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Comment by Biologist123 | Hacker News Reader

This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently very sensitive too. It makes me wonder what happened - as given his lack of evidence - it appears to be an emotional reaction rather than a logical one.

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.

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I am not generally pro cancel culture, but a lot of the opposition to it is certainly whiney and low on evidence.

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.

But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others.

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.

Being wrong is not absolute proof that nobody will follow or agree with these wrong beliefs. Climate scientists, for example, have spent a lot of time arguing in public about the merits of climate science and the lies of deniers. That is important work because the deniers do convince some people and denialism causes real harm.

That is a fairly bad excuse and exactly why I think that cancel culture, even if exaggerated, is of concern. Because you just admitted the motivation to deny people opportunity to state their opinion and I believe this shouldn't take too much influence in any academic discourse and a lot of protesters disqualify themselves here.

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.

Being popular is not absolute proof that ideas are right either. That’s why we need to leave room for the unpopular ideas too.

How much room do we leave for phrenology?

Should we fire anyone who thinks phrenology is real? How about flat earthers? Should they be unable to feed or shelter themselves because they’re wrong about something?

Are you right about everything?

I've already decided you're right, now we just need to find out how much room we leave for these topics.

The whole idea of free speech is that there is no “we” who decides what topics are allowed and “how much room” particular topics get. Free speech means it’s free, and people can talk about whatever they want, however much they want.

If you don’t like what people are saying, you can use your free speech to explain why your ideas are better.

Okay so your solution is to give as much room as phrenology wants. If it gets incredibly popular then so be it, let the masses think that certain races are less intelligent due to head sizes.

Who could that possibly hurt.

Phrenology already had its chance, man. Look, the apocalypse didn’t happen.

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.

I love people who haven't read a lick of history.

Sure, Phrenology just died out on it's own. You got it.

Enlighten me. Please do describe the concerted efforts by governments and institutions to ban discussion of phrenology. What was the punishment for unauthorized phrenology lectures? Are you not violating all these anti-phrenology laws right now by even bringing it up?

> Phrenology was banned in Vienna for a variety of reasons, including the overenthusiasm of Gall's followers, and the treatment of women.

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refere...

In fact in places where it wasn't banned it flourished.

> The ban seemed to make phrenology more popular, and it spread to other European countries.

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.

> But in actual intellectual discourse

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I'm more on your side here, but in the typical "cancel culture" scenario, the type of stuff people are trying to silence (e.g. re illegal immigrants) is much less nuanced and much more aggressive. The analogue would not be "websites shouldn't be required to be accessible", it's more often something like "websites shouldn't be accessible".

> But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others.

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?

One can say that Solomon Asch experiments on social conformity are great illustrations of the benefits of free speech. Diverse opinions discourage group think and encourage critical thinking and discourse. That works even if the opinion is bogus, since in that case it may encourage the individual to avoid adopting an overwhelming majority point of view. As you mentioned it is indeed a slower process, but a much more fault tolerant one. The simple analogy is the slower, complicated democratic process vs fast, simple autocratic process.

> This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence

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.

I do tend to read his essays when I see them circulating and I must confess that I find them fascinating. I’ve wondered if Graham himself doesn’t entirely understand why he’s been so successful or what he’s achieved in creating - and indeed whether he’s aware of the deficit. When future historians of our increasingly interesting and shocking epoch are trying to work out what happened, I feel Graham’s essays will provide useful insights into the preoccupations and delusions of billionaire think: from arguably the most powerful clique ever to have lived. In that sense I’m thankful that he writes.

This is an incredibly useful viewpoint to apply to this essay.

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.

Same; thank you both for the insight. This is a better way to understand Graham — without having to roll your eyes and point people at the Dabblers and Blowhards essay.

edit: missing word

I always thought that Blub Languages was the most perfect distillation, though it doesn't have the additional fun of being applied to an ecosystem entirely outside of PG's expertise. The essay sets up people he disagrees with to be definitionally wrong and sets himself up to be definitionally correct and so much more enlightened then those pedestrian "blub" programmers.

Trying to give it the article a more positive reading: at least for myself, I can imagine several opinions I could express in the United States which would count as "heresy". I'd imagine that if those opinions were said out loud (whether or not I really believed them) my employers would fire me, friends would unfriend me, etc.

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.

> Amy Cooper ...

