribalist hypocrisy: people Graham agrees with are encouraged to weaponize their victimization, while people he disagrees with are denied. First-degree intolerance (including but not limited to "x-ism") is acceptable in any amount, second-degree intolerance (intolerance of intolerance) is verboten.
Where do you get that from the original post? I am not seeing it.
People Graham disagrees with who are denied: those who speak out about "x-ist" utterances, whom he characterizes as "heretic hunters".
Just not seeing what you are seeing. Thank you though.
Is it weaponization of victimhood to disagree, and warn others of the hallmarks of a problematic position?
I don't think anyone was confused about who the 'us' and 'them' are. Every group casts a shadow, so it's hard to talk about a 'they' without there being an 'us'.
Christians consider Satanists the intolerant ones and vice-versa. Both can be claimed to be voluntary association, but if one isn't a choice, then neither is the other.
Would you mind giving me quotes from the post to back up these assertions?
I think the thing Paul really has a problem with is social brigading and mobs attacking people unfairly. Which is fine; but you can make that argument without painting yourself or people like you as a victim. Otherwise you’re just using the same tactic mobs use.
We’re all guilty of this to different degrees because social media algorithms are finely-tuned to propagate outrage and we’re being conditioned to respond to and generate said outrage. I think the way out of the loop is to recognize this pattern and try to break it.
Just not a deep one.
He addresses topics just enough to scratch the itch he wants to scratch without putting any meaningful thought into them, which is why his essays are so easy to discard. Sure, they work for like-minded people who want to drink from the tap of the successful businessman stereotype, but they're usually not useful whenever he strays from talking about business.
PG is capable of at least somewhat greater depth, and has displayed it on occasion, but it suits his purpose to avoid that here.
It's not an ideology that's widely embraced, but has outsize influence in key institutions (kind of like Scientology). And it manipulatively invokes large groups of faceless minorities to paper over the fact that it's being advanced by a small, affluent, relatively homogenous minority: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Yang
> Yang coined the term "successor ideology" in 2019 to describe an emerging ideology among left-wing movements in the United States centered around identity politics. Yang opposes this ideology and believes it may replace traditional liberal values.
Never mind "outsize influence", it has no influence at all — nobody follows "Successor Ideology", not even the person who made it up.
Like there are lots of people demanding to end the SAT because it’s racist against “Latinx.” What do we call those people?
I've extracted a paragraph below, but the whole story is quite short and well worth reading.
>Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones’ deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered by this crime obliged John’s judges to assume an unexceptionable severity. He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake.
[1] https://matiane.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/jorge-luis-borges-t...
I'm a freedom of speech absolutist, but my only sympathies towards anybody who has been canceled have either been because the people canceling them were extremely stupid, had the facts completely jumbled, and petulantly refused to be corrected; or because somebody sheltered had accidentally shared some inherited bigoted opinion that they had never really thought about in a small, relaxed context, and had that mistake blown up by cluster two clout-chasers trying to break into the opinion-haver industry.
One does not speak of Voldemort or his creator.
So yes, I am inclined to believe that modern heresy is a phenomenon, and I am not inclined to believe in ogres.
Paul's connotation for heresy is: A dismissing B due to a specific statement from B (blasphemy) that contradict A's canon of orthodox beliefs (religion).
But I think that incorrectly conflates individual opinion into an unforgivable sin, punishable only with excommunication or death. Historically, cases of heresy arose when someone like Gallileo proposed a viable model of the universe that contradicted dogma, not when they made a single isolated statement of dissonance. The latter were commonplace in secular writing even early in the Enlightenment. (Blasphemy did alienate freethinkers like Voltaire to the Church and Royalty; but it didn't get him imprisoned or killed. It was direct opposition to Royal dogma that did that, like Sir Thomas More's excommunication by Henry VIII).
BTW, 1918's Sedition Act was passed after the US entered WWI, as an emergency expedient intended to squelch open opposition to the war. It isn't really comparable to the concepts of heresy or blasphemy against a canon of beliefs, since Wilson's decision to go to war wasn't a persistent dogma that needed protection. The Act was a temporary martial law (like Lincoln's suppression of the Maryland government for the duration of the Civil War) to be lifted after the immediate threat to fighting a war had passed.
In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.
The BBC had MI5 vet its employees for correct political opinions and associations into the 90s, and won't deny that they do it now.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/16176527.revealed-mi5-vett...
http://tonygarnett.info/mi5-and-secret-political-vetting-at-...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/14/bbc.research
The major difference is that captains of industry used to be able to almost completely dictate orthodoxy, and now in the age of the internet there are competing orthodoxies - some of which don't consider power and wealth synonymous with wisdom and genius. It also turns out that plenty of powerful people who control institutions don't care about being seen as philosopher-kings, and are happy to let their PR and HR departments deal with controversy. They will happily capitulate to all orthodoxies in order to protect the institution.
The problem is that labor rights have been overrun by freedom-of-contract at-will libertarians, so instead of people just hating you for things you've said and done, everyone also has to deal with apolitical sociopathic corporations that will excise you like a suspicious mole at the first whiff of controversy.
In an ideal world, our high schools would have taught the Constitution, the American Revolution, slavery, the abolition movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, and on that basis taught the civil rights movement. They would have taught Homer, Virgil, Greek drama, Chaucer, Shakespeare, poetry and novels. They would have looked at modern explorations of identity such as Kafka and Dostoevesky. They would have taught the Bible and the basics of Christian theology and morality, not as Truth but as the mindset and background of most of those who have, to date, built up our culture. (Much as they might teach Marx as vital background for understanding historically important movements.)
They would also train students to think and reason for themselves, to recognize and reac to susceptibility to persuasion, and to detect and break down propaganda.
With these foundations, a student might then be able to intelligently study "gay rights" or gay identity in literature.
Those foundations are the first job of the schools. Let them do that before anything else.
There's a reason the conventionalists don't want real education for their children and zero involvement of society in their nuclear family: control. They then frame it as some libertarian ideal.
Until a public school teacher can say no to a student, and their parents, nobody will learn the foundations of complex thought in the classroom. That is by design.
In other words, for the same reason that a teacher should have "a position" on any other civil rights.
I think that whether this is or true or not depends a lot on how you define your terms. If cancel culture only means "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights on TV and then lost my job", then yes, the window is narrower now than in 1985. But if it also includes "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights in a bar and then got beaten up," it is not.
As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wondered if that might be due to a change in the cost of university education, which means universities are more akin to businesses servicing clients. And the first thing you’ll always hear in a client-facing business is…
_”Don’t piss off your customers”._
A sad commercial reality because a diversity of opinion in education is valuable.
But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.
Unless we're including religious colleges, this seems hyperbolic.
While I did find this[1], which appears to support the idea that left-wing voices are more likely to get fired/kicked out of universities for their speech (though not by a magnitude), I have no idea how that study split up which speech was 'censored by right'/'censored by left', because when I tried to do so myself with the dataset[2], the results were closer to 55/45 (left-wing firing/right-wing firing) for 2015-2017, which was the years the study chose to focus on, but almost exactly 50/50 for the entire 2006-2020 dataset.
[1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...
If you're looking for a parallel that applies to cancelling the left, albeit outside the academy, union-busting is very common and tends to involve doing your very best to fire people who're speaking up about wanting to form a union. Such speech is pretty unambiguously treated as a "heresy" (in the Graham sense) by business owners.
Where? Which colleges? Can you give a single example of someone being fired from a college or university for a left wing position?
For example, there's this notion that the advancement of knowledge is somehow being suppressed and that naked, barely-regulated free speech has been essential to Western dominance, and that, accordingly, to backpedal on the principle would have some material affect on society.
However, no nexus between the kinds of speech and people being "cancelled" and any sort of practical benefit of the speech is ever identified. Nor do they consider the fact that the proper result of intellectual discourse is that some ideas get discarded, and that to constantly have to rehash debates, reestablish the credibility of basic authorities, etc, drags down intellectual discourse and in fact moves us backwards.
Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.
I (for the most part) agree; like I said, I am not generally a fan of contemporary cancel culture.
Are you Muslim btw, or is your username a coincidence?
Well, where is that? I live my life surrounded by "discredited" ideas with much popularity and power. I don't know shit about intellectual discourse, can it get the police to stop killing my friends? Can it get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?
If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.
True. But trying to prevent further expression of those ideas, or retaliating against those who express them ("cancel culture" IIUC), isn't necessarily the best type of opposition. For example, disability rights isn't an academic issue for me and some of my friends. But when someone expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible, I don't try to silence them; I try to engage with them for the purpose of changing either their mind or mine.
To strong-man "Cancel culture" - trying to remove people from decision-making roles after they have signaled they intend to make harmful decisions is not - on the face of it - a ridiculous idea.
> expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible
If someone openly holding this view applies for a job in charge of your website, are you going to seriously consider their application?
The point of cancel culture isn't to convince the person being cancelled, or to coerce those who agree with them by threat of losing their job. The point is to remove perceived political opponents from positions of influence.
Are you right about everything?
If you don’t like what people are saying, you can use your free speech to explain why your ideas are better.
Who could that possibly hurt.
You think you’re smart enough to determine which ideas should be allowed? How do you know you won’t be the Church burning Galileo at the stake? Hint: you don’t know that. That’s why you have some humility. Ultimately ideas that don’t work will fail.
Sure, Phrenology just died out on it's own. You got it.
https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refere...
In fact in places where it wasn't banned it flourished.
Literally the very next sentence. Banning things doesn’t work.
Phrenology died out because it was openly discussed, debated, and debunked. If you are confident you can prove you’re right about an issue, you don’t need to ban anything, you just go ahead and prove that you’re right. When you start banning things people only take that as evidence that it’s some secret forbidden knowledge that threatens the existing power structure and they’re even more motivated to pursue it.
That is a tragedy not because the targets are indeed often wrong, but because it has a negative impact on when student activism is required and can have positive influences as it so often had in the past. I can be dismissed with references to incidence like those where people just were shouted down.
Yeah this bothered me. His stance on this seems so defensive and personal and he gives very few examples of heretical ideas. It makes this essay more of a boomer diatribe than anything else imo.
> Can [ignoring ideas I don't like] get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?
> If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them. [Context: "We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others."]
but then,
"It is an utter moral necessity to not extend civility to or engage with Republicans on issues like healthcare or police reform, but instead do everything necessary to prevent their ideas from being heard or discussed."
I'm sure your next point is that everything conservatives believe reduces to wrongthink x-isms, and therefore everything is permissible, and you probably are unable even then to see the inconsistency. But it seems like others have taken note.
- I don't assert that opposing these things is a moral necessity for everyone, but do find it so for myself.
- I extend civility usually but not always, it depends on the circumstances. If being uncivil furthers my goals or feels correct then I will do it.
- I don't oppose "republicans" generally but I oppose specific harmful acts, including speech in some instances. "Engagement with" is too broad: I'm willing to (and do!) have coffee and discuss any issue privately, but may vehemently oppose the same conversation happening as a public debate, for example.
- Absolutely not everything is permissible and there are many more lines I won't cross than ones I will.
Just for a concrete example, if you read through my history a little you'll notice I fucking hate the police. What you wouldn't guess is my home AA group is all cops except for me. Many years ago I needed help and didn't realize that's what it was and they helped me and I stayed. None of us hide any part of ourselves there. There are men I have opposed in armed conflict in the street and then met with mutual love and grace in the room.
I see very clearly the humanity of my enemies but nonetheless find I must oppose them. I am rarely truly sure I'm on the right path, but I feel compelled to act and I hope for forgiveness for my mistakes and harms.
Your comment states-- "I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them" to "get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law".
I think it's unclear to me precisely what you're saying here, but I can see how it can be read as saying you seek to silence fiscal conservatives who oppose state funded healthcare or other government support.
If your comment had not included an apparent example of a question of public policy that had little to do with racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or similar I suspect the person you're responding to wouldn't have seen any conflict.
I still think it depends on certain assumptions about my positions and why I hold them. Like, I oppose market-based healthcare access because it causes injustice, death, and suffering on a large scale. To me that is very consistent with opposing eg racism because it causes injustice, suffering and death.
I did, honestly, momentarily forget that this state of affairs is the status quo and so probably has wider explicit support than the others. It's all part of the same hell to me though.
So what you see 500px away might not be visible to other readers.
That's putting it mildly. It's littered with straw men and other logical fallacies.
He asserts, without any proof (because it's a faulty generalization that can't be proven), 'when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion'. He then wastes a bunch of time explaining the implications of his straw man.
As the person you are responding to, I also dismissed it as fallacy ridden bullshit written by someone who is upset that rich and/or conservative people are facing consequences for having odious beliefs and stating them publicly, but this lens of understanding their delusions is a better approach.
edit: missing word
But, I can't really think of any supporting real-world stories where that reaction wouldn't be justified. There are two that come to mind:
- Justine Sacco, the woman who was fired for tweeting a joke that she hoped she wouldn't get AIDS on her trip to Africa. I don't think the joke is necessarily indicative of some deep inner evil, but the lady was a PR exec; it does tend to indicate that she was probably dangerously incompetent at her actual job. Firing seems like the right response.
- Amy Cooper, the lady in New York who called the police on "an African American man threatening my life" in Central Park. He was a bird-watcher asking her to keep her unleashed dogs under control. Widely reported that she was fired for racism. But again, is this really a case of being fired for heresy? Or could it have perhaps just a case of the employer realizing their employee is a dishonest sack of crap? God knows what kind of havoc a person like this might wreak inside a company.
Those two are probably the most widely reported in the past few years. People here are referencing firings in academia; maybe those would give more nuance.
James Damore was fired by a mob who boldly proclaimed "I didn't read his manifesto. I didn't have to".
None of these firings were for honest reasons, but all just to appease the mob. A mob who at least in the last case didn't bother to even find out what he said.
There are many more examples. I could list them on and on, but I'm surprised you've only heard of the two.
There was the lady who appeared to scream in a cemetery
If those two are truly the only ones you can think of then I'd recommend you google this a bit better, and to read "So you've been publicly shamed".
Hell, a year ago you'd be kicked off the internet (social media platforms) as a racist (wat?) for saying the lab leak theory was plausible.
And of course then there's the chilling effect.
(I find it revealing that the reaction on HN is fundamentally that Damore was fired by a conspiracy. The executives must actually agree with him but were "bullied" by woke people or something, as though it's not possible that corporate leadership could find what he said problematic).
The thing you're claiming is that the company/decision makers think damore was right (or that his opinion was irrelevant) and fired him only to save face.
I don't think that happens regularly. I think sometimes someone points out that an employee is racist and the company fires that employee, but that's not "kowtowing", it's a combination of not working with assholes and taking customer feedback. I don't think the thing you're talking about happens much at all.
It doesn't happen much because it's not often a sufficiently large mob gets into a frenzy about firing someone. Can you point to any instances where the mob unjustly called for blood and the company/decision makers refused to kowtow? Brendan Eich was fired by a mob (consisting of Mozilla employees and Twitter users). His crime? Donating $1000 to a heretical political cause years earlier. Corporations always kowtow to the demands of sufficiently large mobs regardless of if the demands are just because not doing so means you'll have mutinous employees on your hands.
Yes, but is it fair to say that they probably made the decision based on what's best for the business?
"Make the mob go away" is a rational decision to make. And one that's done all the time in this world of public shaming (see book "So you've been publicly shamed").
Damore does not have a cash value higher than the productivity lost by many other employees turning into a mob instead of working.
Maybe they would have fired him without the mob. But I don't think so.
> Damore was fired by a conspiracy.
No, I say by mob justice (the mob) and capitalism (best decision for the business).
No conspiracy needed.
That is to say: Debatable.
In my opinion DoS isn't speech. DoS prevents not just a the speaker from talking, but denies all the listeners hearing it. Just like fraud isn't "free speech".
It's not a paradox of free speech that I can't reneg on a verbal contract, or written contract.
Free Speech is about the free exchange of ideas. DoS is literally the opposite of that.
The right of your fist ends where my face begins.
It's possible to argue that it's speech to express your displeasure with a person or their position by interrupting them. And demonstrating or doing a stunt during speech, is fair.
But if it goes so far that your intention is no longer to communicate your displeasure, but to deny speech, then it's like claiming "freedom of movement" to move your fist into someone's face.
The line isn't clear, and I literally mean it's debatable.
You assert that the two I named were fired from public pressure, but that looks to me like self-confirmed speculation based on what you want to believe. Were I a business employing either of those two people, I believe my own reaction would be to fire them. Not for woke reasons; they're just walking, talking disasters. Why employ assholes and idiots?
Anyway, since you mention it I do recognize more of these names, including the ones mentioned by the book you cited. They didn't come immediately to mind. But let's say James Damore is the best example in support of Paul Graham's essay (and far more nuanced and potentially sympathetic than the two I named). He argued (in part) for biological determinism, which is definitely "heresy"; and it's definitely possible to imagine a world in which that would lead to debate rather than firing.
If the essay had actually named a figure like Damore, would it have been more convincing? I can't answer for everyone but for me the answer would be: slightly more convincing, but not a great deal more. There's just a lot more to the story than "this person got fired for woke heresy", and it's not that convincing to do this kind of hand-waving simplification.
Ok. "Work performance" may be too narrow in its obvious interpretation. What I mean is "quality of performance of your duties". Lying to your employer legitimately reduces trust that you'll continue to be able to perform your duties.
But let's say someone goes to private sex parties in their own time, full of consenting adults. That has nothing to do with your performance at work.
> You assert that the two I named were fired from public pressure, but that looks to me like self-confirmed speculation based on what you want to believe
Do you believe they would have been fired if this had not been made public?
You're right that I don't have proof, but I think my position here is self-evidently true.
> If the essay had actually named a figure like Damore, would it have been more convincing?
I think PG feared it would derail the discussion to just be about Damore. That his whole essay would be dismissed by large sets of people as merely "A Damore defence", without reading neither it or Damore's "manifesto".
And exactly as his essay describes it would be dismissed as x-ist, to shut down debate.
So… yes and no. It would be clearer, but risk being less effective in achieving his goals.
Also less timeless, which he explicitly mentions as a goal.
I assure you, the vast majority of us who criticized him read his writings quite thoroughly.
I saw several senior leaders (in industry and in the mob) say exactly what I quoted.
And privately I asked several angry people "did you read it?". Most said no, and some came back later saying "yeah that was not actually what they told me it was".
Not saying what she did was justified, but there is more to the story.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-real-story-of-the-centr...
> "May 2020 testimony provided by Jerome Lockett, a black man who said Christian had “aggressively” threatened him in the park. Among the details: “when I saw that video, I thought, I cannot imagine if he approached her the same way how she may have genuinely been afraid for her life.” He continued, “If I wasn’t who I was, I would of [sic] called the police on that guy too.”
Also see the talk page for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_birdwatching_inci...
Paul did address this though:
> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era.
> And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific heresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded will always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All they need is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the current one will be the last.
Something can be true and also presented with racist or sexist intent.
assuming you know someone's intent suggests a bias against the part that you disagree with. give me an example of a truth that can be perceived as racist or sexist, and i'll show you how easy it is to ascribe intent to it.
I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a women which very clearly was the polar opposite, or how all people with a certain enthnicity have a certain negative trait etc.
These people were not guilty of heresy they were insensitive assholes (when done on purpose) or at least ignorant.
In an honest discussion with someone about e.g. the differences between men and women, I never called someone a sexist, just because their ideas were outdated and flawed as long as it actually was an discussion. The thing is, that more often than not the goal of people spouting such things is not getting to the bottom of things, but validating their own opinion. This is of course out of insecurity, which is why calling someone sexist is not a good way to respond in such an situation. Better is to ask them what they mean and have them explain it to you. And if they realize themselves they are sounding a bit odd, you can just tell them this is not your experience.
When this is done over a mass medium, there are many other motivations. Could be to make themselves look good within another group, attempt to cancel, etc.
It may come from similar positive/good faith motivations but easily becomes distorted.
I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.
This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.
Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.
I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.
Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.
Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.
The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.
It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?
There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?
Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.
Some would call them telltale signs of knowledge, wisdom, and a moral framework that places great weight on respect for others, when used in a corrective context.
And when confronted with this feedback, instead of responding with humility, open-mindedness, and intellectual curiosity, they seek shelter in groups or try to clumsily defend their ignorance through whataboutism, slippery-slope arguments, unrelated grievances, or other forms.
Alternatively, they question the entire premise of social norms or morality, such as what PG has done here. People like him are intelligent enough to know that they cannot attack the truth and defend a lack of respect head-on. Instead, they try to mount a flank attack by publishing pieces such as this that appeal to selfish audiences who care more about their individual freedom than our need to work together to build a better society. It's not super surprising that they do this; after all, controversy and endless argument makes them money.
This isn't a deflection, though, it's the core point. What PG (and the rest of us) are trying to communicate is precisely that we hold different concepts of social norms and morality which used to be common in our circles. Among my friends up until the late 2000s, "insensitivity" was a minor character flaw and "ignorance" was no flaw at all. I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard the phrase "educate yourself", because the idea it expressed was completely foreign to me - the people I personally knew who were passionate about some idea or another were always happy and excited to talk about it with people who weren't familiar.
> I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard the phrase "educate yourself", because the idea it expressed was completely foreign to me - the people I personally knew who were passionate about some idea or another were always happy and excited to talk about it with people who weren't familiar.
I think what happens is, after a while, smart people get tired of exerting the effort to provide basic information over and over again to people who could find it by way of a trivial Google search.
That's what actually turn people off joining collectivist causes; the judgmental rhetoric, moral absolutism and holier-than-thou attitude.
Sometimes it works; but more often than not, it doesn't. People can be really freaking stubborn. They really don't like being proved wrong.
> The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
I just proved your point, didn't I? :P
It could still be a net positive for the teenager, even though it was an extremely inappropriate/problematic relationship.
But this begs the question, doesn't it? Like the real answer is that
1. Lots of opinions were guarded or hushed or held closely even 20 years ago even in much of the western world (being trans or gay, being particularly nonreligious, socialism/communism/any kind of viewpoint left of Obama, all kinds of things about dating and sex, and more)
2. People weren't generally having discussions, or figuring things out with tens of thousands of listeners. Saying really dumb things because you don't actually know what you're talking about because you're a nonexpert is common and has been common forever. But people didn't start doing this until social media.
3. Things that were previously handled by whisper networks ("This professor says all kinds of wild racist shit", absolutely something said in my undergrad, and "this prof gives better grades to women who wear short skirts in the front row", something that absolutely was said in my parents undergrad) are now handled more openly and explicitly. This is probably a globally more optimal result, in that fewer people have to deal with sexual or racial harassment. But it also means that misunderstandings can blow up.
That's it, that's the issue.
This is the generation that needs (and sometimes demands that) their spaces online be protected from any ideas that are divergent to those they subscribe to.
Is body autonomy absolute when you have a living organism inside of you? Is the "hate for women" justified for the sake of saving life? Is life even that important to us if we can allow a pregnant woman to arbitrarily take it? If so, what is our definition of life then?
Excuse my little tirade. I love the age-old abortion debate:)
Oh hardly. I'm of the least-popular opinion, that intelligent human minds are what make people valuable and that the death of a newborn isn't significantly different from the death of a fetus.
Sounds like you are trying to quantify (the value of) life. What about mentally handicapped people, are they deemed not valuable humans in your eyes because they are not intelligent?
Am pro-abortion in extreme cases involving rape or abuse. But am also anti-abortion and pro-life. Not sure if there's a category for people who hold this idea.
Am pro-abortion in extreme cases involving rape or abuse
See, now that's a viewpoint I don't understand at all. The question of whether or not killing a fetus is killing a person is not affected by the circumstances of that fetus's creation.
If that's how Graham reads such statements, isn't he basically saying "It's heresy to call a statement x-ist" in his presence?
What am I missing, this seems totally hypocritical given the rest of his argument?
I interpreted it as saying, for him, as soon as he hears one of those words, the conversation is over.
Which… sounds like… if not heresy, then taboo?
He's saying that, when person A says something, and person B says that the statement is x-ist, person B intends that to end the conversation. In particular, person B intends that they not have to actually refute person A's statement.
PG's reaction isn't the point at all. The point is the speaker's intent.
Which isn't to say that Twitter is important to the United States' future, but also is to say that it's not unimportant.
Commons sway votes, which sway policy in a democracy.
Evidence suggests otherwise[1]. In the US (and really anywhere else) public policy is elite driven, and if anything public discourse and public opinion is amorphous and shifts as a response to whatever is passed down by institutions, be that corporate, academia, the media or what have you.
This very intuitively is visible in the 'topic of the day/week/month' nature of American discourse where everyone seemingly synchronized goes into a frenzy only to move on to the next thing a while later.
The 'commons' are a giant entertainment machine where people who have practically zero influence on anything meaningful can spent their time, that's about it.
[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Except when people don't participate they get nothing out of the exchange and there's no discussion or progress
No you can't. If someone records you saying something heretical, they can share it on social media and the cancel mob will get you fired from your job, even if you don't have social media yourself.
Depends on whether you get put to the stake for this socially unacceptable thing.
At some point it was socially unacceptable/heresy for a woman to float when thrown in a pond.
> belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.
Religion is just a belief system. So is Marxism. Libertarianism. Etc.
Hard disagree. I see this idea a lot, and it drives me nuts. This is how you get to silly takes like "atheism is just another religion", "science is just another religion", and all that. I get that religion can be hard to nail down (belief without evidence maybe?), but it's no use just giving up and defining it so broadly that it means nothing.
This does not broaden the concept of religion, but narrows the idea of science as something sacrosanct (ironically).
There is a belief that the scientific methodology will lead to truth. This is the same as any other religion who is steeped in ceremonial practices. The issue of how practically applicable and successful at producing models, science has been, is incidental. As a religion, the concepts fit together nicely.
Except scientists themselves do not espouse such belief. They know what they know, and also they know what they don't know; the scientific methology, too, is also based on knowledge; there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
When a scientist puts forward a hypothesis, which is not, strictly speaking, knowledge (yet), it does not mean that they "believe" in it, either; it's remains just that - a hypothesis, which gets thrown away as soon as it is disproven.
One could argue that knowledge requires some kind of faith - you have to believe that you know something (while in reality you may or may not); but much of the knowlege we possess is "hard knowledge" - the kind that prevents us from taking actions that would definitely hurt us, for example; scientific knowledge is just as "hard," and so is the scientific method.
Every religion has members who know what they know.
> there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
There is a belief that the scientific method is optimal for discovering truth. How well it works, is not relevant to the fact that it's a practice. This isn't complicated or doublespeak.
Huh, "religious" people also like give plenty of evidence before they burn/shun/deplatform anyone. Evidence can be a thing whatever mob tries to enforce. Main thing is people look evidence in support and not contrary to their beliefs.
The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).
[that such x-ist labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity]
Your conclusion is roughly his point, but his point holds independently of the "truth" of the underlying statement.
It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.
You can not make progress in a land of fiction. Propaganda is a stop sign, not a tool for productivity.
> It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
I think this is pretty insightful.
There are two things at play here that I think are being conflated - one is challenging certain concepts, and the other is challenge the social order that is predicated upon them.
Let’s take racism as an example.
Arguing that racism doesn’t exist, in whole or in part, is challenging the concept. Rightly or wrongly, that is one of the “heresies” from the article. It’s also a very difficult thing to discuss respectfully and productively in the workplace, and in most every case I can think of off the top of my head, unproductive.
Arguing that the actions taken in response to that conclusion, in my opinion, is and should be a different thing entirely. We have a work environment today that seeks to offset historical/systemic racism through positive steps such as affirmative action. I believe that challenging the implementation, scope, or even the continued existence of affirmative action should be acceptable - because it is a specific action that is in the scope of the course of business and has a demonstrable impact on the work environment itself.
From my reading of the article, I think what PG is saying is that it should be much more acceptable than it is to openly and honestly discuss the system that we have built that creates our work environments. I don’t believe that someone who argues against affirmative action - or any similar workplace policy, explicit or implicit - should be anathema.
This example of racism/AA is only one example. There are others with similar stigma associated.
Personally, I feel a great deal of social pressure not to discuss anything related to COVID in the workplace. I work for a company based in SF, but live in a small town in the South - very different social environments. I have had COVID, have verified that I have demonstrable antibodies on par with what is expected from vaccination + boosters. I also have a history of systemic inflammation that I’ve struggled with my whole life, and both my GP and the specialist I see agree that vaccination poses at least a slightly higher risk for me than for the general population. As a result I’ve decided not to get the vaccine. I have absolutely zero desire to try to sway anyone to see things my way, and honestly don’t want to talk about it at work lest it turn into a political argument. With few exceptions, I avoid discussing politics with colleagues.
A while ago we were planning a team outing in California. I wasn’t going to be able to attend, but I absolutely didn’t want to discuss that the reason was that I wasn’t vaccinated and don’t want to be.
This is the kind of heresy that concerns me. I feel like it should be reasonable for me to say that I am not vaccinated and don’t intend to be. I shouldn’t have to justify that. I may be excluded from some activities, and that’s acceptable to me - but it’s a discussion that I don’t even feel like I can have. Instead I have to hide this decision, avoid discussion of it, and hope I’m not put into a position where I’m forced to. If I do have to reveal it to my employer I expect that at the very least I’ll be viewed negatively in their eyes and it will harm my social environment.
It shouldn’t be seen as heresy to hold a different opinion.
Anyway, the truth is if you’ve had COVID-19 you are far more protected than someone who got one of these vaccines. It is heretical to say that, and I get called an “anti-vaxer”, but it’s true.
> a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination
It is a loaded term that is used mostly as a means to vilify people. There must be a lot of people who are pro vaccine, but against government mandates, so where does that leave them? Also, it is possible to be generally pro vaccines, but also skeptical of new vaccine technologies rushed through development and regulatory approvals in record time where the companies leading the push have a history of putting profits ahead of public health.
The fact that your comment shows up in gray here is further proof of the exact dynamic that he is referring to in the essay:
> But occasionally, like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large number of aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideology all at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mob dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant is increased by the enthusiasm of the others.
Choosing to make a particular statement at a particular time, in a particular context, in order to promote an "x-ist" agenda is "x-ist".
That's the same whether or not the statement is true.
I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.
There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"
Because we shouldn't automatically assume the worst in each other?
This is your example of a "truth", correct?
Who defined "crime"?
Why is possession of crack a more serious offense than possession of the same quantity of powder cocaine?
Is the single crime of selling a loose cigarette on the street equivalent to the single crime of defrauding tens of millions of dollars from investors?
How many officers are tasked with arresting people for "quality of life" offenses like loitering and disturbing the peace vs. tasked with arresting people for wage theft through unpaid overtime and time card fraud?
Are your statistics for "committing" crime in fact statistics for convictions? Are there systemic reasons those might be very different numbers?
If all of these are more useful subjects for discussion, what is the purpose of even making the original statement?
Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is judged in a harsher light because those words have a much stronger effect than if, say, some L2 software engineer on Twitter said them. If PG says something that _could_ be interpreted as racist, it threatens to normalize believing that in the minds of the people who follow him. If L2 says something that is on the fence, at worst some of their immediate friends will pile on to them about how uncool that was (barring the rare occasions of people going viral for bad takes, which is an outlier).
I think that's reasonable social policing to keep our discourse healthy. Having that influence over people demands a price in return. If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.
No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.
The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it.
Since only people with wealth and privilege are in a position to denounce it, they must have questionable ulterior motives?
You argue dishonestly and incoherently.
See what is the response.
I don’t think that’s true as there are many examples of people’s loves being destroyed, mainly through careers ended. For example, Nobel-prize winning scientist Tim Hunt [0]. He’s famous and lost his job, for saying something stupid.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8764901/tim-hunt-sexist-r...
Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.
One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.
And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.
The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'.
It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.
However, science isn't the final arbiter for marking out the optimal societal norms, whatever those may be, although this seems to be the meaning of 'truth' as you use it in this context. An authoriarian state with zero personal freedom might be just as capable of feeding its human population as a libertarian state with a minimal set of legal restrictions, for example.
Science does too, although the debaters are generally expected to be working towards developing empirical ways of settling their disagreements. I believe it was Gell-Mann who famously tells a story of holding on to his theory because of its beauty despite several experiments indicating it was wrong, and eventually being vindicated.
There are arguments that need to be expressed even though ideologues may think that they are harmful. That's the point of open discussion. There are questions that need to be asked even if others believe they may have inconvenient answers. That's the point of objective science. Because of sentiment like yours, we increasingly have neither, and we are all worse off for it.
Suffering is not necessarily bad.
One can live a full life in the midst of hurting.
The fact that Santa does not exist angers a lot of people each year…
Yes, pain = experienced disutility = harm.
> Suffering is not necessarily bad.
Suffering is itself bad, but may be an acceptable cost for some greater good, sure.
> One can live a full life in the midst of hurting.
Sure, it's possible to do one despite the other, but that doesn't negate that the latter is bad compared to it's absence, all other things being equal.
Exercising is painful, yet it is not harm. There is “good pain” (ie, muscles being stretched out and hurting after a good workout) and “bad pain” (ie, popping a joint out of socket causing an injury).
Not all pain is harmful.
Emotionally, grief is painful, but it’s sometimes necessary and helpful to grieve over a loss.
I think this is the crux of the issue. The internet (including social media/the internet/blogosphere) originated in academia and was first populated by academics. People like PG (and myself) who grew up in that environment still feel like the internet is-and-ought-to-be a free marketplace of ideas, where academically-minded people can dispassionately debate on any topic. In our view, the Internet's virtues are the age-old virtues of the liberal arts, and that it would be a liberalizing and liberating force as it spread to the public.
But the internet has grown organically. It has been September for almost three decades now.
The internet is more representative of the population at large, and we are being reminded why academia is described as an ivory tower and concepts like tenure exist. Fundamentally, not everyone can be an academic, nor can they tolerate the existence of academics. The "towers" and "tenure" exist as a two way shield: it both mitigates self-censorship among academics by protecting them from mob backlash, and it prevents the "think with our gut" mob from getting indigestion and hurting themselves.
So I think both that you're right, and that it is a shame. The internet has not changed the public's unworthiness to engage in academic conversation despite the oceans of information it has made available. The public will misunderstand and misconstrue and mistrust and misuse academic ideas in ways that harm people, and that harm will be the fault of the academics for not knowing better than to keep their ideas to themselves. Just like it is the witches fault for admitting that they thought differently than their community.
Further, a marketplace of ideas is a marketplace. Marketplaces are not emotionless voids where consumers dispassionately select the product that will provide them with precisely the best utility-to-cost ratio. They are emotional places where concepts like marketing and signaling are extremely important. Similarly, we'd expect a "marketplace of ideas" to be an emotional place and for human emotion to be a consideration when adopting ideas.
Rationally, only one thing can be true. This is what's most useful when applying the scientific method. Scientifically, there isn't such a thing as heresy - only rejecting the null hypothesis, or failing to reject it.
But people are not rational beings. The same message, delivered in the same way, can upset some people and not others. People do not react rationally. Trying to deny this (and claim that people are rational beings), in and of itself, denies a scientific truth.
that doesn't necessarily imply that all speakers should accept the burden to be so inoffensive that _no_ listener would react negatively.
No, it doesn't imply that. But let's unpack the presumption behind your statement.
We all know that there are people in the world with whom we have deep and fundamental disagreement. Religious people are aware that there are atheists; classical liberals are aware that there are autocrats and theocrats, etc. Does that, in and of itself, upset us so deeply that we take offense at it? I daresay no.
What causes one to take offense is the uttering of "heresy" by someone nearby, where such utterance affects them personally. Which means that it is incumbent upon us to know who is listening to us. There is a wide emotional gulf between a preacher who preaches to his congregation and a preacher who proselytizes and seeks converts. Same message, different audience. In the first case, the preacher is among fellows. In the second, the preacher is among those who may not be so open to what he has to say. The preacher who decides to proselytize fundamentally accepts an additional burden, if the preacher has any hope at succeeding. And a preacher who does not accept that burden, does not even recognize that such a burden exists, who tries to communicate the same message in the same way regardless of who is in the audience, well, that preacher should only see his failure as foreseeable and expected.
"Preacher", above, if it wasn't clear, is not a religious term. It refers to anybody who has any kind of message that actually tries to persuade others, rather than merely seeking the empathy of like-minded friends and family.
but these are pragmatic matters for people who are actually trying to proselytize. I fundamentally disagree that the speaker is somehow morally responsible to not violate the listeners preconceptions - that undermines the greatest tool we have as a society.
If you do end up offending somebody, it's because you veered away from the objective and started to put your subjective viewpoint into it. If you're describing your subjective viewpoint to another person, you're either looking to persuade them or to feel better about yourself (i.e. seeking empathy).
Humans don't communicate by simply listing context-free facts at one another. Connotation, implication, and context all play a major role. The idea isn't that the words themselves become evil when said in a different context, but that we recognize that they do different things in different contexts.
Let's consider a totally different scenario: the justice system. In criminal cases, the standard of evidence is way higher than in civil cases. This is a recognition of the fact that the state is capable of causing far greater harm and it should hold itself to a higher standard. Nothing has changed about the truth of say, OJ Simpson's actions, that meant that he was found not guilty in a criminal trial but was able to be punished in a civil trial.
Similarly, we might recognize that somebody with a powerful voice and a large following has a greater responsibility to careful communication than the person working the counter at the local Starbucks.
"They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they have to recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like something that can be banned."
What about being professional? Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you?
I can totally imagine a workplace where "It's not your problem if other people hate you" is the norm. And I'm happy for people who find an employer like that and enjoy that. But does every workplace need to be like that?
What's wrong with a workplace saying "you need to be clued in to how your colleagues are affected by you"?
For me, that's table stakes in being a profesional.
"Making other people hate you"? Blaming a victim of vicious abuse for what his abusers were doing is very much not cool.
A good example of something Damore did not say. Even wrt. engineering skills in the narrowest sense, it's quite possible for women to meet the same standards as men; there will just be many fewer of them since a mixture of biological and cultural factors make for a significantly bigger pipeline on the male compared to the female side. Damore suggested ways to make the job more appealing to women and reduce this disparity.
Do you have a quote where he said women are biologically inferior? You do not, because he did not.
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
And throughout the memo he keeps parroting this ridiculous line that women are more "neurotic" than men.
Sorry, but I'm incapable of reading something this insipid with a charitable eye
I might respectfully suggest you try again.
If it will help you, he doesn't say women are more neurotic. What he says, truthfully, is that women on average score higher in neuroticism than men do in the Big 5 personality traits. It's a term in psychology with a specific meaning, it no doubt has a citation in his memo, and it has direct relevance to why there are fewer women in leadership roles. If the intent is to have more women in leadership roles, and this is true, it should be addressed, yeah? The memo suggests ways to do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
Apparently, this is a heresy: "The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes."
"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
It doesn't matter whether he cites sources and tries to rationalize his position. He's in no place to be making these kinds of broad, overarching statements.
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> ● Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5] ● A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates ● Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate ● Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias) ● Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
> These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google.
> [5] Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race. > [6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.
I'll note, as you no doubt know from your reading of the memo, that your quote has a link that requires a google email to open. I'm not sure what it says.
If you read that carefully and charitably, without mindreading (he "considers" indeed), it reads like a political conservative, and not someone upset about "diversity hires" per se. You can disagree with him. I do, regarding affirmative action, but you cannot, given that quote, draw a conclusion that he thinks women are biologically inferior.
I'm not sure how "We can increase representation at an org level by making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores)" squares with your notions about the memo.
Ok, I don't think any of that will change your mind about the memo or Damore, so feel free to have the last word.
Besides which this wasn’t a “all of a sudden I wrote a paper and then I got fired” - he had been posting similar ideas into internal forums and was getting push back and disagreements. He got his editorial feedback already and he ignored it.
Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine.
This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis.
A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.
Dems are holding the line far better, though they too will fail, and the progressive wing will take over the party, and I'm personally not keen on that, even though I agree with them on some things.
From a free speech perspective the right seems to be more pro-principle and less identity-based cancellation hysteria, but they do so on the back of white, Christian nationalism and rampant hypocrisy which is a slightly different problem than heresy as per the original article.
Calling me disingenuous a bit of a reach.
How could this possibly not be seen as identity politics?
I would say "disingenuous" is on point here.
I am claiming that is the left that more prone to be cancelling people for heresy as per the original article. The right is more pernicious but there issues are different from a free speech/heresy perspective.
It’s OK for me to just use one side to make a point you know. I’m not the BBC.
Sure, if you were in a dojo practicing martial arts - an environment that is safe where engagement has clear rules and often a judge - then it's a fair point to make. So if you are in a very specific context that is intended and structured for open and fair debate (e.g. a debate club), that's a fair argument.
That begs the question of whether a university is such a place. Undoubtedly some of it is. But I do not think all of the university, all of the time, is. Just as going into a gym and doing a judo throw on someone in the middle of their yoga class is not right, even if the gym has judo classes.
So I think there is a spectrum from all rules to no rules and that most, if not all, places of human interaction have some level of formal and informal rules on how we expect others to behave.
I don't ask this facetiously, as I studied intercultural communication in college and have lived in a lot of places, often asking myself how much do I stay in a place and try to change the rules versus leaving to find a place where the rules already align with what I want.
No one appointed you, or some random Twitter mob, to speak for "society".
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does. [2]
I think there is a ton of nuance that contradicts this. For example, a white, upper-middleclass college graduate could proclaim:
"College graduation rates are lower for black people. It must be difficult for them to finish."
And a black person with a low income background who has failed to finish college can utter the exact same words and it means something totally different.
The first might be considered subtly racist, depending on how its delivered, who it is delivered to--maybe even flagrantly racist under the right circumstances. The second might be considered exactly the opposite, alleging racism while not itself being racist.
The context and speaker matter a lot for these value judgments, not to mention tone, implication, insinuation, etc. Paul is bordering on socially crippled here.
Dog whistles are why we can't have nice things.
Maybe you already know this and I misunderstood your comment.
(For bonus points I likewise kinda assumed with nothing to go on except the broader context that our "white, upper-middleclass college graduate" is going to be male and likely middle-aged or older.)
You didn't even try to argue once that the statement is less true when a white graduate says it. The most you can say is one "might be considered" x-ist and affects a vague "value judgement". What does "might be considered subtly racist" have to do with truth?
You're technically correct, the first statement might be considered subtly racist because as PG argues: that's the heretical world we live in. I'd find it hard to argue that PG is socially crippled when he is precisely spelling out this social dynamic that leads to heresy.
The only difference is you seem content that society works this way.
Speaking another language often exposes you to people expressing taboo (to you as an outsider) concepts in a blunt and direct manner. This may strengthen or weaken the taboo to you, but at least it will make you think.
To give a very mild example, in English it’s taboo to mention someone’s weight. Even if they are a public figure that you will never meet. So we have a structure of euphemisms: “overweight”, “larger”, “plus-sized”, etc. But there are other languages where people literally do call each other fat, to their face, and it is not taboo. As you can imagine, this principle extends to political and social concepts too.
Another related reason is that zealots love words. Big important-sounding words, preferably starting with capital letters (which kind of makes sense: arguments low on logic need to be high on rhetoric and wordplay to sound convincing).
Useful concepts easily translate: "chair", "sky", "screwdriver", "surjective function" are words in any language. On the other hand, difficulty in translation is a strong indication that the underlying message would be more appropriately described as "noise".
There are a few false positives (humor, contextual references) but they are fairly easy to spot.
At one point I kept a Twitter account where I tweeted random thoughts about the world only in Japanese. Even though it hardly had any followers, there was something really freeing about this. It forced me to choose my words precisely (lacking a deep abstract vocabulary, it required careful perusal of the Japanese dictionary), and I also didn't feel subject to the cultural burdens of English (as for the burdens of Japanese, I wasn't yet aware of what they were). I definitely recommend to language learners keeping a little diary in their second language, once they get to a point where they are able to.
In reality, the comment reflects four important things about Newton: 1 - marriage: he never married and once complained about someone trying to set him up with a woman; 2 - heresy: he was a reformation era figure, quite religious in his Protestant (heretical to some) beliefs; 3 - crime: as master of the mint he bestowed justice high (mostly) and low on forgers and other criminals within his authority (and not in Cambridge) which leads to 4 - sin: a nice intensifying noun that encompasses not only his intense religious nature but the zeal with which he pursued and punished criminals and many with whom he disagreed, including friends.
Was there really a prohibition on marriage, or was that a side effect of dons being required to be priests (who in the CofE of course can marry). Interesting.
In general, restoration politics were weird.
It doesn’t help that drama likes to portray them as intentionally evil.
In reality, most Christian zealots (or any historical enforcers of heresy) must have been very confident that they are doing the right thing. That their acts are sacred and justified. That they are on the right side of history.
Tolerance thrived when people realised that although you feel certain in your convictions you should have enough humility to let others express theirs, because everyone always thinks and always thought that they are right, yet they were obviously wrong most of the time. And we are likely to be too.
Source? These movements are more than 100 years old. (yes, even gay acceptance basically got its start in the early 19th c.!) Did they really progress all that much from the 1980s to the present day? This is very much non-obvious, at least to me.
Did you read that differently?
For example as to “feminism”—in 2022 nearly all women agree it’s a good idea women can have bank accounts. But Roe remains deeply divisive and most women reject the full scope of those “rights” (specifically the right to abort in the second trimester). Half of women with children at home would prefer to be homemakers, and many resent the social and economic pressures for mothers to work.
Same thing for “civil rights” or fighting “racism.” Does that mean Black and brown people being able to order food at any restaurant? Virtually nobody disagrees with that. Does that mean Black and Hispanic people getting racial preferences in college admissions or employment? Most Black and Hispanic people themselves reject that. As one of the oft-discussed “Black and brown” people, I would say much of what passes for “fighting racism” today is more like this: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ (“Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.”).
Don’t forget that there were lots of ideas advanced in the name of “progress” that turned out to be ideological dead ends. 60 years after “free love,” we have massively retrenched, pushing sexuality out of more and more contexts. I don’t see Malcom X-style racial separatism being the way forward in a multi-ethnic society. “Same sex marriage” was actually a moderate reaction in it’s time—a response to those who wanted to use gay rights as a vehicle for a larger change in norms around marriage and gender.
Finally, we don’t know the ultimate effect of these changes. I can’t help observing that the countries that initiated major shifts in views towards marriage and sexuality in the last 50 years have become dependent for their continued population stability on immigration from countries that have traditional views on marriage and sexuality.
If I dared to push back on diversity and inclusion mandates in my workplace I'd lose my job. That includes explicitly racist talk about not hiring any more white guys. These "anti-progress" sentiments may exist but effectively in a parallel society, relegated mostly to blue collar work. It's dishonest to pretend that this ideology hasn't effectively taken over nearly all of our major institutions, and this slimy sort of denial is partly how it happened.
And these topics are not nearly as black and white as culture warriors make them out to be, but God forbid if you express the wrong opinion or even ask the wrong question. Progress is great but sometimes you need to stop and listen to the people warning you that you're about to progress right off a cliff.
That's not an argument. Not even really a reasonable belief. It happens to people on the regular.
Let me introduce you to Jodie Shaw. https://dangerousintersection.org/2021/02/20/jodi-shaw-resig...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jodi-shaw-...
Shaw quit because of a hostile work environment prompted specifically by her protest, which your linked article elides. Regarding the rap, she was told specifically she could not do it because she is white, and not because of any other reason.
Here's a compare-and-contrast between the 2 articles (NYT vs RS) https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/02/25/smith-meltdown-nyt...
E.g. they called Trump a racist for saying things that most minorities themselves agreed with.
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
The sneaky lawyer trick in what you wrote is "they called Trump racist for saying things minorities agreed with". That's true, they did. But they also called him racist for a bunch of other reasons!
There is a difference between minorities being racist, which of course they can be, and minorities not finding allegedly racist things to be racist. My point is that it makes no sense to define "racism" to encompass supposed "dog whistle" messages directed at minorities that those minorities themselves agree with.
It not only gets used to shut down debate, as PG observes, but it's exploitive. It gets used to argue on behalf of minorities against policies that minorities themselves support. Associations of law-and-order with racism got weaponized in the last couple of years to advance approaches to policing and criminal justice that minorities themselves rejected.
> Why do we have to triangulate this stuff?
Because white people shouldn't get to police other white people on minorities' behalf over statements that those minorities don't find offensive.
> Trump was obviously a pretty racist guy.
In the sense that pretty much every 70-year old man is racist? Sure. In the sense that any of his policies were racist? No. Strong borders, careful scrutiny of refugees from parts of the world rife with fundamentalism, quelling riots, etc., are not racist.
I'm not out to get you with these observations. I don't think you're racist, or running cover for racists. I like that there are vocal conservative-leaning people around here. It's weird that you'd deploy high school debate tricks to respond to me, isn't it? If it's "sneaky lawyer trick" upthread, I apologize; I was just having fun, not trying to cast aspersions.
As to Haitians and family separation, I don’t think that fits into “racism.” Refugees are from a different culture, they come from dire economic status, etc. Many countries have harsh reactions to refugees that have nothing to do with “racism” but with not wanting to provide for poor foreigners. For example Bangladesh has responded very harshly to Rohingya refugees, even though many (most?) acknowledge they’re closely related to Bengalis. (The Rohingya language is mutually intelligible with dialect spoken in Chittagong, where my dad went to college.)
How can that be a meaningful or illuminating example, though? The US has a completely different history in which race and racism have played a central role, for both ill and good. Bangladesh as a country is younger than Loving v Virginia.
I don't think a leader's personal conduct and presentation are completely immaterial qualities, people/children can smell this stuff, and boy did Trump smell. A good leader inspires people to be better. Even more so for the figurehead of free world, I think folks should be able to say "look, that's our leader, he's a good (wo)man" to their children. They could with Obama, they couldn't with Trump. You're a parent, does this not cross not your mind at all?
I think Trump is a boor and I certainly wouldn’t want my kids to emulate him. At the same time, I think many of his detractors have screwed up morals as well and worry about my kids absorbing those.
[1] I think treating “racism” as a political issue rather than something to be addressed through cultural means actively hurts “Black and brown people” by pissing away political capital on abstract debates that don’t actually help anyone.
Edit: And to be absolutely clear: it's a lame technique. It works because it's emotive, not because it reveals any particular amount of truth.
Given that it's specifically about the shape of these sorts of arguments, adding specific examples would produce tangents into the merits of the specific examples; omitting them encourages the reader to consider the pattern in the context of their own experience (as you say), but by removing the actual "grievance", this technique reduces emotion, and gives us more opportunity to consider the pattern dispassionately. This would actually be more "emotive" if it forced us to confront examples which we might violently agree or disagree with.
Providing specific instances of the pattern would only be necessary if the pattern itself has few enough examples that the typical reader hasn't encountered any. Given that Graham's entire point appears to be that this pattern is increasingly pervasive, by providing examples, he would undermine his own conclusions.
Graham can't make the point that it's pervasive, because he won't provide any evidence to that effect. He won't do that because he knows that hand-wringing about "heresy" is much more agreeable than the interior position: that rich and powerful men like himself shouldn't be made to bear uncomfortable thoughts.
Yes he can. The reader can use their brain and think of examples themselves.
If Graham wants to argue that "this pattern is increasingly pervasive" wouldn't it help to provide examples of how fast it is becoming more pervasive? He could do this with examples. If he's claiming it is becoming more pervasive I think he failed to present any evidence for that.
"All we have to do is keep pushing back, and the wave collapses"
Nastiness directed at JK Rowling and Jesse Singal because of trans stuff [0][1]. I’d add Bari Weiss to this list too. [2] If the mob could destroy these people and get them fired they would. As it is the pressure from the mob makes things unpleasant for them. Most people would not continue to fight back against it.
Sam Harris gets a similar level of hostility for what are very nuanced conversations and it’s why he has his own platform.
James Demore at Google is another more controversial case (actually read the memo - it’s way more benign then you’d think from the meta conversation and imo a reasonable thing to discuss).
AGM wrote chaos monkeys and comes across as an ass in it so he had his offer rescinded from apple - I personally don’t care as much about this one since there’s some risk here with what you write and how it represents you when it comes to a hiring decision (though Apple handled it poorly).
Depending on where you work not adhering to Kendi style anti-racism can also be heretical.
Then there are pressures for other things like being forced to state pronouns in tech interviews or be unlikely to move forward. The song and dance around land acknowledgements (I think they're dumb, but that's likely a heretical view in these circles). Being given side eye or “corrected” if you don’t say “Latinx” at work. There are lists of stuff like this at work, told not to say “sanity check” because it offends insane people, don’t say “left hand side” because it hurts one handed people. If you don't agree you can find yourself labeled ableist, racist, transphobe, etc. specific arguments from you are then ignored and your job can be at risk.
Lots of stupid shit imo and pushing back against it will often have harmful career consequences so you have to be quiet about it. Most of the people loudly complaining about this stuff are on the right, but it affects a lot of people across the political spectrum. I suspect the right complains the most about it because they paradoxically have the least to lose (they're just in a separate tribe anyway with their own political support structures). The people that get hurt by this the most imo are earnest people that are interested in things that are true despite tribal affiliation, they're more exposed.
This permeates the culture and makes it hard to have interesting conversations about anything that comes anywhere close to a third rail topic. It also makes it harder to understand what’s true.
I find Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander, Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Coleman Hughes, Kmele, to be good examples of people engaging on this stuff in a nuanced way across the political spectrum.
For what it's worth this is a comment I would not have historically been comfortable writing before getting a new job where the risk from this kind of thing blowing up and having career consequences is reduced. That's likely the most common negative affect of this kind of heresy. When you put penalties on sharing ideas sure you block some truly horrible stuff, but you also snuff out anything that doesn't align with the current cultural beliefs about what is correct and true. The issue with that is what's currently believed to be true is almost certainly not 100% correct and rigidly enforcing cultural beliefs will slow down our ability to struggle closer towards things that are more correct. That's why holding free speech up as a virtue is better on net (and engaging in in-good-faith discourse on difficult topics is a good thing).
When you limit speech you put a subset of people in the position to choose which speech to limit - even those with the best intentions will do this poorly, it's better to have robust systems that don't require this centralized speech control. The promise of the web was to enable this (and in a lot of ways it has), but the failure of the web is that problems with our computing stack incentivize centralized services that bring this problem back. Either way, mobs pushing to silence/fire people that disagree with them is probably something we should work to avoid.
[0]: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY
[2]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-wi...
- Transgenderism is a mental illness
- Trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete athletically with cis women
- Kids under age 8 shouldn't be taught LGBT concepts such as gender identity in elementary schools (read: "Don't Say Gay Bill")
- Code of Conducts in software projects are dumb and ineffective
- Biden shouldn't have used affirmative action to assign a SCOTUS justice
- Forced corporate DEI is dumb and ineffective
No, this isn't true. Jewish is an ethnicity that crosses multiple "race" backgrounds.
In politics, people are typically arguing for their positions, and thus you can't take simple statements of fact apart from what the speaker is trying to achieve. Basically: why is the speaker talking about Jewish people on power so much? Why do alt-right people love to talk about black crime statistics? Both of these things can be true, but they're not just making random statements, they're trying to imply their arguments. It's dogwhistling, basically.
Say what now?
Of course, racial categories are made up anyway, but some people seem to care about these things.
Ironically, the Sephardic and North African Jews that I know are more likely to self-identify as nonwhite, but are probably still counted as white by the US Census. Goes to your point about made-up categories!
Confusing these two fundamentally different statements is one of the oldest moves in the reactionary playbook.
Also think its a common misunderstanding to think of critical theory issues as relating directly to oneself. I'm a straight white guy and I understand concepts like privilege, and it's nothing to feel personal responsibility or guilt for.
That’s wrong (evil), full stop. No amount of gaslighting will ever change that fact.
I'm talking about interpretation. I think that conservative pundits try to get people to interpret diversity initiatives as an attack against white people. I think people can also come to those conclusions by themselves too of course. But that's why I wanted an example: there's like a dozen programs you might be taking offense to but given that I don't take offence to them myself, I'd need an example.
You still haven't given any other examples though. Like, I get your concerns and I'm trying to have a genuine conversation but I can't discuss pure vagueries. I think liberals misunderstand and misapply critical theory as much as conservatives misunderstand and decry it, so I can certainly agree that some in-world implementations of it are bad.
Is he defending racists? Is he defending sexists people? Nazis? I doubt so.
I understand that you cannot be Republican if you do not believe in gun rights. But these are political affiliations: nobody forced you to be Rebulican.
Edit: As for who he's defending: I don't think he's defending any of those groups. Honestly I don't understand why so many people get upset about the US getting more accepting given they don't seem to be socially reactionary themselves.
How about statements like:
- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants - there are two biological genders - the US is not structurally racist - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) - math is not racist
If the worst punishment is people yelling at you on Twitter, then I think the heresy metaphor has been stretched too far.
Not heresy.
- the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants
Not heresy.
- there are two biological genders
Bad - this sentence is telling part of population should just kill themself since they don’t exist.
- the US is not structurally racist
No heresy. This sentence needs to be context.
- cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites
Not sure. The sentence needs be in context.
- young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.)
Bad. This sentence is implicitly claiming than being gay is not ok (being gay makes you “ controversial “ human - better not exist).
- math is not racist
Bad. This sentence implicitly claims that girls are stupid. (Mistake I read this is as “math is not sexist”)
As you can see in you cannot say that certan type of people are less of a human. But I that think WW2 kinda solved this.
You might as well as just pointed to a strange woman and yelled WITCH.
You religious fanatics are all the same.
> Bad - this sentence is telling part of population should just kill themself since they don’t exist.
Which part of the population are you referring to? People with intersex conditions like Klinefelter syndrome? They definitely exist, but I wouldn't say that "there are two biological genders" implies that they should kill themselves (wtf?) -- it's just omitting some edge cases. And it's a descriptive claim rather than a normative one.
> Bad. This sentence implicitly claims that girls are stupid.
How so? Saying "math is not racist" makes no mention of gender. This seems like a leap in logic, unsupported by any good-faith reading of the original text.
I’m not aware of ”math is not racist” so I do not know what it means.
- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines, never met anyone who disagreed with this, but it doesn't really contradict stuff like vaccine mandates.
- the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants, also never met anyone who disagree with this, just that we should do more to help refugees.
- there are two biological genders, seems like you're confusing sex for gender as gender isn't a biological concept.
- the US is not structurally racist, it is but most people seem to agree with you, it's rather the heresy to say it is than to say it's not...
- cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites, not a heresy to say, just different interpretations of data.
- young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) In what world is this a heresy
- math is not racist ??? who said math was racist. There are some people who are racist who hide behind math though, but it's not the math that's racist it's the person.
You seem to be a very unaware person of the costs of heresy today.
1. Truckers in Canada were labelled as racist, removed from donation platforms, de-banked, etc.. because they were against vaccine mandates. How does body autonomy not contradict a medical mandate?
2. Much of the left, and leftist orgs say that the US should have an open border
3. Biological sexes then -- many on the left don't agree with this and saying it like JK Rowling for example got her on the heretic list
4. LOL you are plain nuts if you think the common position from the left is the US is not structurally racist
5. data is data, blacks are kills by cops at a lower proportion
6. LOL are you even aware of the "don't say gay" stuff happening in Florida?
7. LOL many have said math is racist including BLM and other leftist groups. The whole construct of logic, match, cause and effect thinking, etc.. You really aren't paying attention.
2. Feels like a strawman tbh. Even if there are people saying this it's a radical position that's more similar to heresy than what you claim is the heresy...
3. People are really only arguing for gender. JK Rowling is arguing for 2 genders and why she is castigated.
4. Why focused on the left though? Maybe like 60% of "left" thinks the US is structurally racist, that still means most of the US thinks it's not.
5. On HN I expect you to know that you can cherry pick and slice data in any way to present any conclusion. Some people also don't think there's a gender pay gap for example. Your conclusion is not a "heresy" so long as presented with sufficient context, but it's the process of creating that context that betrays racist intent that makes you a target for being canceled. For most people it's trivially shown that black people are at several times risk of being killed by cops.
6. It's a right-wing legislation. Doesn't it counter your own point?
7. Rather than me not paying attention you read too much right-wing propaganda that strawmans issues. There is no democrat on an anti-math platform this is nonsense.
JK Rowling is castigated because she makes a distinction that the more aggressive people try to pretend doesn't exist.
The math thing probably refers to dumb policy in SF to remove algebra and standardized tests (the latter spread to some universities too which MIT recently reversed). It'd take longer to dig into this - but there are nuanced non-racist views here that would definitely get you into heretical territory pretty fast.
> JK Rowling is castigated because she makes a distinction that the more aggressive people try to pretend doesn't exist.
She does way more than "makes a distinction". She is actively against trans people. If you go on her twitter it's almost an anti-trans crusade. This is her main preoccupation these days and so will naturally garner hate. In practice, most people "makes the distinction", and this is normal and isn't heresy.
> The math thing probably refers to dumb policy in SF to remove algebra and standardized tests (the latter spread to some universities too which MIT recently reversed). It'd take longer to dig into this - but there are nuanced non-racist views here that would definitely get you into heretical territory pretty fast.
I still think it's too much to say it's anti-math, what it boils down to is education and access to education. Framing it as anti-math is very right-wing. There's no way a "pro-math" view would be heretical. MIT paused standardized testing because of covid not because they were anti-math, that kind of framing is really done by media commentators who are more interested in disrupting civil society than having honest discussions. Unfortunately it seems like people on HN are still susceptible to paying attention to those miscreants.
Initially, I thought people were arguing that despite biological sex, there is a subset of people that feel like they should be the opposite gender (or a lot of variance within that) and work towards making that a reality. They still recognized the biological distinction though and that the groups were different.
To me the Lia case showed a lot of people arguing more than that. That sex itself is a social construction and Lia is a woman just like a biological woman is and there is ultimately no substantive difference (this is sometimes argued in a more obfuscated way, but this tends to be the core of it). It ends up being a lot of disputing definitions to shoehorn trans women in under the same word and group (which in the Lia case directly affects non-trans women's ability to compete with other non-trans women). With that axiom in place then it's easy to argue there's no reason she shouldn't compete alongside non-trans women. I think this is wrong. It also leads to weird language things like "men can be pregnant", referring to the class of biological women as "uterus havers" etc. (and then making pedantic arguments about this)[0]
JK Rowling seems to have made this her entire thing (probably partially in response to the blow back she receives from it), but I thought her writing here was reasonable: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-... and her comments about social contagion are definitely heretical but seem to also be true? Risks around this are real and I'd be worried about a young person regretting transition surgery - this is also a heretical view, but seems to happen.
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-wi...
(2) Socrates was mostly right about democracy.
(3) Seriously violent criminals, once convicted, should never bet let out of prison.
(4) The US (and all nations) should have essentially open borders.
(5) The US should make health insurance illegal and provide health care as a function of government, the way they provide national defense.
(6) All gun control is against the US constitution and poor public policy.
These are all my sincere opinions, and, although I think most of them are clearly, sometimes self-evidently true, most of them are heresies.
As for the gender one: imagine you woke up in the body of somebody of the opposite sex tomorrow. Wouldn't you be in the wrong body?
My understanding is that the "wrong body" argument is actually not an accurate explanation of trans people's experience though.
Gender: I was talking about reality, not science fiction scenarios. Yes, by definition, in your example, you would be in the wrong body.
I think that's a good example of how people can be certain of their beliefs despite flying in the face of the evidence.
Yes, they're distressed because of this mismatch.
> But they are no more “evidence” than someone saying “god is love” is evidence that “god” is “love”, or that the speaker has any coherent notion at all of what those words could possibly mean.
You seem to be making an appeal to transcendental meaning - evidence isn't based on transcendental meaning or equivalence, it's based on observation of material reality. "gender" is a term created to describe the fact that trans people clearly have a mismatch between their sex and an internal property. That's all there is to it.
The internal property is called gender.
What is gender, in the sense of an internal property? How do we detect it?
If you think that gender dysphoria is rooted in delusion, you should probably read into it. There's a reason trans people aren't treated the same as people with anorexia or schizophrenia - it's because trans people are normative outside of being trans. It's the same kind of situation as being gay.
Trans people are, and I'm generalizing here, people who feel their biology doesn't match up with the gender role they identify with. They often then want to align their physical presentation with that associated with the gender role, on the belief that societal roles are more important than biology. (It's very transhumanist, in a sense.)
I'll note a fairly easy example of sex and gender differing even in our society, which is intersex people. I.e. those whose physical expression lies somewhere between male or female (which isn't super-common, but certainly happens). They're ambiguous physically, and we historically make them pick (or pick for them at birth) what gender role they'll perform.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20562024/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19341803/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10843193/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7477289/
http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to2014/2013-t...
But that doesn’t mean that the language that the patient attaches to the condition needs to be taken literally, or even that it has any meaning at all. A clinician treating an emaciated anorexic patient who insists that she is overweight (a real, well-known condition) may, as part of the treatment, interact with the patient avoiding, temporarily, contradicting the accuracy of the patient’s self-description. Her condition is real and “valid”; her self-description is just another symptom.
This is probably a dead end of an argument. I think you're making a value judgement about what could be possible -- you're entering the question accepting as an axiom "sex and gender are the same thing and cannot differ", and so naturally the person's reported experience must be incorrect. If you instead think "sex and gender are different things", you'd reach a different conclusion.
Basically, it's a set of socially prescribed behaviours and expectations based on sex. Men wear trousers and are strong, women wear dresses and are graceful. That sort of thing. There's a few different concepts mixed up in the idea of gender, but it's effectively the social aspects associated with sex.
If so, is your original “(1)” point entirely objecting to people saying “I feel I was born in the wrong body”? I, and I think others, were certainly reading it as “trans people aren’t a real thing”, with the implied policy implications that carries with it…
The argument isn’t that sex and gender are entirely unrelated concepts. Just that they’re not inherently equivalent.
Edit: I think fundamentally, if you don't object to treating trans people decently like using their preferred pronouns and name, or getting surgery, I don't think it matters too much. I'm not an expert on the definitions by any means, my primary concern is opposing justifications to mistreat trans people, so if it's just a matter of terminology I guess my only suggestion is to read into what the relevant fields of study have to say if it's something you want clarity on.
You’d be free to argue that this isn’t an inherent property, I suppose, given initial probable-fluidity. But since it seems to settle into being a largely fixed part of your psyche before the point you’re likely to have permanent memories, I’m inclined to view that as a meaningless difference.
It’s at about the same level as arguing whether sexuality is an inherent property, I think? It’s another of those “it might be hardcoded or it might be early-development cultural, but it’s basically impossible to change it so…” things.
Either way, some ideas are "heretical" for a reason: they lead to worse outcomes. You could argue under the same "trans are mentally ill" model that gay people are too. But we don't, because letting gay people live their lives (or more accurately, not oppressing them) leads to better outcomes. That's what it's all about. And it's the same with trans people - if they're accepted and allowed to present how they want, outcomes are better.
My position is mainly that unethical things shouldn't be advocated for. I think there's no good argument for stopping trans people for living the lives they want to live, and that people will rightly criticise you for being opposed to them exercising their freedoms. It's not that these things "can't be said" but don't be surprised if people criticise you for it. I think people calling this heresy are being melodramatic - being ratio'd on twitter is not the same thing as being burned alive at the stake.
The other ones are opinions and I’m not aware of anybody being canceled or fired for saying those.
My understanding is there are two groups here, and depending on where you live one or the other of them will get you into hot water:
Group A-1 believes:
1. Gendered identities are a social construct, meaning your gender is dictated by how you are perceived socially
2. Gendered expression is good
3. Every person should have equal access to all social structures
4. Therefore every person should be allowed to access whichever gender identity they prefer
5. Because gender is socially constructed, this requires your social group to be on board with assisting in the social construction of your gender identity (using the correct pronouns, etc)
6. Therefore it's wrong, and anti-freedom to deny someone's gender identity.
7. Sex is an outdated concept, existing for historical reasons to prevent #4, and in the rare cases it might be medically or sexually relevant should be replaced by a "basket of physical characteristics"... hormone levels, genital structure, etc, as the individual situation may require
Group A-2 believes:
1. Most of what A-1 believes, except:
2. Gendered expression is not good, because it is a conduit for misogyny
3. But it's inescapable in today's society
4. And people expressing gender outside of their social assignments helps break that down
Group B-1 believes:
1. Sex is still a relevant concept medically
2. Sex is still a relevant concept because some peoples' sexualities are tied to sex not gender identity
3. Sex is still a relevant concept for understanding patriarchy, and it's counterproductive to the goals of women's liberation to try to dismantle sex groups before dismantling patriarchy.
4. Encouraging transitioning as a solution to #3 is bad, because it reifies gender roles.
5. Sex is not malleable
6. Forcing others to reify your gender identity impinges on their right to build social groups around sex identities (for reasons like #2 and #3)
7. Gendered expression is not good, because it is a conduit for misogyny
8. People should express themselves however they like, but this has nothing to do with sex or "gender"
9. Gender doesn't really exist
Group B-2 believes:
1. Most of what A-2 believes, except:
2. Gendered expression is good, because tradition
3. Patriarchy is about as powerful as Matriarchy so it is not important to dismantle
4. Encouraging transitioning is bad, because tradition
IMO this debate can rage on forever because whichever side you're on, you can pick and choose from the -1 and -2 variants to concoct an evil version of either perspective.
Also, I truly love all three of: A-1, A-2, and B-1 and I think all three of them hold very important kernels of truth. As of 2022 I can't see how they could be reconciled but it one of my greatest desires that one day they could! Save us Gen Z! I don't think I'm supposed to support B-1 in public though, so I mostly don't. And from your question I think you agree that B-1 is problematic? If I had to pick just one for society I'd pick A-2, but I think it misses a lot of the picture that B-1 is trying to hold on to.
Anyway, I thought this breakdown might help answer your question? Did it?
I happen to think that private ownership cars should be severely restricted, perhaps even outright banned. I think everyone will be better off. It's a pretty hot take and something of a "heresy", but no one is going to call my employer to get me fired, or round up a gang on Twitter to badger me over it. They make thing I'm an idiot, but that's perfectly fine.
- Climate change is not as bad as show in the news
- Most womans prefer to work in somethings else than engineering
- Most womans will find more satisfaction in raising kids than a job
- A father and a mother is what is the best for kids
- Trump wasn’t worse president than Obama
- The press and big tech is 90% democrat thus they push the narrative they believe on other (some people call that deep state, other stolen election)
"What you can't say" [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html] is one of the first of his essays I ever read. It eventually directed me to this site.
At the time, I thought it was brilliant. 18 years on, I think it's a good piece of writing but he's only got half the story. Sadly, today's essay suggest to me he hasn't found the other half in the intervening nearly two decades.
Taboo is a powerful tool. Some taboos, to be sure, outlive their usefulness. But some compress lifetimes of experience into easily remembered lessons for people who have not yet had that experience so that we can ever progress... If every generation has to keep relearning the same lessons over and over, there's no time for more.
The counterweight to the philosophy Graham is espousing here is this one (https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...). A taboo is a social analogy to a fence. Someone built it at some point for a reason. That reason might be gone, in which case the fence is unnecessary. But if you're going to tear down a fence, understand why it's there.
18 years on, I don't think Paul is wrong, but the repeated mistake I see people in my field make is assuming that they're the smartest person in the room when they encounter a heresy or taboo and falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.
I've read both essays and it seems that Graham's opinion on the topic hasn't changed much over the last 18 years. We can probably all guess which "recent" event prompted him to revisit the topic, whether we agree with him or not.
"If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head."
I think you've made an interesting argument, but isn't this evidence that the taboo mechanism is failing at its job and needs to be replaced with something better?
The advantage to the taboo system is that if it's the smart folk who are getting themselves into sticky situations jumping fences, at least they're smart enough to have a fair shot at getting out.
Anything we replace it with needs to maintain the feature of protecting the most vulnerable... Taboos have the advantage of being simple, so you don't have to be smart to adhere to them.
I wish PG clearly spell out that is not ok to say that other people are less of a human. And with “heresy” he meant “vax mandates”, “gun control” and other general issues.
I’m ok dicusssing gun control, taxes, etc. but I (and anybody I know) are really not ok when somebody says “evolution does not end at neck”.
Given how often Claire Lehmann and her coterie show up as a reviewer of his essays and their Twitter interactions with Graham, it's easy to figure out he's talking about exactly such a statement.
I was not aware who that person was but by reading her blog posts it seems to be way too anti-gay and racist to be considered serious.
Here is my problem with it: It is not something that "appeared in the last 20 years". It was always like that.
You just from a group that was completely shielded from it.
Now the protective shield that you so used to starts to dissolve.
You start to realize how the real world works. Not so perfect. Not so happy.
And think that it is some new ill destroying your perfect happy world.
I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right. I'm curious how he can look at anti-"critical race theory" laws and "don't say gay" laws, which quite literally restrict freedom of speech among academics and teachers, and _not_ view this as a damaging and dangerous politics of conventionality. I'm curious as to how he can take a religious metaphor like 'heresy' and not apply it to the US American right which, in no small part part, advocates for a literal theocracy.
These essays often seem very reasonable, to me, when stated in the abstract. Of course we should support freedom of speech! Of course we should be sure that nobody is fired for expressing harmless opinions! But, consistently, the proposed solutions are uninformed, unfeasable, ineffective, or even counterproductive. The best way to make sure people are not fired for speech is not to make it unacceptable for minorities to argue vehemently with their oppressors; it is to end right-to-work, end at-will employment, and give labor more power. The largest threat to the academy is not "mobs" of students expressing their disagreement with their schools' administrations' policies, it is the systematic defunding and devaluing of the humanities, the pure sciences, and the arts.
Now when they spout similar nonsense, such dudes are publicly criticized, and the criticism deeply shocks and distresses them, to the point that whiny white/male supremacist grievance has now entirely taken over a whole US political party, which is trying to outlaw public criticism of white/male supremacist ideology.
Edit: Disclaimer to satisfy rayiner: I am a 6'2" married 36-year-old straight white male homeowner with 2 kids and a car.
Edit #2: Folks may enjoy https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
This is a really good point. It's frustrating, though predictable, to see people arguing about the precise threshold of "harm" to which speech should be held in the comments here when the harm done to most people Graham seems to be defending amounts to "someone was mean to me on the Internet."
And - yeah! That sucks! People being mean to you on the internet sucks. But until people like this are defending every target of KF/ED/4chan/etc hate mobs just as vehemently, I'm not really interested in treating them like they're neutral, rational parties.
If this is intended to refer to the United States, it is highly exaggerated. I doubt you could find a woman, disabled person, or LGBTQ+ person who seriously would rather spend their life in 1970s America than 2020s America. The normalization of rights and tolerance for these groups has been so total and swift that it can be hard to to put things in perspective and imagine what life was like in the relatively recent past.
That's not what I meant and, I think, not what I said. I did not say that we _had_ rolled back those rights, but that we were in the _process_ of doing so. Rather than moving in the direction of liberation for these groups, we are moving in the opposite direction, at least in some places, and more relevantly for this discussion, that politics of oppression is normative in the right-wing party here. Graham's essay is explicitly aimed at the left, yet effectively elucidates the precise tactics and goals of the right.
The right to abortion has been threatened more now than in the past many decades, for example.
Gee, how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections as not trying to turn back LGBT rights? One wonders.
Attempting to argue that the battles being fought today—fighting laws regulating private conduct in bedrooms versus teaching third graders about sexuality—is disingenuous. So is overlooking that the current flash point on “women's rights” (Roe) is unpopular with women in its full scope—specifically, Roe’s guarantee of elective abortions in the second trimester.
> The best way to make sure people are not fired for speech is not to make it unacceptable for minorities to argue vehemently with their oppressors;
Oh please. Social progressivism is an overwhelmingly white movement. Elizabeth Warren’s voters in the Democratic Primary were about as white as Donald Trump’s (85%).
More recently, the court seems to be looking to overturn Obergefell. [1]
> the current flash point on “women's rights” (Roe)
I was referring to the proposed reinstatement of child marriage in TN. [2]
1: https://www.educationviews.org/clarence-thomas-signals-willi...
2: https://www.wlbt.com/2022/04/06/proposed-legislation-could-l...
This is a complete misreading of that opinion. Note that both Thomas and Alito concurred in the denial of cert. They said nothing of overturning Obergefell, but criticized the process by which it was done—by judicial fiat rather than legislation. Specifically, this meant that the legislature had no ability to consider and address religious objections.
Thomas and Alito’s opinion not only didn’t call for Obergefell to be overturned, but are completely mainstream compared to other developed counties. The year after Obergefell, the EU Court of Human Rights ruled that the express right to marriage contained in the European Convention on Human Rights did not cover same sex marriage. EU countries all enacted same sex marriage through legislation—and they included various protections for religious liberty—exactly the process that Alito and Thomas said should have been followed. Switzerland only legalized it last year, and it’s still not legal in Italy.
> the current flash point on “women's rights” (Roe)
I was referring to the proposed reinstatement of child marriage in TN.
Meanwhile Colorado just legalized killing babies right up until birth.
Woah, really? Let's see... https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/politics/colorado-abortion-ri...
> The governor emphasized that the new law "does not make any changes to the current legal framework," saying: "This bill simply maintains this status quo regardless of what happens at the federal level and preserves all existing constitutional rights and obligations."
> A FERTILIZED EGG, EMBRYO, OR FETUS DOES NOT HAVE INDEPENDENT OR DERIVATIVE RIGHTS UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS STATE
There is no limitation to viability. The defenses I’ve seen of the law (e.g. Politifact’s) mistakenly assume that Roe makes it impermissible to abort fetuses in the third trimester, which is incorrect.
Sure, Obergefell and Bostock were good, but op was talking about the country, not just SCOTUS. You can't ignore things like bathroom/locker room bills, the Don't Say Gay bill, book banning, etc. You're narrowing to things that support your position.
> (Roe) is unpopular with women in its full scope—specifically, Roe’s guarantee of elective abortions in the second trimester.
This is a right-wing talking point that (predictably) ignores the facts, narrowing to data that supports their position. It's very hard to poll about abortion because it's so nuanced, and most Americans are really uninformed. Couple of things here:
If you look at Gallup's results (the poll Town Hall et al reference) [0], you'll even see majority support for abortion in the third trimester. 75% of respondents believe abortion should be legal when the woman's life is endangered, and 52% when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. You'll also see that 56% of respondents oppose an 18 week ban, which is well into the 2nd trimester.
The reason the right centers on the "second trimester" talking point is that a different question shows way lower support (65% think it should be illegal), but when they drill down, support in various scenarios (life of the mother, etc.) increases. This is similar to polling about the ACA: if you asked people about Obamacare they hated it; if you asked them about the policies in Obamacare (no lifetime caps on care, no preexisting conditions) they loved it. It's an old, disingenuous trick.
> Social progressivism is an overwhelmingly white movement.
This is super untrue, but it's not that surprising since you're using Warren's primary campaign which, again, is a very narrow measure that supports your position (the demographics of the states she competed in are "overwhelmingly white" [1], so what you said applies to every candidate until Super Tuesday). The quick rejoinder is "then explain BLM", but something more substantial is the demographic breakdown of the Democratic vote in the 2020 Presidential election [2]. Quick synopsis is Biden/Harris won:
- 63% of Hispanic and Latino voters
- 87% of Black voters
- 68% AAPI voters
- 65% of Indian American voters
- 68% of American Indian and Alaska Native voters
- 43% of White voters (38% men, 44% women)
Maybe you'll quibble on Biden/Harris not being a progressive campaign? We can look at the last Quinnipiac poll from before the Iowa Caucuses [2] where Sanders' and Warren's non-white supporters made up 41% of their vote shares. Sure they don't match Biden's 70%, but they're decidedly not "overwhelmingly white" (might want to look at the Buttigieg campaign for that one).
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/01/31/just-ho...
[2]: https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=3651
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
As to your other point, you can’t use support for Democrats as a proxy for support for “social progressives.” My parents vote straight ticket democrat, but they’re not the least bit socially progressive. I’m not talking about democrats who support DACA. I’m talking about the ones who say “LatinX.” These are the ones driving the ideological rigidity PG is talking about. These folks are overwhelmingly white: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/ (“progressive activists” are 79% white, the same as “traditional conservatives”).
You have to appreciate that white people vote Democrat for different reasons than POC. Matt Yglesias has written about this at length. For example, Muslim Americans supported Bush in 2000. Post 9/11, Iraq and the anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right pushed many to Democrats. But Muslim Americans are still very conservative within their own communities: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres.... Additionally, many are alienated by the right not because it’s religious, but because it’s Christian specifically. Thus they may support democrats out of support for pluralism, not because they agree with Beto that we should strip tax exemptions from Catholic churches and mosques. Indeed, one of the starkest differences between white and non-white democrats is that white democrats overwhelmingly believe that religion isn’t necessary for morality, while about half of non-white democrats believe it is: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...
The right focuses on Warren’s primary run because it allows them to disentangle the “we like Obamacare Democrats” like my parents, from the socially progressive intersectional democrats like Warren. Indeed, even Sanders is a bad point of comparison because remember the Warren progressives attacked him as “racist and sexist.” Sanders is popular among Hispanics because social democracy is a broad lane among Hispanics.
And Warren shows just how unpopular “socialism plus intersectionality” is with POC. You cite the Iowa Caucus, but 91% of democrat Iowa caucus voters are white. The POC there are basically all college students. I don’t know why you didn’t cite the Super Tuesday results, which is when the diverse parts of the Democratic Party actually vote. Warren got crushed among POC. Among Black people in Virginia, for example, she got 7%, losing to Bloomberg: https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/super-tuesday-14-states.... Among Hispanics in Texas she got 8%. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-boosted-sanders-...
All told, Warren’s support in Super Tuesday was 80% white, in an electorate that was only 50% white. Warren was, in fact, never even a viable candidate in a diverse Democratic Party: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elizabeth-warren-boo.... We were subjected to her for a year because she’s incredibly popular among the highly educated white people who run the media and everything else. It hasn’t been lost on me, as a person of color, how many of the loudest voices talking about race over the last year in elite circles were both white and Warren supporters.
There’s other data points too, such as Eric Adams winning Blacks and Latinos in the NYC primaries, and Yang winning Asians, while white progressives decried both.
I generally find white left wingers so hard to love because of the complexes and attitudes commonly connected to this sentiment. I try to forgive them for what I can't unsee as progressively dehumanizing everyone and everything in the spheres I have little choice but to inhabit, even though they give us no such quarter. The thing that pulls me out of anger at that tribe is sadness, when I think that probably (driven by forces that increase published statistical likelihoods) at least one atheist/left-winger I've read a mean comment or message from has killed themselves and is no more. If I feel they are dehumanizing, the correct reaction is to rehumanize.
> The right focuses on the second trimester issue because Roe mandates the availability of elective second trimester abortions, which people oppose.
Casey tossed out Roe and with it the trimester framework. The right focuses on the 2nd trimester because it polls in their favor.
> "social progressives"
I don't really think this term is super useful (is it pro-reproductive rights, pro-trans rights, what?), but stipulating that it is, I get what you're saying. There's a diversity of political views in the US, practically none are coherent and many are surprising (some Black Americans think things were better under slavery, if you can believe it). I believe they're all valid though, hard as they are to reconcile.
> Warren
My main argument here is that votes for the Warren campaign aren't a good measure of support, for all the reasons the Democratic primary process is a dumpster fire. You can dig into polls and I can throw process at you, but if you want to look at support for progressive issues across demographics, that's what polls are for. Dunno why you have an axe to grind w/ her.
> There’s other data points too, such as Eric Adams winning Blacks and Latinos in the NYC primaries, and Yang winning Asians, while white progressives decried both.
Descriptive representation matters a lot, especially in down ballot races.
---
My point with all the social progressive stuff is that it's poorly defined, and support is hard to poll across demos and issues. Which is why I reached for broad, inarguable measures like people who supported Biden/Harris, and also dug into specific questions in the Gallup poll. But you can be more granular, like how can you look at Sanders' support amongst Latinos and non-college White men and not think support for social progressivism is anything but diverse?
> "ideological rigidity"
This one drives me nuts. When the 40 people in the extremely online wing of the Democratic party display ideological rigidity, someone's Twitter mentions blow up. When the State legislature of Texas displays ideological rigidity, they effectively ban abortion and curb reproductive health access for millions of women. Are there probably weird cases of some super progressive losing it and crossing the line? Sure. None of it measures up to what State legislatures are doing.
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
I would offer the analogy of a broken (analog) clock. If a broken clock says the time is ten o’clock, and the time actually is ten o’clock, it is more important to note that the clock is broken than that the clock is correct. Similarly, if someone says something that is technically true, but they are a person who often lies or has goals that harm others, then it is more important to note that they should not be trusted than that they are correct.
Critics of 'intolerance'/'cancel culture'/'heresy' often invoke truth in their arguments. They miss that the phenomenon has nothing to do with the truth of an out-of-context statement, rather it is about whether a person should be trusted.
This is a great analogy, but I'd go even further than this; someone can say something which is true, but in context use it to signal harmful intent. Saying "you know, that last commit from Jane was awful" while venting about bad process over lunch with a good friend is very different than saying "the last code Jane committed was awful" in a meeting about hiring the team's second female employee - even if it's absolutely true.
Good point! The "problem" is often framed that society is full of adult-babies who can't be disagreed with without dire consequence. But is it at all possible that it's just the case that in recent years people have just felt more empowered to tout anti-social ideas which are worthy of scorn in the first place? There's quite a bit of evidence for the latter (January 6, Charlottesville, Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers).
I see the former (and maybe the latter, I honestly don't pay too much attention), but my interpretation is that a major culprit for any reversals in rights is the far left, who have upped demands from reasonable tolerance (which we had essentially achieved) to ridiculous "you're actively protesting with us or your against us" proportions that have caused the pushback.
Just to add, in principle I'm against
> anti-"critical race theory" laws and "don't say gay" laws
even if they are mischaracterized to a large extent. But I see them as the latest escalation in response to provocation from the left. They were not written in a vacuum.
This is the equivalent of the schoolyard bully saying "I wouldn't have hit him if he hadn't asked for his lunch money back."
My comment was giving my perception, anyway, I'm not trying to persuade.
More than 1,500 books have been banned in public schools, and a U.S. House panel asks why https://coloradonewsline.com/2022/04/09/more-than-1500-books...
curl -sb -H "http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html" | grep "right" one will be the last.<br><br>There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine when, like the medieval church, they say "Damn right we're banning
Instead we're stuck with an modernist take ungrounded in history.
Tangentially, I'd like to note "rich old man" as an example of one of those "just speaking an objective truth" things this essay supports, and the reason it can be problematic. Because objectively, Graham is a rich old man. (You could quibble about the precise boundary on "old", but he's 57 currently and that counts to me.) However, my saying it and calling attention to it certainly implies things, doesn't it?
Why do you feel it is "telling" to accurately and concretely identify something that the article was explicit about?
“The Special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it”.
Noteworthy to add that for Chesterton “heresy” is defined as the obstinate rejection of a dogma.
The current culture war got stoked in the early 90s by conservatives because it got them votes, and has been escalating since then because it still does. Or are you going full Buchanan to claim black and gay people getting equal treatment in the civil arena is a "left-wing power grab"?
Conservatism in America has not existed as a unified front modulo the culture war for decades. The only thing keeping the stakeholders together are social issues and revanchist sentiments towards anything that has even historically challenged those issues.
It’s one thing to complain that it exists, and another to discuss the roots of the phenomenon and how to address it.
Yes, I am implying that the guys at Silicon Valley with all their non-evil intentions are a major part of the problem. That the incentives of making money off data collection somehow got aligned with creating mobs of think-alike people who suddenly felt empowered to just shut everyone out of their bubbles.
Ask people to stay off facebook and twitter, Paul. Or are you in too deep?
Edit: and now it’s flagged.
As somebody else said in this thread, it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion" when he instablocks anybody on Twitter so easily.
Misquote. He said "implicitly ending the discussion by calling someone a x-ist", which is not the same at blocking someone who is annoying - blocking someone is just shutting your door, not making them lose their livelihood by defaming them.
If you know of any instance where someone has lost their livelihood due _only_ to being called an x-ist, please share.
This is hardly implicit.
Also, you want to write software without “being canceled?” Well, dust off your oscilloscope skills, in the unglamorous embedded world I hear toned down right wing rants about Putin being canceled and Covid testing as a mass surveillance program and all that happens is sometimes someone’s like, alright, let’s move the meeting along.
Does PG live in the Bay Area? That’s probably why. Most mainstream American opinions would get a person fired there.
Holding a view that tens of millions of Americans have and you get fired.
It's not even particularly controversial.
1. Some things may be true (or at least potentially true) but not appropriate to point out in a given social situation. Example: "Avi did a good job on this project in part because of his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, which conferred a genetic intelligence advantage." This could be true, it has some scientific support, but it seems to be not a good idea to say. It would probably still not be a good idea to say even if we definitely knew it to be true. A person who habitually says things like this might reasonably risk reputational and professional consequences.
2. Paul says there are more heresies than in decades past. Is that true, or are they just different?
3. Are there some things that should be heresies, like arguing vigorously for the legalization or destigmatization of adult-child sexual relationships? Don't those things provide some insight into why people might see themselves as legitimate in making X-ism a heresy?
Will add more as I continue reading.
Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.
The problem is that there are heresies and heresies, and conflating everything together isn't helpful.
To give one extreme of a "heresy": It's reasonable to not want to associate with someone if they're (in your perspective) ideologically reprehensible. In that sense, it was a bit aberrant that in the past most people would look the other way at stuff like racism and antisemitism in academia or the workplace ("none of my business," "not related to their professional skills," etc.)
But when other people think of "heresies" they might be talking about approving of a right-wing policy in a left-wing environment, or (moreso in the past) being labelled "communist," or taking contrary stances on things like wage equality.
So to reiterate my point, the article is flawed and can only lead to noisy nuance-less arguments until it spends more time defining "heresy."
Beginning of the actual framing of the issue:
> There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.
> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist,"
Is there any genuine confusion what he’s talking about here? How many commonly used words fit the “x-ist” framing?
I mean he’s a white pontificating boomer billionaire active on Twitter worried he’ll eventually say something dumb and get cancelled.
Which, indeed, is a concept that’s having a cultural moment right now. The problem is he’s adding literally nothing to the discussion.
I think most sane people can realize that the fringe “woke” elements of the discourse can veer into ridiculousness. Maybe that matters a lot maybe it matters a little I dunno.
To the extent there’s an actual problem here it’s really focused on those who are potentially at actual risk.
Examples of actual problems that could be created by excessive wokeness include the increasing degree to which HR is able to divide and control the most vulnerable elements of the labor force, or the highly cynical ways in which jargon laden intersectional language is used to obscure a hegemony of corporate and wealthy donor interests over leftist or activist organizations.
Would be interesting if he had opinions on that.
But instead we’re again talking about how the most powerful economic forces in our culture are being trolled on Twitter. That isn’t an actual fucking problem. Like really it isn’t.
PG is clearly a very smart guy. I’ve read his books I want to like him. Sure is a terrible pity he’s not spending his twilight years being introspective about the horrifying legacy of inequality and misery that’s been inflicted on society by the tech sector, where he has an actual ability to have a positive influence.
You’re trying to divide two types of heresies because you don’t want to acknowledge the truth, there’s no two types just a sliding scale of offensiveness. You want there to be repercussions for some heresies (overt racism and homophobia?) while others should be let to slide by. But there’s no inherent difference between the two types. PG is smart and acknowledges that, but decides there should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be. As long as it’s not the government that’s doing the banning in public forums people need to shut up about their rights. What’s special about the government? As PGs friend Thiel eloquently put, government is a monopoly on violence, it stands to reason the only entity that shouldn’t have the authority to shut your opinions and voice is the entity with the monopoly on violence.
But I guess once you’ve stayed rich and influential for long enough you’re annoyed at this one remaining domain where you can’t just have everything you wanted yet so you want to change the rules to let you do the same. That’s what people like Thiel and now sadly PG are trying to do. They don’t care about any real issues, they just want to spend time blasting wokeness and actively sabotage all of humanity (in Thiels case) because I don’t know what their endgame is.
So you're saying that there are factually correct statements that nobody should be able to utter without facing repercussions? Can you offer an example?
There are infinite true statements. We have to carefully pick the most useful and applicable truths to say in any given situation.
That's what wisdom and maturity are. Understanding a situation and choosing a good course of action. Including the truths we choose as the primary descriptors of the situation.
I think this is actually the big problem in the debate, not "cancel culture" or "heresies". A lot of people seem gleefully enthusiastic about seeing the worst in other people. This is not isolated to just one ideological side: people on the right engage in it just as much as people on the left.
I've started to seriously dislike "dog-whistling". Often it's "yes, what they're saying is looks fine on the surface, but I know their actual secret motivations!" Yes, things like "14/88" and whatnot really are "dog-whistling" and it's fine to call it out as such, but 9 times out of 10 I see it used today it's weird assertion about someone's motivations. It's essentially a straw-man argument with extra steps (allude to a far more extreme position than what was stated, and then attack that).
Sometimes this goes so far I wonder if I somehow don't understand the English language correctly, or ... something. Many times I see people commit a "heresy" it's something fairly mild – or even completely benign – taken to far more extreme levels than what it seems to mean on the surface.
In this specific article it seems clear to me that Graham isn't defending tosspot Nazis or other overt "x-ists", yet here in the comments we have people who seemingly take this to mean that Graham is defending folks who say that "people with different skin colors are dumber" and similar things. You can read that in his essay, I suppose, but only if you come at it with a certain attitude.
Once you eliminate the "this person is x-ist, let's find arguments to support it"-attitude the whole "heresy" problem goes away, too. I haven't the foggiest how to actually do that though.
...one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves.
Remember, these are religious fanatics not scientific objectivists.
I’ve been asking, practically begging people, to comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of my statements than the way it makes them feel.
Looks like Paul Graham wishes for this too.
No, you didn't.
This is a fault line that roughly follows the main party-lines in the US as far as I can see. And so pg can also be interpreted to be dog-whistling which side he is on. Which can also be the reason why the analysis comes across as a bit shallow; like when did we start to interpret historical phenomenon in terms of ad hoc personality types? (the "aggressively conventional-minded" personality type that supposedly is responsibly for crying heresy since time immemorial).
This struggle (between "the guardians of proper speech" and the "free speech advocates") has been extremely personal for several decades, but by bringing personality into it pg seems to turn flip the coin on the opponents; they are inherently bad humans (too). So it's perhaps not weird that this post has been flagged off and on, for that reason too.
But another take on this is how the political struggle has gradually invaded every nook and cranny of human existence, down to questioning the "way we are". It is likely a dead end that just might be one of the causes for increased mental illness in western societies.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that we need to take a step back and not so easily be drawn into the political talking points. Perhaps the answer is: let's not engage in ad hominem attacks, not on individual level, not on group level. Easier said than done perhaps, but I seriously think we need to get there.
Let's stipulate that group A has statistically more X than group B. This is the truth, measurably.
If we state this fact on public television, but omit, overlook or belittle the (also stipulated) fact, that this is due to unfair advantage Y (which then accelerates development that furthers the unfair advantage of group A) that's X-ism.
The devil is in the cherry picking and context. The outcome might not even be intended. Or it might be. The crux is: Saying "that's not what I meant" is just as easy as saying "that's what you meant" (or "that's sexist") and neither is a sign of sincerity.
The proposition can certainly be debated, but it's important that it is debated rather than shunned as heresy, because if it is true, pushing to make blacks represented according to population in high-IQ professions such as law, medicine, and engineering will erode standards and reduce productivity in those fields.
It doesn't work now; it might work better in the future when the current claims (which are right-wing propaganda) are irrelevant, and only the vague, not particularly actionable, generalities.
> Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for heresy was death
It still is. Did you miss 1/6 and the “hang Mike Pence“ chants? Did you miss the Pizzagate lies and the violence they instigated? Did you miss the current “groomer“ propaganda directed at the LGBTQ+ community and allies from the right for merely existing openly, including the Disney “bring ammo“ shirts being marketed? (All of which—at least, promotion of the ideas, if not the actual execution of the violence—is not limited to the fringes of the right, but mainstream major party political and media figures.
> The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left
There can't be a reason for a thing that isn't true. Falsely portraying the intolerance as primarily a left-wing phenomenon is the central element of the persecution propaganda that is the common underlying foundation of all of the right-wing violent intolerance efforts going on; while PG is pretending to be above the fray and neutrally negative on the left only because of the dynamics of current condition, he is actively participating in the things he is criticizing by knowingly validating the false premises underlying the most violent, dangerous anti-“heresy” movements.
> There are many on the far left who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.
“Many...seem“ is pretty weaselly, but I (and I bet I have more experience with the far left than PG, despite not being a far leftist) know of no one on the far left who believes in reintegration of felons for whom there is reason, at least negative, to believe are reformed that does not believe that for non-criminal moral wrongdoers.
Those who have neither reformed nor even acknowledged their acts or the wrongness of them are...not the same.
I agree with PG in that I'm also not too happy with the "only X can be x-ist", but on the other hand I'm also not a conspiracy nut that talks non-stop about "critical race theory". I'm also not free speech absolutist, as I'm ok with things like European law criminalizing Nazism or glorification of genocide.
I feel like I'm constantly against three very radical groups, and there's nobody representing me.
I'm tired of radicalism coming from three different directions.
Perhaps people should read David Graeber and Cory Doctorow more?
The whole culture wars thing is a prime example of complementary schismogenesis in action, which was rather nicely presented in the Dawn of Everything from Graeber on couple thousand years old tribes.
Have you noticed how the discussion here is fairly civil? It's very similar to most Reddit places, lobste.rs and other *moderated* fora as well.
Most of these extremes only arise in unmoderated spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. Or the original /b/.
Similar things are happening in the news comment sections wherever they don't care to moderate.
It radicalizes people long-term. I am no fan of censorship, but EU will probably step in eventually.
’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’
Nobody heard him.
— https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...
I would amend #1 to “the adherents of the conventional view are convinced its truth is beyond question.”
Truth is actually really important, maybe the most important thing for heresy. A defining feature of heresies is that those enforcing them believe strongly that the heresy is untrue.¹
Take PG’s example of doubting the divinity of Christ. Truth isn’t secondary in that case - just the opposite. Believing it, literally, is the core feature of Christianity.
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
This is a fallacy. Insofar as this phenomenon exists (less than people think), it’s because the belief content of the statement is different depending on who says it. There’s a common view on the identitarian left that “minorities can’t be racist because racism is about power and they don’t have any.” But a Latino professor who spends his time arguing that Black people are genetically inferior to other groups will get cancelled just as quickly as a white one.
¹Or need to be seen as believing it 100%
Did I read this right?
I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.
For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
I think you read your biases into that, too:
> The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says.
So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something.
And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different.
In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable.
But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success.
Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500.
So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
Yay.
But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.
Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.
"It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.
The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender.
My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.
"13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational.
Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".
Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context:
A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top.
B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all.
If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's:
> Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good.
What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?
What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?
Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.
When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes. People aren't getting fired for picking nomad over kubernetes. People are getting called out for denying the existence of people who aren't like them. When someone gets fired for, as an example, purposefully misgendering their colleagues- that isn't getting fired for having a bad opinion, that's being fired for making a hostile work environment.
What's always interesting to me is that these "free speech absolutists" are explicitly calling out the left here, when the right is the one passing "don't say gay" legislation and refusing to allow trans children the healthcare needed to save their lives. The right is also kicking everyone out of their party who doesn't bow before Trump. To say that the left is creating heresies while ignoring that the right is literally creating new dogma is just delusional to me.
Here's the question:
Are you tolerant of people who do? Or do you make the lives of those people (who viscerally feel their gender identity to be true) more difficult than those who share your belief?
The line is crossed with the latter.
Has GP crossed the line merely by expressing his/her/their opinion? This probably depends on his/her/their social status as well. The CEO of a company saying something in an official meeting carries a different weight for all employees than some random employee saying the same thing.
Or does GP need to say or do something personal to someone in order to be considered to have crossed the line? Be careful there: add too many constraints and we will end up giving a free pass to people who genuinely offend and cause serious discomfort to those around them.
These are the kinds of issues about which we as a society need to have reasonable discussions and make consensus-building efforts, but it all descends into name-calling too soon.
why do you consider it beyond reasonable accommodation for some people? do you think you know some deeper truth about these other people than they know about themselves? why do you think you can reliably identify that case? couldn't you simply leave them alone, and not make a big deal out of it?
if you think it doesn't matter, prove it. refuse to recognize anyone's identity. start misgendering and misnaming people you wouldn't do that to before. see how far that gets you.
I think the debate is less about what someone's inner life is like, and more about whether gender words (like man, woman etc) refer to inner feelings or to someone's physical sex. Historically they have been used to refer to both, and many people. use their own gender label to refer to their physical sex rather than any inner feelings.
Yeah, but neither do they. There is such a thing as objective truth. I have no right to be treated as four-legged, because I do not have four legs. Neither can I claim a right to be treated as the Queen of Englang, because I am not the queen of England. Nor do I have a right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex because I am not in fact a member of the opposite sex.
1. Whether people of different sexes ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
2. Whether people of different gender identities ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
My own view is that in the vast majority of cases we shouldn't be treating people differently on the basis of either sex or gender identity, and that identity-based gender and sex-based gender are about as bad as each other!
Does this change when it legally changes? Or does the gender you were born with forever stay the same?
Someone might think they're charming, and I might find them a great bore.
It's obvious in this example that equivocating that with deciding for that person, anything at all, is asinine.
Most social settings, and all professional ones, require that I be more polite to this "charming" person than I would otherwise be inclined to, given my own feelings on that subject.
There is something to be learned here.
What you can't do is harass people, deny them service, or make their lives a misery.
No one is forcing you to believe in something. They're asking you not to be an arsehole about something which doesn't affect your life.
But they are forcing you to pretend to believe in something by dictating what you are allowed to say about it.
The norms are not as straightforward as you claim.
But there are people out there that tell me it is bothersome. Out of respect, I modify how I speak and write. Why shouldn’t I get the same courtesy?
What is the point of specifying pronouns then? Isn't this just a lazy form of misgendering?
Instead of using someone's name you could just refer to everyone as "Hey You", but that seems discourteous and disrespectful. Why not just use their preferred name and pronouns?
No, because "they" isn't gender-specific. It's not referring to someone by the wrong gender, it's not referring to them by their gender at all.
> What is the point of specifying pronouns then?
I'd argue that there probably isn't much point. Why do we refer to people by their gender? No idea. It doesn't make any sense to me.
When used as a singular it’s the pronoun for people that identify as non binary. You are absolutely misgendering people but you get a free pass because contra fosefx this whole pronoun thing is about power and who has it, rather than universal respect.
It can be used for this, but it's also used for someone of indeterminate gender or if you simply don't want to mention their gender. For example:
"Oooh, that's such a beautiful baby, are they a boy or a girl"
"Does your friend want to buy my phone? You said they were interested?"
