What You Can't Say
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Note that I didn't say, "The stronger you are intellectually." It has /nothing/ to do with how smart your are. I know amazingly smart people with tiny framesets on, for example, patriotism. Their country is great and everyone wishes they could live there, etc. It's a psychological trait and is worst in the aspects where we are weakest.
The stronger (and usually smaller) a frameset is, the more it can't be argued against. Logic won't work. And heresy is simply when we poke at strong framesets.
The way to battle them is: to be a good person. By being good (honest to yourself, honest to others, loving, and generous), you push up pool. When you do the opposite, you pull it down. The healthier we get and society gets, the less we'll need framesets. In other words, by making the world a better place we'll make it ... less messed up. :) You know what I mean.
You see, everyone chooses a strategy around their teens or even into their twenties to say why they are valuable, why they have a right to exist. A woman might choose: sexy, smart, beautiful, motherly, etc. And that becomes their identity. So attacking that (call a smart person "stupid" and they'll light up) is attacking their entire identity, what they've chosen as their right to exist. Have you seen a university professor in a tweed jacket? There you go.
The framesets I mentioned are tied to that identity and defended with that same "raison d'etre" fierceness. Information that violates the frameset, violates the identity strategy. It's like you have all your money in a particular stock and someone is saying something negative about the company. The more stake you have in that company, and the more fear you have of it crashing, the more unwilling you will be to be rational about what others may say.
Following the analogy, it might seem that diversifying is the answer: you're smart, but also into extreme sports and healthy, etc. That's not really the answer, though. The trick is to get your money out of the stock market; you have to care as little as possible what people think. Sound easy? It's one of the hardest things you can possibly do.
Here is a list of taboos:
- Religious beliefs. Not believing in God is OK, but it should be possible to freely criticize other people's beliefs.
- Sexual taboos. Bisexuality, swinging, S&M are all considered improper for no apparent reason. I won't dare even to hint child sexuality here.
- