Can somebody list “heresies” which we are not allowed to say but they are ok? I cannot find a single one. But maybe I’m missing something.
(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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- 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)
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.
> 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.
You might as well as just pointed to a strange woman and yelled WITCH.
You religious fanatics are all the same.
- 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...
- 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
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...
Confusing these two fundamentally different statements is one of the oldest moves in the reactionary playbook.
No, this isn't true. Jewish is an ethnicity that crosses multiple "race" backgrounds.
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!
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.
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.