I think it's more analogous to referring to a transwoman as "they", which I also do. "They" does not gender you at all, so it can't misgender you. I don't think you (or anyone else be they cisgender or transgender) have a right be referred to by your gender, whether you prefer it or not. I think that's different to be referred to by a gender you consider worng. In that case someone is actively labelling you as a gender. By calling you "they" I'm saying I think you're genderless, whereas by calling someone "he" I think you are saying you think they're male.
If you had a strong preference to be referred to by your gender then I probably would make an effort to do that, but I don't think you are owed that (to be honest I wish trans people weren't so hung up on pronouns too - I think it's silly to be so fussy about language - but I have seen cases where they're used maliciously so I can somewhat understand why they are).
Right. As it turns out, I identify as male not genderless. But this is not something you are obligated to honor under threat of being fired for some reason.
That is my point.
If I provide my name and preferred pronouns, if you respect me and my wishes, why not use my name and preferred pronouns when addressing me or referring to me?
Using "they" when I don't want it as a pronoun is misgendering.
In Tagalog, it/she/he is a simple word, "siya" (pronounced "sha" if said quickly).
Furthermore, generic he has also been around for hundreds of years. So we should keep using that too, right?
This seems less like a material distinction and more like something that transphobic people would bring up to support their ideology.
> Furthermore, generic he has also been around for hundreds of years. So we should keep using that too, right?
My point was that it isn't new or somehow "a gen Z thing", not "all old things are good"
No one has said anything about trans people, we were talking Gen z butchering the English language. Also, is it a disorder (“phobic”) or an ideology? Or do you not understand that distinction either?
Even if there is no harm in calling them ‘your majesty’ it doesn’t feel right.
I dont care if you are male or female or whatever you want to be. I just want everyone to be happy to the extent they can be, but be tolerant of those who remember you as you were to them as well. It isnt just a switch you can turn off instantly.
This seems to be a common fear, but it’s not rooted in reality. As long as you make a good faith effort, no one is going to get mad at you for messing up their pronouns. You might get corrected; just apologize and move on. It’s not a big deal.
If someone suspects you’re messing up in bad faith, they might be harsher with you. Which is, I think, entirely reasonable.
Maybe you have friends who wrongly assume bad faith when you mess up. I’ve never seen that happen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t! You could have some shitty friends who don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. But comments like that “your highness” hypothetical really aren’t doing you any favors.
(People on Twitter probably assume drive-by repliers are speaking in bad faith by default; that is, unfortunately, just a feature of the Internet)
Pronouns aren’t any different - if you had a masculine looking female coworker at work - say she was into bodybuilding - and you keeping calling her “he” as a “joke”… persisting when you were asked not to, by your boss, by hr perhaps even. What kind of person are you being here?
You can not believe in gender identity, I don’t care. But be respectful to your colleagues at work. Is that so much to ask for? To literally not be as asshole? Is that what you’re defending - your right to be a flaming asshole to your coworkers without any consequence??
And in the end this is what the “culture wars” are about: the right to not be decent to certain people.
what do you do when you are asked to respect someone else's choice of gender identity? do you go along with it, while quietly keeping your own opinion? or do you complain and purposefully ignore their request? or maybe do something else entirely? how do you keep a friendly work environment when the mere questioning of someones gender identity can be considered hostile?
you ask that your rejection of the idea is considered not hostile, yet you consider the enforcement of rules of interaction as something hostile.
I know people who thinks like you, but they don't shut the fuck about these things, and take every possible the opportunity to proselytise about it.
I've seen it happening in workplaces, for example. But also parties, random people on the street.
Not shutting the fuck about it is fucking annoying and if it's in the workplace I'll be complaining the fuck about it until you stop and/or looking for another job.
Now, I'm a 100% neutral part on this, and even me don't wanna hear about your bullshit. Imagine now if you were to use this to actively hurt people.
One funny thing I learned from studying high demand religions: you don't have to believe something for it to be true. It's existence is entirely orthogonal to a person's opinion.
A heresy is a position that damages trust. When someone publicly espouses a heretical position, they damage other people's trust in them to make good decisions and have good judgment. Now, you can also breach trust via committing a crime, so the overlap is clear. But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked. Somebody who says women don't belong in space is going to end up as unqualified to be director of NASA as somebody who fundamentally and with great conviction mis-states the tyranny of the rocket equation. Both mark the person as a poor fit for a high-trust job were there opinion on those topics matters.
And people who believe themselves against "canceling" seem to often be in agreement even if they don't realize it of themselves. A talk was famously pulled from a security conference several years back because after the talk, people concluded that the speaker didn't know what they were talking about. The difference in opinion is on what constitutes a breach of trust, not on whether people can respond to such breaches by routing around other people.
That's because no trials are held in modern mob justice for heretics. The mob justice punishments are more like lynchings.
Medieval heretics could at least expect a "witch hunt"-style trial. The monarchy or church was the authority and there was a semblance of rule of law.
Modern heretics face mob justice by self-appointed vigilantes and mob justice punishments. The lack of due process is concerning.
This is not true. You don’t have to look hard for examples of people being jailed in the US for holding unorthodox positions.
Defining heresy as “a position they damages trust,” implies that an accused heretic is at fault for believing something that “damages trust.” That is entirely subjective relative to the one whose trust was damaged.
Society has claimed heresy to suppress political and religious opponents since the beginning of human history. We have also shown a track record of being very wrong with regard to how we define heresy in the past.
Why should we believe that we are any better than our ancestors on this front?
This rings alarm bells for me. Could you give an example of someone jailed in the US for the mere holding of an unorthodox position, rather than a concrete action, in the last, say, 30 years?
I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, how criminal transgenders should be incarcerated, or whether affirmative action is a good way to help disadvantaged people.
I do think the article is about that. I think it was purposefully left vague so he could take advantage of people giving the benefit of the doubt. I don't think people's pronouns should be up for debate, and I believe PG does.
Anyway, maybe GP is talking about other “heresies”.
Here's an example:
"There's no such thing as a trans person. Trans is not a real thing, it's a mental illness and a delusion that needs to be cured. "
If you hear that and you are trans, then you are bound to feel like someone is denying you actually exist. Its a strange feeling that someone whose existence has always been validated by society cannot really relate to. I imagine that's why you are puzzled by its meaning.
(Is it more about denying trans people's suffering perhaps ?)
I guess that this dismissal of mental illness (and here also of trans people) also comes from equating "anormal" with "bad". At least I can see where the conservatives are coming from with this, but I have much more trouble to understand it when progressives fall into this trap !
But back then we heard all the same things. "Oh, we can't have gay men teaching young boys because they are sexual predators and they are trying to recruit our young children to be gay." Or that "being gay is a mental disorder that needs to be cleansed through re-education".
It's just striking to me how similar the arguments are, right down to the legislating intimate space use like bathrooms and locker rooms, and the moral panic over children (who are yet again being used as moral shields). It used to be you couldn't even be gay in the military. Now they let gays in and it turned out to be not a big deal at all. But without missing a beat they've recycled the same baseless arguments but crossed out "gay" and filled in "trans", seemingly without any recognition or reflection about how badly their anti-gay arguments aged.
Yet the situation is radically different, since trans, in addition to having "social issues", also have "body issues" ?
(Then there's also the situation with (real) pedophiles, which, unlike for gays, we have decided to keep in the mental illness category - and understandably so, considering the danger for children.)
I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.
I think the issue is the consequences of speech which are permissible themselves -- I think being shunned by a friendship group seems always permissible. Being marginalized in one's workplace, shunned by one's colleges, and so on -- this seems far less permissible.
I dont think this is a strictly left/right issue; and what today is called "left" is rather a kinda of corporate politics --- "corporate correctness" rather than "political correctness". This is about embracing "diversity and equality" of your workplace identities (vs., diversity of skills; and equality of treatment, for example).
I'd imagine if work/life were better seperated, and the workplace better managed, these issues would be felt less seriously.
The question of "free speech" is a massive red-hearing. Everyone accepts some concequences to some speech in some situtations. The only useful conversation to have is: what concequences are permissible, and when.
Presumably, likewise, no one believes abitary ones, whenever -- yet this seems to be the implied position of many who think you can just stop the argument at the point where some "anarchism of speech" is shown to fail. Nope.
The only reason I brought up left versus right was because that's the reductionism PG resorted to here. I also think it's a bit more nuanced. I also think focusing on this being a free speech issue, as PG does, is a red herring for other cultural issues.
As far as where this culture is present, at least: tech, academia, etc. Ie., the places where we do see this counter-reaction. Though the counter-reaction is dressed in the language of free speech -- I think its more just about the capture of corporate policy, in these industries, by a certain descendent of political correctness.
People have to turn up to work in these industries, or otherwise participate in them, whilst holding their nose at this mawkish soapboxing display of which rich idiot is "changing the world" all the while those who are repulsed by this are ever-more seen as inherently immoral for not singing from the same hymm sheet.
If we recast this whole issue as one where previously political activity has spilled over into most areas of life, such that many now cannot espcae it --- then we see what the problem is.
It isnt free speech. Its the lack of quiet places. It's that if you want to work in these areas, you're bombarded with the loud noises of loud opinions that you can't escape.
There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.
See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.
Is this really a topic you needed to weigh in on? I’m assuming you weren’t concern trolling or playing devil’s advocate, but it’s very easy to imagine how a “gentle challenge” might get interpreted as such if your relationship with the other person doesn’t generally include similar discussion topics.
Certainly I wouldn't hang around with someone constantly reminding me which of my views they currently think aren't falsifiable.
You have literally provided it as an example of canceling:
> > When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes.
> There are plenty of examples... e.g. a friend ending our friendship
Someone can be affected by things and still end up with false beliefs. It’s possible to still be kind to someone and argue a belief they hold is wrong.
What’s true can be in conflict with deeply held beliefs (and often is). Part of the core issue is when one side won’t engage in actual discussion of the content and only argues at the meta level about identity.
I think roflc0ptic’s examples are good ones - thankfully it seems the discourse around this kind of stuff is shifting back to being more moderate.
Edit: It's not particularly important or relevant to what's been said here if you see the mainstream discourse as shifting to being "more moderate". This is a given with any single-issue activist, it's your business if you deal in organizing activists. The shift to being moderate only happens through this process, there's no other process.
If you don't concern yourself with organizing activists, then this isn't your wheelhouse, and I don't see why it was brought up.
Yeah, on that I agree - requires more deft communication skills. I think you can still “blame them” for holding false beliefs though (or phrased differently not give them a free pass on dogma) while still understanding it’s going to be an emotional thing for them, but this sounds like it might be us just disputing definitions over “blame” and we mostly agree.
I think this is a good point. An issue that coexists with this is that activist circles here in the 20x0s, of which I have been both a part and adjacent to, are in general not open to evaluating the truth value of their beliefs under any circumstances, not even around questions like "is this tactically/rhetorically an effective strategy?". There's also a related issue where basically their only tool for communicating across difference is opprobrium. You can see this laid out persuasively in this (uncommonly good) quilette article: https://quillette.com/2021/01/17/three-plane-rides-and-the-q...
What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion. And sure, there was a combative element to the civil rights movement - we're on the bus, you can't fucking ignore us - but it was coupled with cogence and reason. I'm pretty sure microaggressions exist, and also think they're a toxic framework for evaluating the world.
No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing a culture where people make their activism an immutable part of their identity because it's all they know and they have no reason to pursue outside perspectives; if you're in a marginalized group it can be very easy to end up in a situation where there's nobody to look out for you besides yourself. This is not a new happening in any way shape or form, from my knowledge it's been this way for as long as there's been free societies that allowed protesting. This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
Can there toxic social pressure in activist spaces? Absolutely, but that can be present in any social group where there are leaders and followers. That also isn't new in any way at all. I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
less of this please.
> This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
> >What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
>No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing
If you take the "don't listen to other people because you don't know who to trust" knob and turn it way up, you get to "listen only to people who agree with me", turn it farther "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy." I _don't_ think this was the dynamic in the mainstream civil rights movement, but even if it was it wasn't the rhetorical tactic outside of the black panther/WUG fringe. I _do_ think it's the dynamic/rhetorical strategy in the current activist milieu which has bled into the broader world.
You're right to say this, sorry I just legitimately can't understand how you could be extrapolating this if you had actually seen a lot of the high profile stuff that happened on e.g. facebook in the last decade. There's just so much unreasonable behavior and tribal "us vs them" attitudes coming from all sides at all times. I've seen lots of people do like you're doing now trying to blame this on "activists" for no real reason when to me it's every group doing it constantly all the time, even the ones that you would think would be relatively reserved. I honestly think you might be in a activist bubble and you need to get out from it, I can't understand why you would be otherwise focusing so much on the tactics of some "activist milieu".
Edit: Another response brought up a good point. Your pushing back on body image issues seems pretty tone deaf. Those are pretty personal and the point there is that it doesn't help to shame people for being overweight. Nobody responds well to that, it usually just causes hurt feelings. You can still promote healthy lifestyles without making it about "anti-fatness".
I could be mistaken about their idea's falsity, or they could be mistaken about its truth, but we'll never get closer to knowing if I don't engage.
Obviously I also owe them kindness and respect.
If they choose to interpret a kind, respectful disagreement as oppression or violence against them, they're hurting themselves.
In a mildly-related vein, it took me a long time to be able to recognize personal criticisms as a gift from the critic, and I'm still working on it, but the basics of that mindset shift seem to be settling in at this point. When someone tells me what they really think of me and my actions, they're engaging with me and giving me a chance to understand them a little better. I strive to be grateful for that even when the delivery is rude or hurts my feelings.
Genuine rejection and harm to others looks like physically injuring them, verbally abusing them, or barring them from societal spaces and services.
Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
Sure, same for combat vets. It still incumbent on them (and everyone else) to reality test their beliefs. Creating social conditions where people say unreasonable things and the only acceptable response is to say nothing and think to ourselves, "it's okay, she's a woman/black/whatever" seems bad to me. I don't think it helps anyone.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
You make interesting points but mix it in with shitpost stuff. Would be great if you chilled on that
To me it's like, look, do you really want to go to work with someone who says things like "you are ugly" and "you are stupid" and "your mother is a whore" to everyone every day? I know people who would do that even in professional settings, it's just as bad as you'd think. It's not declaring "heresy" when they get fired because nobody wants to deal with that every day. Pg is of course entitled to his own opinion of what he wants on his startup incubator and forum, which is why there's moderation on this site and why he has kicked people out of YC before for literally just saying things. It's not enacting "heresy" when you ban somebody from YC or hacker news for saying stupid and callous things! So why the double standard? That's why this whole comment thread and article is just absurd to me, I'm so saddened that so many people are actually commenting on this.
I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respect you."
Obviously you can tell people when you think they're wrong without them trusting or respecting you, but you're clearly right that it may not have many useful results in that case.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here...
I have a slight bias against pg.
His earliest essays I enjoyed, but his writing in the past ten or fifteen years strikes me as suffering from the blindness induced by being rich and myopically focused on startups and technological advances, with the apparent assumption that those things must be inherently good.
If I happen to agree with him on this particular point, it's not because I'm inclined to like his stances by default.
I think it's rather the opposite. There are, to be sure, tragedies and abuses of woke rhetoric that gets directed at the wrong people and/or implemented in outrageous ways. But they're pretty rare, and generally get a ton of media coverage for exactly that reason. Those are what PG is writing about.
But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people entering this kind of argument are actually just wanting more cover to say things they used to say that are... well, kinda off. Not "lose your job" off, but casually "x-ist" in a way that most of us would prefer not to engage with.
And really, that's the rub here, and the biggest problem with PG's essay here. Where are the examples? If there's something you want to say but feel you can't, then say it. This is a reasonably anonymous forum. PG is reasonably immune to that kind of criticism. But the problem is that when you say it the debate becomes a debate about your opinions and not your oppression, and that's ground these folks won't win on, like this one:
> I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric
You literally had a friend walk out of your life because you couldn't respect her boundaries about something as senselessly unobjective as body image, and the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one?
> the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one
I never said I was oppressed. You've invented that whole cloth.
If you find yourself thinking "they're just using this for cover to say bad things", consider that in the context of you abjectly misreading/inventing details to what I'm saying here. If you fill in details that match your own negative biases and then say "wow, these people really live up to my negative biases," you're not evaluating evidence, you're just testing your own beliefs against your projections of your own beliefs. Certainly looks like what you're doing here.
You are making stuff up. The person already said that they discussed politics together all the time.
If you are discussing politics with someone all the time, it is absurd to claim that a boundary has been crossed.
Like, I say I cannot understand trans people at all, and people will jump on me because I’m rejecting them and making them feel bad, when I’m just stating a fact.
There’s a lot of this stuff.
When you say "I don't understand trans people", trans people have heard this many times before. Unfortunately for you, many people who have said this phrase before followed it up with "...and therefore I hate them. I will legislate against them; I will pass laws against their existence in public space; I will demonize them; I will jail them; I will murder them."
Those are the stakes, so the pushback is in proportional to the life and death nature of what's going on here. When you say "I don't understand trans people" they are expecting you to follow it up with more of the same. And I get that's not great for the general public's understanding of trans people. But understand that it's a reaction to years and year of abuse from other people who also proclaim that they "don't understand."
Your general confusion is being received in an environment where people are literally fighting for their lives. Maybe in a different time, when people aren't facing down the vast power of the state to dictate their existence, there would be more room to treat you gentler. But the pressure has been ratcheted up to 11 by powerful forces bent on a 21st century new moral panic, and that's not the fault of trans people and their defenders, but the people who are trying to make their lives hell for no reason other than intolerance.
On the other hand, there is no such agreement around gender. People are using terms such as "gender", "man" and "woman" to refer to vastly different concepts ranging from "how someone subjectively feels inside" to "what physiological traits someone has" to "how someone is treated by society".
To the extent that not understanding someone comes from not understanding how they personally define gender and how that fits with how other people are using the same term, it seems quite reasonable to be confused.
Just because "I know it when I see it" applies to your personal lens its an inarticulate way of viewing the world.
If this is the case, it’s only the case in the most vanishingly contemporary moment of ours. Both the Holocaust and the American system of chattel slavery were fundamentally predicated on questions of identity (“one drop”). Both moments also fundamentally shifted how and when people consider themselves Black or Jewish, because they are aware that others might consider them so for the purposes of persecution.
Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think this needs qualification: I don't think that treatment of individuals on the basis of gender (or sex) is just in the abstract, but I do think there are social policies that are inequal in scope that are justifiable on the basis of making all individuals more equal.
> Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think a lot of people agree with this! The tension is again in scope: the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
I pretty much agree with that. But I think that most people are thinking about rights being as assigned to gender in the abstract. It seems to me that the reason there's so much fuss about statements like "trans women are women" is because the assumption is that "women's rights" are assigned to women in the abstract, and that who gets them is therefore determined by who counts as a woman.
> the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
That's only true if you accept that cisgender men won't want to act in ways that we associate with trans or cis women (e.g. wearing dresses or make up (and if you define gender in terms of identity then you could even include making changes to their bodies here)). And IMO that assumption is pretty sexist. I also think that there is a tendency to assume that such men are trans women, but identity doesn't work like that, and if we want to talk about assigned-gender-non-conforming people in general then we should talk them instead of trans people. I guess I don't really accept that that trans women are under more pressure to behave in certain ways than cisgender men are. But if you have a good argument as to why you think they are, then I'd be interested to hear it.
Or see this op-end regarding the ADL changing their definition of racism to require it be against "people of color" and Whoopi Goldberg claiming the Holocaust was not about race: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/03/whoopi-go...
The same kind of postmodernist thinking that is comfortable redefining well understood biological terms like "male" and "female" to be about "not doing the dishes" or "liking climbing trees" instead of generally unambiguous biological properties is just as comfortable deciding that you're "white" on the basis of not wanting to extend the protection of anti-discrimination laws and norms to you.
Seems like a weird thing to say. I don't understand FORTRAN at all and as such I stay away from people discussing it.
Why do you want to tell trans people that you don't understand them? Wouldn't it be easier to read some literature so you can gain a basic understanding?
I see this a lot and it makes no sense to me. What does it mean to deny the existence of someone? To pretend they do not exist?
People who make that comment usually seem to be falling into a trap of viewing a disagreement or difference in opinion as something much more extreme.
This effectively denies the existence of people who believe or desire to be their non-assigned gender. The statement tells trans people that in the eyes of the speaker, their personal identity is a fabrication.
If that's not denying the existence of a different kind of person to you, I don't know what is.
Define horrible.
But a lot of these heresies are about behavior/speech outside the workplace, or behavior/speech that you need to actively look for.
So I don't buy the "hostile work environment" justification.
Looks like someone didnt understand the article, because PG directly addressed that point.
People say horrible things all the time! In fact, I reckon that if you said anything, a non-negligible fraction of the world's 7.5 billion people would think you horrible for saying it. It is not possible to avoid saying horrible things, especially out of context.