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...

Neither was fired for work performance. I think anything else is a distracting justification, not a reason.

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.

There are many reasons outside of work performance to fire people. For example: someone who lies on their resume, then does a generally good job. That's generally a fireable offense in isolation from performance (though hopefully not as an automatic decision).

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.

> There are many reasons outside of work performance to fire people. For example: someone who lies on their resume, then does a generally good job. That's generally a fireable offense in isolation from performance

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.

James Damore was fired by Google, not a mob. The people at Google who made this decision read his "manifesto."

Okay, would saying "a mob bullied Google into firing James Damore" instead be better?

Presumably the executives who fired him are intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions about what he did or didn't say.

(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).

Corporations kowtow to the demands of Twitter mobs all the time, why should Google be an exception?

In terms of firing people who don't deserve to be fired?

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.

> 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.

Fox news all the time, there were calls to fire some people responsible for firing timnit which never happened, etc. So yes. You just never hear about them because "company ignores Twitter drama" is the null hypothesis.

> Presumably the executives who fired him are intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions about what he did or didn't say.

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.

Could it not also be said that a group used their free speech to convince a private company to end it's employment with an at will employee?

In the same way that shouting down a speaker, preventing anyone from hearing it, is exercising free speech.

That is to say: Debatable.

It seems like an inescapable paradox of free speech, no?

I don't think this is unsolvable/inescapable, and I think we need to solve this.

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.

There are plenty of things that you should be allowed to do, but that you shouldn't do.

In my experience, people will do anything they're allowed to (and often much that they aren't, but that's another issue).

> James Damore was fired by a mob who boldly proclaimed "I didn't read his manifesto. I didn't have to".

I assure you, the vast majority of us who criticized him read his writings quite thoroughly.

Maybe. I too only have anecdotes about it.

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".

James Damore was in fact fired for workplace behavior it should be noted. His manifesto was a document discussing Google’s actions and policies and was distributed to coworkers.

Written as response to a request for such comments, and distributed in the forum designated for such comments, yes?

I have a far less positive view of education and many of the professors who have traditionally occupied it in the US. A whole lot of entrenched people with tenure who have formal authority over people (grad students) without even a hint of manager training and it really shows. Many of these people are downright childish, intentionally put blinders on the world immediately around them, and cause countless students unnecessary pain just so that their own eccentric personalities are accommodated.

> somewhat low on evidence

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.

I’ve looked at some of these academic circumstances and the ones I looked at were very misleading. Often times the only account we have is from the fired person, who is obviously going to push the most favorable narrative. When you dig in, there is something else amiss.

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.

It’s a good point you make. I’m thinking of all the heterodox economists who don’t get hired - ie the throttle is applied at a different layer.

> 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.

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.

> There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college.

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...

> There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college.

Where? Which colleges? Can you give a single example of someone being fired from a college or university for a left wing position?

> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here

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.

It allows anybody who reads the piece to apply their own specifics to it. It means that if they hold any "heretical" beliefs, they can assume that PG supports them.

Or on the flip side, it means that the reader can assume that PG holds whatever unflattering "heretical" beliefs they are opposed to.

I'm not sure that's true. There's enough insinuation here that I don't think that my grandma would assume PG is advocating for anti-religiosity, for example.

On the other hand, you can spot Andreessen, Haidt, and Lehmann as his reviewers (and similar personalities on previous articles) and have a pretty good idea what views he's actually talking about.

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Not even 500px away from here, there's this exchange from you, contradicting your clever tweet:

> 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."]

Note: Twitter replies and suggestions are sorted according to it's recommendation engine.

So what you see 500px away might not be visible to other readers.

What's the contradiction here I don't see it?

"Republicans aren't getting cancelled for describing their political policies, they're getting cancelled for being racist or x-phobic"

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.

Oh, I see how you could read it that way, yes. Here let me refute some of these assumptions:

- 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.

I misjudged you by the looks of it, so I apologize for that.

The tweet suggests the views targeted to are not ones related to taxation, government spending, or regulation-- standard fiscally conservative stuff. In its own act of conspicuous omission the tweet implies the censored views are obviously abhorrent ones. A later reply says the quiet part out loud, referring to the views of whiny conservatives as "racist views, misogynistic views, or xenophobic views".

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.

Yeah, I do see it now, thanks.

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.

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