Heresy (2022]
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.
- Actual day-to-day acquaintances' responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: your friends having a problem with your views)
- Individual and bandwagon responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: "the internet" having a problem with someone's opinions)
- Corporate responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: Google banning accounts or firing an employee)
- Government responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: the executive branch punitively cutting unrelated funding or the DOJ starting frivolous lawsuits)
Ordered thusly because I think people (regardless of their orientations) have increasing issue with those things the farther down the list you go.
And especially #3 (corporate) and #4 (government) seem to have gotten out of control after 2016, somewhat as a response to worsening disingenuous behavior by #2 (the internet).
It's one thing if friends decide to not be friends because of expressed views. It's worse getting mobbed by 100+ strangers from the internet. And it should probably be unacceptable that there are corporate or government consequences for some of the low-grade "Well that's just your like your opinion, man" stuff in the last decade.
Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.
Here is the discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147
The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.
Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!
I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.
That you feel differently about "Milikan, Shockley, and Watson" is shocking. You really think a mentally ill rapper deserves worse than eugenicists and thieves?
Oh wait, you meant Diddy. Yeah, prison for serial rapist billionaires is beyond the pail. They need understanding.
What did any of these great Heresy Heroes of yours achieve? More expensive Nikes, more palatable child sex trafficking, or serial rape?
Milikan's name has actually been removed from stuff. He's accused of raping zero kids. I guess you could argue that he stole credit for the Nobel prize from his grad student, but I don't hear you supporting Zweig or asking for Gell-Mann to be censored.
What a ridiculous false equivalence.
> 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.
How is that overlooking it?
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.
What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...
Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.
It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?
Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?
It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.
Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.
When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”
You can say for example that the sum of genetics, culture, finances and upbringing will have different results.
Make it ever so slightly more specific and the water gets hot fast.
The retaliation for different topics is also different and has little relation with how offending the topic might be (if at all) 100 people might call your employer or you will simply be considered a lunatic.
The worse part of politics is that any real opinion will cost votes. You can't really say anything. Everything is heresy at that point.
Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions.
I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it?
My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them.
Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use?
Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.
This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"
If you are judged not on your actions but on the actions others may take due to words they heard from someone who heard them from someone who heard them from you, then we might as well close up shop.
The responsibility for actions remains with the people who those actions.
The exceptions we have traditionally made, "You can't shout 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" same quite reasonable next to, "You cant discuss the sexual dimorphism of humans because someone somewhere might feel bad about themselves"
What do we do when people disagree about the intent behind a word?
Who decides what is antisocial?
What do we do when people disagree about what is antisocial?
I don't believe there are neat clean answers to any of these. The closest we'll get will involve mutual respect, assumption of good faith, and dialogue. We can't have any of that if our starting point is, "I believe your words are secretly not what you say they are" or "I will hold you responsible for anything bad that anyone does that might be tenuously connected to your words"
This is probably less restrictive than you are advocating for in your previous comment: as long as there is plausible deniability, the speech goes free.
There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.
However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.
If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.
I know this really apply to the topic but hopefully I’m not the only one to have gotten a chuckle from it.
It's more like what was heresy earlier aligned with one's viewpoint. The change is it has shifted, not narrowed.
That's a bit too reductionist. When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is.
For example if Trump and Obama both say "all lives matter", well yeah of course it's technically true in both cases. But only a complete idiot would think they were saying the same thing.
Otherwise, hard to disagree with anything here, but I don't think he's said anything new or profound anyway. The far left is definitely reaping what it sowed at the moment.
Citation needed.
The idea that most statements contain hidden meanings or only serve to cover up hidden motivations suggests an incredible level of paranoia.
I would posit the opposite - when people say things you can & should generally take them at face value. Sometimes people will disappoint you some of the time. Some people will do it so often that you would do well to discount their future statements. If you find yourself believing that anyone who doesn't share your opinions & values is secretly a facist/nazi, carefully curating their public image until it's time to strike, then you should really consider finding some grass and touching it.
I wouldn't say most but if you don't think this never happens that's just naivety. If you think right wing anti-immigration wasn't thinly veiled racism... Hell sometimes it wasn't even veiled.
(I say "was" because in the UK the situation has changed somewhat in the past 5-10 years - immigration has actually reached unsustainable levels. But Farage and worse were around long before that.)
even though it's from 2022, it still resonates with how I got fired just recently. something that Warhammer's Imperium calls out and does with no shame, publicly, is being built out silently or with euphemisms in our world.
ever more reasons to appreciate Warhammer as an unfortunate parody of our own little rock ball. and here I am, jobless, for calling Claude Code "a decent search engine"
Aaand thats when I stopped reading. You're not being censored, Paul, you're being rightfully told you're an asshole and refusing to take it to heart.
Creating an intellectual culture where all political ideas you disagree with can be construed as X-ist... not so much.
Despite that, half of Democratic Congressional representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, just voted to cut aid to Israel.
What the above poster listed is just a brief overview of the opposite, which has been the status quo for the past like 50 years here.
There is a lot of noise against Israel, but all the action is in the other direction, so to speak. And there are comical pains being made to absolve Israeli society for the country's actions even though it's a democracy that has voted for the very policies people are increasingly discovering and labeling abhorrent.
I say this respectfully because it's your wife, but if one can see the acts that Israel has been committing and how it plays in the US political process, but feels attacked when people react strongly and do things like try to boycott the country, then some introspection is required. Really needs to be a "are we the baddies" moment.
It's good she's here and that your children will presumably be raised here. It's not good to be in the kind of society that is under the grip of such an ideology as prevails over there.
Further reading for those interested: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.
?? We have all been seeing this happen, and professors have lost their jobs over criticism of Israel, such as Katherine Franke from Columbia, and now this prof suing Northwestern.
But nobody ever seems to get fired for defending Israel etc.
And no university has ever had funding threatened for having curricula or profs that demonize Palestinians or undermine their narrative.
You could probably make an argument that the students who got expelled were expelled for the nature of the protest, and not the cause itself, but that's rather different from "pretty directly backwards of what's actually happening"
I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.
Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.
You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.
Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.
I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.
"A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised."
We got that in a previous swing, more or less. It's not exactly a renowned Harvard academic, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov... I leave it to the reader to decide if some of the reception from various media and opinion outlets of the time are simply covering themselves with calling it crazy while expressing their true opinions in the positive coverage they give of it, or if this is a case where the search for "balance" leaves them giving more credence to an idea they consider crazy than they intended. Enough postmodern cynicism and you can read anything into anything, sometimes.