Even if you limit yourself to racist and sexist speech, how do you deal the fact that roughly 100% of the people on this planet, of ALL races and sexes, are themselves racist and sexist, and say racist/sexist things all the time? What are the consequences for a homophobic black person? What are the consequences for the Japanese woman who hates the Chinese? What are the consequences for the Libyan mother who circumcised her 4 daughters, with the support of her government and community?
The culture war that the left has started is an intellectually bankrupt grab for cultural power, who's primary effect has been to piss off the good people of the left, and to inspire a once-in-a-century outbreak of insanity on the right. I get that you want to make the world a better place, and it makes sense that punishing people for wrong views could make it so, but you've done the experiment now. Tell me, how is it going?
* The tools of censorship are then used for normal speech. Proof: Ron Paul had a YouTube channel. He left politics before the covid and no videos had been posted since the pandemic started. But they censored his YouTube channel full of videos by censoring all of the videos and the channel.
* Proof here: https://twitter.com/ronpaul/status/1308849979730071554
* This censorship of the political right happens in a long list of cases that have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or false propaganda. Ron Paul's YouTube channel being censored is one example in a list of thousands just like it.
It's really easy to think/say horrible things. The main defense humans have against it is following orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.
If you think you are naturally good (whatever that means), you are wrong. If you think you are good because of your intellect, you're also wrong. It takes many generations to build up the kind of orthodoxy that keeps humans good. And the lessons behind it are too many to learn in a lifetime.
So, we need to mostly follow orthodoxy, at least in our actions. But that poses an intellectual problem: orthodoxy is imperfect, and to discuss and advance it, or even understand it well, you have to challenge it. If merely by challenging it you transgress, then it will never be understood very well and certainly not advanced.
Granted, there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
Remember: gay marriage was illegal almost everywhere 20 years ago. Imagine the surprise to, say, a 60 year old, that "misgendering" (by using pronouns associated with one's biological sex) might be a firable offense today.
One issue is that there are multiple orthodoxies. Each human culture has its own orthodoxy which is reflected in the culture's norms and practices.
>> there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
When and why is it right or just to judge one culture against another?
We can try to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, but it is very difficult to understand without having lived their lives and experienced it ourselves. Perhaps the best we can do is to be compassionate and tolerant of others who think or live differently than us. We can educate, persuade, and help, but condemning them and punishing them strikes me as unfair and perhaps unjust depending on the circumstances.
2) I think you're conflating two different groups of people to make your argument sound better. I don't like cancel culture and I don't like the Florida bill either. People aren't just "ignoring" it.
3) > denying the existence of people who aren't like them
This is such a weird, vague statement and I have no idea what it means - which is great because it perfectly captures the mob mentality of the far-left cancel culture. The reason everyone is so afraid of it is because you never know exactly what you can say, and it changes by person by day.
In my professional experience, even "acknowledging the existence" of trans people is a minefield. The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive. Certain people think changes of pronouns should be handled differently and if you disagree with them you eventually get a meeting invite from your supervisor called "Discussion".
Speaking of hostile work environments...
I understand the euphemism treadmill can be difficult, but understand why it exists: when people in a group use certain words to self identify, those words are then coopted by outsiders of the group to vilify insiders. Therefore the old self-identifying words are abandoned by insiders and left as markers of those outsiders who are attempting vilify them. Meanwhile new words of self identification are adopted by insiders that have no negative connotation.
Take for instance people with mental disabilities. The words lunatic, insane, retarded, disabled, mentally disabled, special etc. have all been used to describe the same mental state, and have all been at times the "correct" way to refer to such people, and also the "insensitive" way to refer to such people. Calling someone "retarded" used to be clinical. Now you say "retarded" and it's a grave insult.
This is just the price of diversity, and existing in a world where people want to use powerful words to shame and demean. Words have amazing power, and when they are wielded in evil ways you have no other choice but to abandon the word and move to a next one.
This is why the N-word is so forbidden to say; Black Americans took a stand and said: "No more. We are reclaiming the power of this word, and you just can't use it anymore, period." It took a huge movement to make that social change, and it'll take the same similar movement to stop the euphemism treadmill for trans people.
In the meantime, try to keep up. If you make a real effort people notice and they have tolerance for that. However if you make clear that you have no idea why you have to keep up with all these words in the first place, and it's really all just a bother to you that you'd rather not deal with, you're implicitly signaling you're more aligned with someone who may use those words in a harmful way, and that may be why you are met with hostilities.
Emo Phillips was never my favorite comic, but he did have one bit that dovetails quite nicely, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78
[0], [1]: Charles Fourier
One of the reasons I haven’t applied to YC is that I was getting the sense that he and YC might have the opposite opinion.
It seems plenty of SF Bay Area based startup, founder, investor networking groups are uncomfortable for people with opinions that might be considered heresy.
Ie, is Harvey Weinstein redeemable? What if he saved 1,000 others from sexual abuse, to redeem his sins, in the next year. Can his past sons be forgiven?
Many forbidden ideas are taboo because they, often obviously, have little potential to help society, and great potential to harm it.
I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.
Questioning the legitimacy of geocentrism is a victimless crime. Questioning the legitimacy of gay marriage or gay adoption or sexual transitioning has very defined, specific victims that face real actual harms from these attitudes.
Right now parents of trans children are being accused of being abusers, with legal threats to that effect. Gay parents and their supporters are being called groomers.
Clamping down hard on that is defensible. You may believe that this is an unjustifiable restriction of speech, but it is materially different from old concepts of "heresy".
Someone saying that "teaching about sexuality is akin to grooming" is clearly telling a lie. If someone gets shit for it, then the hubbub/cancellation is definitely not taking priority over the question of truth or falsity.
Heck, if anything, the anti-trans/anti-LGBT conservatism you're referring to also falls into the same issue: it's also bullshit "Heresy" that people use to punish others over truth.
Out of curiosity is there an age limit on this statement for you?
Because while we're talking about heresies I'd like to say teaching sexuality to young children without parental consent is grooming.
What happened to asking for a permit slip signed by the parents if you want to give a sex talk.
It's a parent's rights issue, not a LGBTQ issue.
Also, this word “grooming” gets dispensed a lot lately when discussing this issue, and I’m not sure that the people who say it know what it means. Or, alternatively, they are afraid to say what they really think the consequences of talking to children about all the different relationships people have because they know it is wrong and would subject them to fierce ridicule.
Comparing teaching to grooming and considering the two the same is a bad-faith argument.
Anything that could realistically be considered grooming would NEVER appropriate, even with your so called "parental consent". Even with adults.
Just because you call something "grooming" doesn't make it so.
There is an age for children to learn everything. A 1 year old might be too young for Javascript. But calling it grooming is going way too far.
I ask again: what is it?
https://mobile.twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/10503916635...
"""
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
"""
The implication here is there is currently no significant wave of intolerance coming from the right, which is baffling to say the least.
I see this a lot in modern free speech advocates. They seem to almost exclusively focus on censored speech that goes against liberal dogma and completely ignore similar behavior from the right. Is it just because liberals have more cultural power than conservatives?
Paul Graham is intolerant of intolerants of intolerance. I think to solve the paradox the way to go is not to solve by principle but weight on how much intolerance you are applying in order to prevent some other intolerance to someone else.
"Your freedom ends where someone else begins"
EXAMPLE
Person A: People from group X are more likely to be BAD at math.
Person B: Don't be racist/sexist/x-ist.
Person C (Paul Graham): Hey B, you are using x-ist but is the statement true or false? If the statement from A is true, then A should be allowed to say it without B calling him/her x-ist.
Well it depends on what's the approximation and opinionated consequences. Maybe group X is worse at math by a small percentage 1% and A is removing numbers to make a larger generalization that loose its context and is just demeaning of the group X. This is solvable by stating actual figures without implying consequences from it. Person A should have said: The study ALFA showed results where group X was 10% more likely to be BAD at math than group Y and Z. I will pass you the link to the paper of the study so you can review it.
Even a decade ago, tribes were geographically local. Today, your tribe is literally global. It knows no borders. Thus social media amplifies the effect of cancel culture and "same think".
I would argue this may dominate over the effect you assume and drive the same simply because if one wants to become outraged over an act, they need to know it occurred in the first place.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the overall effect of the internet is to drive cultural consensus.
What's worse is tribes also have strongarms inside corporations. If the Internet mob wants to get someone fired for saying something, they just reach out to the local chapter of strongarms and make demands/walkouts against the company until they get their way.
It just feels a bit meh to me.
But perhaps that’s how all things are. I have a view which I think is heretical: I believe that banning organ trade is unethical and exploitative and that bringing organs to the market in a safe way is not only possible but required by us. I think it doesn’t fall into this fallacy because there is no time when this was considered except one year before NOTA passed. But perhaps you all think that is boring.
This thesis is the real "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". I can respect that it applies truthfully to many would-be SJWs, and the labels are indeed used to end conversations. However, meaningfully calling something racist, sexist, etc. is a start of a process, not an end. This meaningful discussion (and, much more frequently, reflection) is too often precluded when one party is too defensive to look honestly, openly, and beyond themselves, at their own biases.
Which can lead to this:
Person 1: That thing is beautiful.
Person 2: No it's not beautiful.
Person 1: Yes, it is beautiful.
Person 2: No, it is not beautiful!
or slightly better, this:
Person 1: For me, that thing is beautiful.
Person 2: Well, for me, that thing is not beautiful.
Person 1: Why don't you find that thing beautiful??
Person 2: I just don't see it as beautiful.
or much better, this:
Person 1: I feel so much joy when I see that thing.
Person 2: I don't feel joy, I actually feel disgust.
Person 1: I'm confused, why do you feel disgust when you see that thing?
Person 2: It reminds me of this one thing that caused me a lot of pain before.
So while yes, I don't think labeling something as universally X necessarily ends the conversation, I think it can lead people to a binary debate about universals instead of open up the conversation for people to share their own experiences and more personal perspectives.
Let's hope the liberal values prevail, and we return to our search for truth, which does exist.
It's difficult to build strong opinions on a topic. Mostly we go with the safe opinions that are acceptable by society.
And problem comes up when we mix belief, perspective, facts and opinions.
I see this sentiment expressed often to the point where it seems to just be accepted as true without the need to provide proof. Is anyone familiar with a methodology that attempts to examine this view with more rigor other than just, "boy it seems like more people are being cancelled these days"?
More competing tech from non-SV sources would be a boon for everyone including YC. There's no motivator like healthy competition.
People should be judged for saying harmful things.
I don’t think truth is something that people should obsess over, but it is very important to seek and hopefully gain understanding.
I remember reading 1984 and the breaking of people to admit that “2+2=5” was an interesting way that people accepting false things as true is very bad.
I think intent matters a lot as judging people for being mean is different from someone saying “the sky is blue today” and the listener is harmed because they hate blue or whatever.
That’s a completely made up example, but I think real, although dangerous, example is trans issues. There are bigots who say things like “women aren’t men” or whatever to hurt people and I don’t think that’s right. But then someone will say “men are generally stronger than women” to discuss some scientific principle and people feel harmed there because they don’t want any differences to exist.
Useful question: do you belong to any democratically run organization, defined as one where the members can fire the leadership?
The problem with it is you can attack anybody you dislike with very little cost to you because you stand with a large crowd agreeing with you. And you don't even have to understand the issues since the opinion you put out is commonly accepted. It in fact might not be your opinion but you can still use it to attack opponents.
Political correctness is a quite naturally occurring phenomenon. People oppose other people. There's not much we can do about it except try to point it out. But that's not what Paul Graham is doing, he's talking about it in the abstract, only.
That is not a bad thing but I see an issue with it: It gets you far away from actual issues that harm us greatly.
It is not the biggest problem that political correctness occurs. The problem is some of the things it is used for.
For instance in Russia it is the ultimate heresy to say that Russia is fighting a war on Ukraine. The war is a real big problem. It is not caused by political correctness, supporters of the war are simply using political correctness to support the war. And state-sanctioned official heresies, yes that's what we need to fight and expose in general.
The real problem is not political correctness but using it for bad purposes. Like using it to support an unprovoked military attack on your neighboring country and putting the "heretics" into prison.
Obviously, those who criticize overreach of responses to injustice, will inevitably find themselves in common cause with reactionaries who do genuinely oppose progress, whether they want to or not. But that's all the more reason to be tolerant of good-faith dissent: the alternative is no one trusts anyone, and good-faith dissent itself becomes coded as a reactionary trick.
However it seems that today many want to pretend that these differences don't exist, e.g. a progressive talks to a conservative as if the latter agrees on fundamental presuppositions but only misapplies them. In other words, we treat our opponents like they are heretics from our religion instead of infidels who belong to a different one.
No one has ever been cancelled over support for, say, charter schools or wanting lower taxes. I disagree with those but they're not morally reprehensible.
In my opinion, the reason why "cancel culture", or heresy as the author calls it, is so dangerous is because it legitimizes A) dehumanization, B) the idea that any evolutionary strategy is off the table, and C) the idea that you are not obligated to explain yourself if you want people to listen and take you seriously.
A) Society is regressing to the point where the mere utterance of a word or phrase can be deemed so offensive that it justifies murder, permanent injury and/or sexual violation being perpetrated against the speaker. This is a level of barbarism most would associate some distant dark age or the fauna of an unexplored jungle, yet here it is.
B) By evolutionary strategy, I am referring to the knowledge, experience and skill we apply individually and collectively for the purpose of survival, and the decision making processes we engage in along the way. People do not have to believe what you believe. They don't have to pray to what you pray to, or eat what you eat, or wear what you wear, or speak your language. And that's perfectly okay as long they aren't stepping your toes, and vice versa. There are many paths that can be taken to attain fitness and fulfillment. Monocultures suck, and stifled speech breeds them like there's no tomorrow.
C) A lack of transparency deprives us of the chains of logic used to reach a given conclusion, whether it's true or not. Tying this back into point B, in nature there is generally more than one right way to do something, yet the ugly monoculture that has come out of American social media and acadamia would seem to disagree. There is an all-pervasive "my way or the highway" attitude. When everyone is fearful and secretive it creates a chilling effect in every strata of society. It doesn't matter if you're a burger flipper or an electrical engineer. In all environments poisoned by this culture of hosility it becomes impossible to build enough trust to get the work done, let alone innovate or do it efficiently.
Human beings are smart enough to choose our own whetstones and sharpen ourselves in a controlled manner that leads to a lot less pain, suffering and death. But apparently not smart enough to overcome misplaced pride and petty tribalism. In my opinion this is the great filter. Not aliens, not an energy crisis, not space travel. Just learning to work well with others is going to be the hardest thing in the universe.
Obama is a very smart dude. 2 years ago he saw it building and he misidentified this as activism.
John Mcwhorter I believe better identified this as a religion: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/11/2/2272...
As an atheist you see the same pattern often. Here's a hour long video of sam harris and john talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHUu9sAGKo&t=2s
This new religion has the christians, muslims, atheists, and others all worked up.
It's unusual for a new global religion to form, nothing there to really prevent it. The big difference this time is they got really big while remaining undercover.
I guess my prediction as well. You could become a preacher for this new religion, set for life to serve. Just need to figure out how to. If you do try this, make sure you are following the golden rule every day. Make sure you're 100% positivity. Try to merge religions, I'm pretty sure 'coexist' is a big part of this.
The only thing being exposed by this is that a certain group of people were exempt from the rules most faced and are now having to face some small fraction of that.
The part he's missing, or being wilfully ignorant of, is intentionally distorting heresy and orthodoxy through bad faith and selfish uses of both. I can understand that the person who challenges the system due to experienced injustices or inequities is coming from a different place than the person challenging the system because they aren't allowed to dump mercury into the water supply. One is trying to speak to a system they perceive to be unfair while the other is trying to keep the system from performing as intended in order to further entrench their own interests. That they might seem similar is mostly window dressing.
I heard this argument in 2008 when folks loved to point out that Obama was popular with youth, just like Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It's Sinophobia, full stop.
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?
Many (most?) statements embed some of the speakers attributes, either explicitly or implicitly. At a trivial level, saying “I am hungry” can be true when one person says it and false when another does.
Obviously “I” statements are not what Graham is talking about, but the idea that your lived experience cannot qualify or disqualify you for passing certain judgements seems suspect.
Unlike others, I don’t want to cancel you for being racist, though you clearly are, by your own admission.
This tolerance I show towards others allows dialog and thus enables human progress. Cancelling racists does the opposite. I support your right to think out load and bless the sacredness of your inner spirit even though you think racistically about free speech which imo is not really “free” speech.
Here’s an example: There are words that have historically been used as slurs that have been reclaimed by the people they were used against.
If you are not a member of that group, your use of the word invokes the history of its use, and is likely x-ist. As a member, you are likely able to use it.
He can't think of a statement that is false when a white person says it and true when a black person says it (or vice versa).
The quote in question is immediately after this paragraph:
> If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.
Which the quote about the variation of a statement is given as an obvious counter argument once someone has already said that x-ist statements cannot be true.
Are they really the same statement if they have two different meanings?
There are truths that are empirical (math, physics, etc), but most controversy that includes “x-ism” is about things that are subjective and don’t bucket neatly into a true/false dichotomy.
Consider looking at piece of art and saying "I think this part is badly done". This is a very different statement depending whether it is the author saying it, the author's mentor saying it, unrelated person saying it to their friends, or the same unrelated person writing it on twitter. And it doesn't matter whether it is true - it might not even be possible to say, objectively, whether that part is actually badly done.
Same goes for talking about groups of people. Criticising a movement as a member internally, as a member on twitter and as a member of opposing movement is very different, no matter whether it is true or not. And movements are (usually) voluntary - it matters even more when talking about groups of people by categories they can't chose, like cultures, sexual orientations, skin color, etc.
"grouping people by categories they can't choose" is "x-ism". people are more than their skin color, sexuality, or anything else.
What a load of shit. So he sets up this opinion piece with a poorly constructed straw man (quite literally a false statement in every _discussion_ I've been part of) then uses this as an anchor for the rest? I mean, this is one of the most aggressively conventional takes on cancel culture I've read over the past year.
Maybe he should get back to being active with YC again so he has less time to embarrass himself like this.
Indeed, some people chase heretics to take their wealth / power.
What he seems to have missed in separating truth from prejudices is important to recognize. This is an expected communications problem in a society that struggles with decency, and decency is what’s at issue here - not truth. Because at least one party lacks decency, they’ve lost their credibility to convey any truth. The other party may lack tolerance, but that intolerance is, at least usually, about those prejudices, and not any underlying truth.
Regardless, actual heresy - of the biblical type that Graham is trying to use to support his argument here - has historically been more based on threatening a power structure, such as was the case with Martin Luther, for example. Ironically here, the tables were turned, and the “heretic” (Luther) presented factual information while it was the hearer that reeled with prejudice. The two cases are about as much alike as a camel and a spork. I am surprised he tried to make the comparison. Nonetheless, if that is what he’s trying to argue, then he’s seemingly suggesting the fault is always on the listener for being offended. In the cases Graham is describing though, it is far more likely to be the speaker who wraps whatever truth there might be into vitriol brought into the conversation. It at least would have made for a good essay to point out both possibilities.
Tl;Dr: truth always falls victim to prejudice, on either side, which is why we should work to identify and root out our own prejudices before engaging.
As to the charge of undue weight being given to certain statements: Is there no statement that should result in the firing of an otherwise excellent employee? None? What about praising Hitler or advocating sacking the Capitol? If there is one, is there more than one?
Lastly, I hate to bring this up, but I was silently shadow-banned (had all my posts publicly censored) on this board by Mr. Graham himself for the heresy of criticizing some of his business approaches.
Sure, it was his right to do that, as the moderator. Isn't it an employer's right to fire someone for a statement that will harm the company - true or otherwise?
There have always been consequences for unpopular speech, some of which strike us as unjust. The line has shifted radically away from valuing free expression in recent years, unfortunately. But to say that "heresy" in this sense ever went away is a false statement. The only question that's ever been in play is where the line is drawn, and that's what should be addressed, by anyone claiming to seek justice; case by case, individual by individual, and not by countering one hyperbole - "you're an x-ist" - with its opposite, e.g. "you're the Spanish Inquisition".
> "The most notorious 20th century case may have been the Cultural Revolution. Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, the Cultural Revolution was otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon. Mao said in essence: There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them. And that's all the aggressively conventional-minded ever need to hear. They went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels."
A more balanced approach would have included the rise of authoritarian fascism in Germany as an example of the persecution of the heretics, namely any who opposed the power of the Party or questioned the validity of the 'untermenschen' concept that relegated so many groups - Slavs, Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents to 'unperson' status. Indeed, Hitler's acolytes - like Mao's - also 'went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels.' A rather popular book was published about this phenomenon that's worth reading, called "Hitler's Willing Executioners."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/784848.Hitler_s_Willing_...
