Regardless of how well meaning people are in their desire to hold people to account for bad views, it does have a chilling effect, and you can't learn if you don't have a safe place to make mistakes.
It makes sense that you want to have candid and open discussions, and those discussions will have to leak back to the respective companies for any concerted action to be taken, but you don't want your company's security specifics to be identifiable.
There are a number of different situations where I can see this being useful, but:
> “In corporate culture, there’s a liberating and freeing quality to the idea that this is a safe space for me to say unpopular things and not get labeled as a conservative or racist”
is really not one of them. I fully agree with Ocean's take that "maybe it’s just a bad solution to a worse problem," and I think there we can tease out two separate social problems:
1. People looking for safe spaces to say racist or other discriminatory things (generally identified as a politically-right problem)
2. The 0-strikes political climate we now (believe we) live in (generally identified as a politically-left problem)
(Both feel like symptoms of High Conflict: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55711592-high-conflic...)
I think these are actually the same problem: they are both about convincing yourself that "others" are "bad" and "we" are good, and looking for every conceivable way to do so. Not just in the specific instance, but permanently and unchangeably.
Somewhere along the way (my belief is that it was around the time social media took off, but I don't have proof for that), we forgot that we're more alike than we are different, and that people can grow and learn and change, and that both of those things are good, actually. It's not like there's some fictional past where we all agreed more than we do now, but it's how we relate to or exclude others that has changed.
The difference between The Before Times and now is that it was historically hard to curate and communicate with a group of people who exclusively agreed with you. This had two primary consequences:
(1) You were constantly exposed to nice people who nonetheless disagreed with you about something / everything.
(2) It made you realize that you're the asshole, if you couldn't at least be polite to someone with different views than you.
Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.
Indeed. IMO, social media should have very limited facilities for blocking/muting (e.g., maximum number of accounts to block, no blocking accounts that have never previously interacted with you, and no import functionality), so that it could only be used to stop true harassment, and not to intentionally live in such a bubble. That's one of my biggest criticisms of Bluesky: the whole design of their blocklist system seems to be to intentionally encourage this sort of thing.
The ability to block obnoxious and hateful people is fundamentally far, far less of causative factor of information bubbles than the pervasive engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are.
What you suggests is setup designed so that large scale harassment is easy. Alex Jones will love it, psychopaths will love it.
I can't not use social media because it is the only way to get local info and it is a terrible way when you consider that for every post from someone i subscribe to, there are 6 ads and 6 channel suggestions specially chosen to entice me to join in a flame war of comments. I'd just give up if i didn't have the hope of at least from time to time catching a break because i blocked all the things the platform thought to suggest for a few weeks. My hope is to one day achieve a whitelist of local posts which is driven by geography, not agreement/alignment on politics or ideaology. since that's not an option, i'll blacklist the entire world if i must...
Like you, I believe that we're more alike than we are different, but that mindset focuses on the small differences over the many similarities.
That's my cynical take.
Any given senate hearing or political speech would lead to dozens of expulsions in a standard censored software company.
It is the small people who need protection.
Speech that can get one elected to presidency with a comfortable margin in the Electoral College can get another fired.
We truly live in a polarized world.
To claim otherwise is just a lie designed to make it so it stays that way.
Personally, I’ve also found that stating your opinion, and having it recorded and known to everyone, makes it very hard for you to change your mind. We’re very harsh to people who do change their mind in such circumstances because the first thing we see is a record of them saying the opposite, and then we ask them to explain themselves and judge them like it’s some kind of fault in their character. There are opinions I had when I was 18 years old that I think abhorrent. I don’t want to be associated with them. I’m very happy there’s no record of me having these opinions. I don’t want to have to explain my past like that just to hold the opinions I have in the present. I have found that process never really ends — i’m regularly changing my opinions on beliefs overtime . I wonder what opinions I have now I will look back on with shame. so I try to make sure that I don’t have anything recorded for the end of times under my name just in case I want to distance myself.
You should expect verbal pushback on your shitty ideas. You should expect physical safety nonetheless.
There is also shitty pushback to decent, or inchoate, ideas. I strongly push back against the notion that there shouldn’t be spaces where one can say something dumb and not be crucified for it.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-crucifies-11-christi...
1. put (someone) to death by nailing or binding them to a cross, especially as an ancient punishment. "two thieves were crucified with Jesus"
2. INFORMAL criticize (someone) severely and unrelentingly. "our fans would crucify us if we lost"
But, for today, I always wonder when someone says they are going to be harassed for their opinions. Just what opinions are we talking about, here? That's what these discussions always seem to lack: Specific examples of what opinions you want to share that you are afraid to share.
I've always liked Stephen Fry's retort to the old "You can't say anything anymore!" line. If a friend tells you that, pull them aside in private and ask them "What exactly are these things you'd like to say but can't? We're in private now, and I'll give you a judgment-free chance to say what you think you're being prevented from saying. Go ahead!" Nine times out of ten, they still won't say it, because they know it's terrible. They just want to complain that they're somehow the victim of censorship.
30 years is a long time. Even the most vanilla of opinions can become entirely taboo in less time than that. Take gay marriage as an example. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act became law. Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer were among the Congressmen who voted in favor of it, and Bill Clinton signed it. In 2008, Barack Obama said "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." Even Obama's statement would be taboo today, let alone passing such a bill.
People who literally believe and say that sort of thing are in government and literally running Republican party.
This would be an entirely warranted "punishment for opinions" because of your failure to adequately safeguard young female athletes.
It just so happens that controversial views on one era frequently end up being seen as 'right and proper' in another, and vice versa.
Here's a 'safe one' unless you actually think about the implications of what it means I'm saying - forcing people, against their will, to kill (or be killed) is a fundamentally unacceptable violation of human dignity and human rights, that should never be tolerated under any circumstance.
That's probably safe to say, yet now apply it to certain situations and suddenly it becomes tabboo. Of course in the future it will probably be as plainly obviously correct as the notion that slavery is wrong.
The right to choose an abortion also extends to the prospective father.
Whether something “looks bad” is a basis for whether to discuss it, where to discuss it, and with whom, but not a basis for determining truth.
Sure. Not every discussion involves something I really believe in.
Also, I think it’s reasonable to believe that not all of one’s deeply-held beliefs are the public’s to know.
Now, say that in 2020 in a woke software organization.
Example: "I believe there are two kinds of people in the world, the righteous and the despicable. You belong with the despicable, I decided. If you disagree, you are woke".
They would consequently treat it exactly the way people in this thread do - with assumption that you have ideological and political goals against that group of people.
It is a group of people deciding unilaterally what other people are without room for any alternatives. Say what you want against trans people, but at least they only identify themselves and ask to be allowed to exist.
Do you want to make an argument about bathrooms or sports whatever? Fine. But don't start it by de facto invalidating their existence, because that eliminates any room for a productive conversation.
Saying that any relevant technical setting as a newcomer would likely be received politely although many would then point out the ground truth behind that simplification:
Nature has many examples of physical gender not being straightforward; egg tempreture determining development in crocadiles and other reptiles for one.
Even in humans it's less that straightforward for a little over 1% of births and decidedly undecided even by experts with all the machines that beep for about a fiftieth of 1%.
Banging on about it in online forums using throwaway accounts is simply being a sad wannabe edge lord type.
> Nature has many examples of physical gender not being straightforward; egg tempreture determining development in crocadiles and other reptiles for one.
Temperature-dependent sex determination results in offspring of one sex or the other, so how does this refute the observation across species that there are two sexes? Please explain your reasoning.
For humans specifically we not only have xx and xy, but also xxx, xyy, xxxx, xxyy, xxxxx, xxxxy, 46xy dsd. There is a de la Chapelle syndrome, persistent Müllerian duct syndrome and more. These are just the most obvious things that muddy the waters, and I don't really know much about that topic, but confidently saying "there are two genders and you can tell by watching birds and bees" is anti intellectual
Anonymity should be lauded and protected, BUT if you're expecting to benefit from the use of your subject matter authority or credentials, then it needs to have your name attached.
Without an identity, there is no authority.
And then wait for the lynch mob to come round because they disagree that {people shouldn't be property / women should be allowed to own property / etc }.