Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.

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about e.g. the differences between men and women, I never called someone a sexist, just because their ideas were outdated and flawed as long as it actually was an discussion.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.

There’s a big difference between calling it out in person and over the Internet. You were rightly calling out the person’s language as unacceptable. Maybe the hope was to change their behavior (unlikely, at least in the short term) or at least stand up for what you thought was right.

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.

It may be too late to have the kind of conversations you are envisioning with young people raised in this generation. They have conjured up big words and terms that don't even mean anything in the practical sense and will easily take offense with anything or anyone about whatever values they strongly identify with.

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.

That's one of the more depressing parts. Even the people I agree with never engage with the actual argument of their opponents. For example, I'm pro-choice. The people who are anti-choice believe that abortion is the murder of a child. The people who agree with me, however, never engage with that argument. They just point out ways in which the anti-choice people are sexist or otherwise hate women. Similarly, the anti-choice people refuse to engage in discussions about body autonomy. A similar pattern is reflected in almost every other contentious political issue. Factions don't argue with each other, they just talk at right angles as loudly as possible.

Strange observation indeed. Must be difficult to live in a world where everything is black or white to you.

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:)

Must be difficult to live in a world where everything is black or white to you.

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.

> 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.

The real-world error bars are quite wide because of the impact of moral character on a person's value, but sight unseen I would give the last seat in the life boat to the non-mentally-disabled person almost every time, yes.

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.

A life isn't really that simple to define but yes. There are many "sins" external to the creation of life that warrant consideration of carrying a pregnancy to term. Some of them include inbreeding. At that point am okay with letting the society or the creators decide on the baby but am a bit more liberal on life created as a result of violence or psychological manipulation.

It’s tempting to point out a few heresies. My hunch is that you’d err on the side of feeling uncomfortable. “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy, the way that clouds are telltale signs of a thunderstorm.

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.

> “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy

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.

Indeed, some would. Would you? Note that you reflexively express your position by reference to a putative consensus.

I'll put it this way: there are a lot of people, including many here, who are ignorant and insensitive; and in this very conversation, there are quite a few people who are unapologetically so. They don't even know how ignorant or insensitive they are being, because they seem surprised and/or defensive when it is pointed out to them.

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.

> Alternatively, they question the entire premise of social norms or morality, such as what PG has done here.

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.

Thank goodness it's not like that anymore. I remember those days too. People thought we were insufferable jerks back then, too, but they weren't on the Internet to tell us so. They were telling us in real life, but many of us weren't receptive to it.

> 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.

How do you go about building a better society collaboratively when you started with calling your intellectual opponents ignorant and insensitive??

That's what actually turn people off joining collectivist causes; the judgmental rhetoric, moral absolutism and holier-than-thou attitude.

There are more- and less-effective ways to communicate. I agree that turning people off is a bad outcome. I don't necessarily recommend using those words head-on; rather, I try to summon facts, history, law, etc. in order to bring more knowledge to the table. Similarly, I try to help people see things from other people's perspectives, or try to help them complete their initial thoughts to their logical (and often absurd) conclusions so that they might see things differently.

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.

Another fraught heresy, which I'm about to commit, is that men and women are intrinsically different (in aggregate, on average, blah blah blah) and thus if you swap the genders in your story, it is a genuinely different story. Granted, I can't say that I have positive regard for older women who sleep with teenagers, though I'm glad you didn't garner any trauma from it, but my personal experiences lead me to have a very negative opinion of older men who sleep with teenagers. Maybe it'd be different if that weren't a highly stigmatized thing to do, but currently the selection effects are such that 99% of them are scumbags. For the same reasons that counterculture groups have a higher-than-average incidence of rapists (anecdotally, I admit) — when you gather a bunch of people willing to transgress societal norms together, well, said transgression continues.

> 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

> Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.

It could still be a net positive for the teenager, even though it was an extremely inappropriate/problematic relationship.

> 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.

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.

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