In any case, whenever a commentator chooses to exclusively focus on fascist atrocities or communist atrocities when examing '20th century atrocities', you can be sure they have a severe ideological bias and are hardly honest interlocutors. In this context, 'x-ist' could refer to either communist or fascist, although I suspect the author is implying 'racist' or perhaps 'classist'?
I think the baseline is equality. Anything after that, we celebrate our differences and the debate is about a future direction for us all. Extremely generic I know, but better than trying to homogenise us into a singular point of view.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.
E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.
(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)
To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted):
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Which is fair. If someone is going to respond to you by beating and shooting you, you shouldn't have to tolerate them. The justification for the intolerance of the intolerant is that the intolerant use violence to get their way.
But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.
Neither was I. Nor do I think Paul should be "rounded up" either. Just that I believe his mode of thinking is flawed. I expressed an opinion just as he did.
Then I may have misinterpreted your statement. Would you mind elaborating on exactly which part of the essay confuses the paradox of intolerance with heresy?
Is this a matter of heated discussion or what…
That’s usually all there is to it.
Personally I flagged it because it’s conversational flame bait where two radicalized groups will argue past each other endlessly, which will serve only to reinforce their radicalization. (Yes, me too)
This is such a great summary on the hypocrisy that went rampant in the past few years in the US media and US politics.
Why so many people?
Banning Critical Race Theory, teaching kindergarteners about gay people, and removing certain books from school libraries are all being done by the far right, today, via legislative bodies.
Is a clip from a BBC show (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, worth a watch if you enjoy British comedy) so copyright block not too surprising depending on where you're located.
He basically takes the piss out of a taxi driver. The stereotype goes that a taxi driver will share their "bloody immigrants" opinions with their fares whether the fares care about hearing it or not.
Cabbie says: "These days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you."
Stewart "wears him down" in the bit by repeating the question back with increasing incredulity and after about 3 minutes the cabbie character eventually just says, "no, you don't actually get arrested."
It's fckin hilarious.
"The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like."
We don't need to imagine. We're over a year into a wave of moral panic from the right focusing on local school boards in the united states, in which they seek to purge reading materials dealing with subjects that make them uncomfortable, fire people for raising those subjects, and impose rules against raising those subjects, in some cases carrying criminal penalties.
Looking over at Russia, we see the worst case scenarios Paul references in the esssay playing out quite explicitly, today. The example of how we'll know we're really in trouble ("Damn right we're banning ideas, and in fact here's a list of them") and the example of Mao saying "There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them"? Putin and his followers have already entered that territory [1] [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-protests.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.htmlThe issue under debate is what kind of speech merits what kind of consequence. The idea that there should be no consequences for speech oils only remotely believable when you are a member of the white, cis, wealthy class who’s lived without consequence for speech for their whole lives.
If I can respectfully say something here: you're making sweeping statements about people based on their race etc. It's going to be difficult to make persuasive arguments if that is your debating starting point.
It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
Exactly like you're doing here when you rode on in to "both sides!" this argument.
If you think there’s some large group of people that all wear white hats and aren’t being shitty or ruining anyone’s life, you are being willfully blind.
Furthermore, when you engage in this whataboutism garbage (“what’s always interesting to me”, yeah I’m sure it’s fascinating) when someone tries to point out something your “team” is doing wrong, you are part of the problem.
Yes, Trumpists suck—-that means everyone else should get a free pass? By that token shouldn’t Trumpists get a free pass because Putin is out there committing atrocities?
Aren't most people in the majority, in whatever metric is under consideration, by definition? Which tends to be the in-group in democracies?
I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.
There is some controversy though about whether the concept of due process as per law should be extended to a general principle that guides the operation of privately-owned websites. That isn't how the internet used to work so the jury's still out.
>>Man guilty of hate crime for filming pug's 'Nazi salutes'
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
Turns out they are and will.
I’m not saying it should be unlimited or anyone should be legally or morally obligated to refrain from social consequences for any and all speech, but I do think a society where tolerance is extended to a majority of the other people by a majority of people is healthier than one where that isn’t the case.
There can be no discourse when one side wants just to be left alone and the other wants to exterminate them.
You might want to rethink that 20th century lesson.
Counterexample: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
> His efforts to fight racism, in which, as an African American, he has engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), have convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
In fact, bringing people of different minds together is the only way to have free discourse, and the only way to change minds.
Main relevant bit copied below.
###
“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.
This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.
Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.
> “Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”
> “He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.
If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.
I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.”
> In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US universities
I don't think this was new. Liberality tends to go hand in hand with seeking reality, as discovering something and then adopting it requires intellectual big-tentism. Perhaps the author bemoans the rise of bureaucracy within the university, which has demonstrably increased?
My concern is that these arguments about moral puritanicalism aren't without merit, but that they are often ignore the cancerous alt-right, which is bereft of morality beyond racial nationalism. Perhaps the cancel culture creedal concern is considered to be salvageable.
It's a nicer form of the term fascist.
Here is more information to start with, as well as several linked sources, compiled by people for your benefit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right
The ambiguity in the law is there as a feature to hush normal conversations that might otherwise happen.
It's somewhat unfortunate that misinformational memes of this sort travel much faster than reasonable understandings of its problems (this is but one example.) I believe it impairs the resolution of the nation's problems. Yeah, it galvanizes some support, but also hardens the opposition, and impairs the ability to make any sort of incremental progress, leaving achievable reforms stalled for years or even decades.
Moreover, as a matter of principle, I don't really want to be part of a political movement which values spinning a story to its advantage more than it cares about informing the public. Build your movement on something solid.
And for what real benefit, exactly? How is this improving our society in any real way?
It's "you're going to jail if you dare to talk about it".
That's the obvious violation of First Amendment: government cannot use force to dictate what you say.
And this topic is not on the short list of exceptions (threats of violence etc.).
And stepping back: realize you're being played by politicians.
Republicans know well this bill is unconstitutional.
They know there are topics way more important to spend their very limited legislative time on.
But DeSantis is going to run for the president so Republicans are picking fights with stupid bills to whip up their base to vote for them.
Those stupid fights are also distracting you from things that actually matter i.e. how to maintain and increase prosperity of the people.
Laws around hate speech and defamation seem to contradict you.
Who even came up with the phrase cancel culture to begin with? When? Why does it rhyme and is a just a few syllables? Why doesn't anyone who creates and pushes these slogan/memes and what their motivation is?
You can have a problem with cancel culture and not be anti CRT. Who would have thought, right?
It seemed to me that the firing of Timnit Gebru at Google was superficially the political reverse of the firing of Antonio García Martínez at Apple. And yet the latter case is considered cancel culture, while the former is not.
*Politicians don't start from "I believe X/Y, let's do something about it." They start from "How do I get my voters agitated and eager to vote for me, and what position should I take on controversial issues X/Y during an election year to achieve this goal?" Politics/electioneering is showmanship first. Silly things like real personal political beliefs only get in the way of politicians' end goal of power.
The idea that you could introduce homosexuality or anything else without the same basic check seems backwards.
Granted, the DSG bill has some badly-written foibles but the general idea is on the mark.
But that doesn't really make sense because "thou shalt never question the divinity of vaccines" is a modern day orthodoxy, and those who do in fact question them are the modern day heretics, with scientific institutions being the modern Church. Heretics aren't actually set on fire these days but they are e.g. currently banned from entering the United States and many other countries, and just a few months ago they were banned from all public places etc.
A man truly dedicated to the abolition of heresy would recognize that by calling people as "extremists" is in fact (perhaps unrealising) the exact same behavior he is criticizing. After all, has he talked to these people to understand their heresy? My guess is no. Rather, he just feels in his bones that by Following The Science™ he is a morally and intellectually superior creature.
When an essay that thinks it's arguing for the ending of heresy cannot even avoid damning some heretics, I see no particular reason for optimism, as Graham does. Rather this problem will get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
Your argument is basically a “slippery slope” argument, and this is a good example of why these types of arguments are so weak and problematic.
But good point, no two times in history are completely identical so we shouldn’t bother.
Unless that opinion is about who owns a specific piece of land.
Sorry, I mean 'intolerant people'.
- Palestine and how many academics have been fired or silenced for supporting them l? Nathan J Robinson was let go form The Guardian for a joke about Palestinian treatment.
- The score of labor organizers fired in the tech and food service industry for expressing their right to organize?
- Tech workers getting fired for what could be claimed to be sexism/sexual harassment?
- People fired because they are extremely right wing?
People who talk about the limiting of free speech almost never care about the first two but they sure get high and mighty when their friends get cancelled for making off color jokes.
- labor organizers getting fired
- Palestine
- Folks getting sexually harassed
And I'm sorry but: what specific opinions does this guy hold that he is so angry about? It feels dishonest to whine like this without expressing any of the heresy himself.
Also, it isn't "cancel culture" if your belief system is trying to dispossess and devalue people I care about. It is self defense. 30 years ago you could wear blackface and speak open hatred towards non-binary people. I think it is a good thing we don't tolerate hate anymore. Apparently Paul Graham disagrees.
> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.
I can't think of the last time a thing like this happened to me. I seriously doubt it has ever happened to Paul Graham outside of social media. If you are being kind and honest, I can guarantee someone will be interested in having a conversation with you about the subject. Unless they are an asshole.
I get the feeling Paul is main-lining Fox News and not actually having discussions with that many people. The TV man is making him angry about dumb culture war issues.
I've spoken before about how I feel the left can have shitty priorities and be extremely whiny. But here is the thing:
There are a lot of mentally ill people on social media who do nothing but harass and terrorize others based on their narrow world-view. This happens on both the left AND the right. It is impossible to know if these people are acting in good faith, or trying to give the left/right a bad name by being annoying and reactionary.
Every time you see someone say something controversial, they complain about "death threats on social media." While that IS vile and disgusting, it happens all the time. Every time. You can get death threats for saying Super Mario World is overrated.
Why are we still taking these pathetic social media people seriously?
Answer: Because they are a useful tool for the opposite side to use as a cudgel to while about "cancel culture."
You don't need a straw man anymore. You can always find an idiot or crazy person to represent an insane world-view and present it as if this person is The Pope of Leftists/Conservatives.
Candice Owens is a great example. She doesn't exist for CONSERVATIVES. Sure, they like her ( maybe ), but that isn't why she is famous. Her job is to have reactionary takes that gets picked up by centrist / left leaning orgs so the TV man can make the TV viewers angry.
"Cancel culture" is a TV show that has been doing nothing but re-runs since the 80s when it was called "political correctness."
pg likes to do this thing where he takes some noble instance of a counterexample (e.g. Newton being declared a heretic for important scientific discoveries) and uses it to butter up the audience to be sympathetic to what ultimately becomes a defense of racism/sexism/whatever-ism you want without consequences because, wait a minute kids, the homophobes and racists might be right! What he manages to do rather surreptitiously, is attempt to get abstract enough that he can bring all forms of discourse to the same level. He reduces all discourse to the "search for truth" but if he had even a passing knowledge of speech act theory, any linguistics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy etc. he'd quickly recognize that much of the speech and discourse human beings are engaged in is not about finding the truth.
Ultimately, we determine our own values, and just because something is true does not mean it aligns with our values. Can a statement be "xist" and true? (let's call it what it is, pg means the negative isms here, racism, sexism, etc. (see how suddenly it's hard to agree with him when he says what he means and doesn't hedge? he hedges and hides behind abstraction because he realizes his position is indefensible to most "conventional minded" (read not bigoted) people)) yes of course. a statement can be totally racist and somehow true. Does that mean we should accept all these statements in all realms of discourse and that such the authors of these statements should be free of consequences because the statement happens to be true. But we don't just live in the world, as humans we have agency and we might decide that when truth and morals conflict, we prefer morals.
Is calling someone ,e.g. racist an attempt to stonewall their speech? Of course it is. People don't like racism. Paul claims this is a "wave of intolerance" while conveniently ignoring the fact that the positive content of "xism" speech is also a vehicle of intolerance, and usually a much more aggressive one at that, to the point that your speech is trying to do the work of not tolerating the very existence of classes of people in society.
Human society is an amalgam of all sorts of discourse. Even we "conventional minded" simpletons can recognize that the intent of a "xism" discourse is usually not truth seeking so much as it is the active exclusion of certain classes of people from equal participation in society. It's nice to think everything is reducible to something like "Newton V. the Church" but this is a reductive move that ignores all the particularities of such discourse and tries to make things that are fundamentally distinct (scientific process v. racism, sexism, all manner of exclusionary discourse) equivalent. Should scientific exploration be punished with the stake? No. Should racism be punished with loss of a career? Possibly. As with every moral problem, we often need to judge case by case. Can "cancellations" be a way too severe given the violation? Of course. Can they also be appropriate? Sure. Moral problems are not reducible to a abstract mathematics that removes human particulars from the equation or to technical description and the part of your brain responsible for empathy must be pretty lacking if you think otherwise. Morality is not some abstract calculus. That's why we have juries and judges.
I'm really sick of pg using his platform to come up with these absolutely piss-poor pieces of sophistry that are ultimately defenses of horrible shit veiled behind "smart" abstract language so that "conventional minded" people are tricked into thinking this guy actually has something interesting to say about society and isn't secretly a massive bigot. Continue being a great capitalist or whatever but keep the pseudo-intellectualism to yourself, please.
Sure, that might insulate him and put him in an echo chamber, but blocking is entirely his right, and he's the one who'll get the consequences from that.
I also tend to do a similar thing in spaces I curate, and it's honestly better for mental health. Someone comes out from nowhere with something completely 180 degrees from what I say? That's not reality TV, that's my private [social network page]. I'm not gonna be baited.
Saying someone "can't block" is an asshole move. Nobody should be forced to talk and see messages by anyone.
To take an example from my own experience, if I automatically tuned out anyone who said something bad about the requirement to make things accessible for blind people, I would deny myself the opportunity to learn how they think and become more effective in my advocacy or, possibly, revise my position.
If you're interested in hearing the other side in all cases, then of course blocking is counter-intuitive. Wether he wants or not, it's his choice.
However, even if you were to block everyone, you could still curate the experience of hearing from the other side in other situations: by consuming articles, by asking someone privately, by not blocking some of the replies.
I also would disagree 100% that social networks are a proper venue for this kind of exchange.
He still has 100% the right to block and saying this is akin to cancellation is bullshit.
People judging you for your blocking is one of the prices you're socially expected to pay in return for those privileges.
Someone popular being in an echo chamber causing problems for society is a larger issue that maybe we should address separately. It's not on him to solve problems created by social media at large. Maybe limit reach of Twitter accounts.
Even if it were kind of his responsibility, that doesn't preclude him from being fully in his right to block people when he doesn't want to interact directly in a social network. That should be an inalienable right.
You can criticise anything you want, and I'm not saying you're not in the right to do so. But saying this is a problem comparable to cancellation is making a gross exaggeration.
Does his block makes you lose your job? If not, you are missing the point.
It puts your financial wellbeing of you and your family at risk.
You and others will probably think twice before dissenting otherwise you better dust off that resume and tap into those savings.
But I guess people aren't killing people so cancel culture is okay, is that your standard?
I have disagreed with PG on Twitter, and also pointed out errors in his logic and facts a bunch of times, and haven't been blocked.
But it’s not easy, because every group, in every society, organically develops its own heresies – things you cannot say without consequences.
For example, here are some heresies common in the Silicon Valley startup community:
* Heresy: “Government regulations are, on the whole, a net force for the good of humanity.”
* Heresy: “All entrepreneurs in the US owe much their success to past government spending on infrastructure and education, so they should be personally taxed at high rates to repay their enormous debt to society.”
* Heresy: “High redistribution of wealth via government spending is necessary for sustaining economic growth.”
* Heresy: “Silicon Valley is an exclusionary club, not a meritocracy.”
Proclaiming any of these things, say, at a dinner party with startup CEOs, is socially equivalent to jumping on top of the table, pulling your pants down, and passing gas. In fact, the latter may be more socially acceptable -- it's less threatening to the startup zeitgeist.
You're basically just saying it is heresy to be moderately left-wing in Silicon Valley.
Which I don't doubt is true, even if I hope it is not quite as dire. Just wanted to point out the connection.
EDIT: though if we're talking "in front of CEO", that might be like talking about French Revolution in front of a monarch, or mentioning Mao in front of landlord, so I can understand why the CEO would not like it.
4) is extremely contemporary, but it's definitely a common populist right-wing position these days also.
Sometimes, you will get nuanced pushback (since these are very old ideas), but I've never seen a person cancelled in SV for holding the suburban socialist/communist ideologies that you listed. You are more in danger if being labelled alt-right if you argue against these things.
Of course any answer to that question has a lot of nuance to unpack. But SV culture I don’t think would even accept the premise that this question has valid answers on both sides.
* Higher economic growth can be achieved by investing in education, but nobody would do that, because it's (rightfully) illegal to sell yourself into slavery in exchange for education.
* Regulatory capture sucks and is super hard to work around. It should be combated instead of being relied on as a future moat against competitors.
[flagged] HeresySee his words: "Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired."
Most people in the US are under at-will employment, so they can be fired at any time for almost any reason. So if we're going to argue that they are being fired due to political persecution from the hard left, you have to make a thorough case there because you're saying their employer shouldn't be free to hire and fire whomever they like.
This is a great point. I’ve seen the same with attitudes towards homeless people where they can harass people on the street all day long and get treated like they’re a poor victim who has no agency, but a “normal” person can get fired over an awkward compliment. It makes no sense to me.
Body autonomy is incredibly important.
But when people start ranting about anti-vaxxers that concept doesn't even enter their little heads. It's never I understand their rights and how important that is, but...
Because any complex thoughts on the issue are heresy.
There's never been stable rulers who didn't get rid of the naysayers. "Drain the Swamp" was unsuccessful and it was like the vaccine for them. Now, they just know what can be used to attack them, so they are just fixing those things, whether it's gripping technocrats by the balls or getting rid of punishments for pedophiles.
imo banning an article about cancel culture would only bolster its point.
but I'm curious, why do you think it's flamebait and not a topic warranting discussion?
"(1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done."
This obviously has nothing to do with the classical conception of heresy most pronounced in the Christian tradition, which is well-defined and well-documented. Anyone with intellectual honesty can discover on their own that "heresy" simply denotes teaching that is markedly false in virtue of being contrary to dogmatic teaching, almost the opposite of what is implied in point (1).
Based on many of the underlying assumptions in this piece, I think it would be entirely fair to describe Graham as some kind of liberal. This is evidently something he would bemoan me doing (see: the bit about "x-ism" in discourse), but the ideas expressed, the value-judgments made, and the characterizations of medieval Europe made in this piece are by no means original or historically-unprecedented.
The liberal or perhaps whiggish historiography (a conception of history, in this case, in terms of the degree of negative liberty allotted to individuals not only by the state but the body politic as a whole) implicit in this piece appears at least prima facie to lead to its author's either mistaken characterization or perhaps purposeful recharacterization of the notion of "heresy". Liberalism ad absurdem would, in performance, consider a classical conception of "heresy" nonsensical, because it assumes the truthhood of a dogmatic teaching which isn't immediately obvious to everyone. However there is something that, at least if pushed on it enough, no one will deny without performative contradiction, and that is that certain things are good and true, and others not. No systematic thought can be non-dogmatic, because the dogmatic rejection of dogmas is a dogma (it is, in truth, only the dogmatic rejection of dogmas existing in some form on the present world-stage). Of course, the dogmas of the varieties of liberalism are, more or less, incompatible with orthodox Christianity, which popularized the term "heraese" in the Latin West, and this accounts for the different notion of "heresy", which appears to me now as a corpse of a term, once mostly denoting false teaching, now emphasizing the persecutory aspect of espousing teaching contrary to certain dogmas. Similarly, "paganus" once referred to a rural, bucolic person in the Roman Empire, and through pejorative use by Christians simply began to denote those who practiced the religion common among the rural Romans. Now, the so-called "neopagan" movement self-identify as such, appropriating the term entirely. I have also witnessed the phenomenon of some "far-right" people I know crying about being labeled "fascists" because they were not "fascists" as defined in the doctrinal document ghost-authored by Gentile, but then years later willingly adopted the term, accepting that the nuanced differences between their worldview and the IFP's were negligible from the perspective of people who use the term "fascist" pejoratively. I think a similar thing is going on here with the use of "heresy". The author clearly believes that the dominant thought-forms during the middle ages are "antiquated" (his word), and because the differences between traditions with different declared dogmas probably appear to him negligible from the perspective of his values and historiography, the only thing the word "heresy" signals to him is the mere existence of socially-imposed consequences for expressing this or that belief.
Quite fascinating how we, as a species, use language.
All that's left is a bunch of bare, generic assertions. It would be very difficult to convert them into falsifiable statements.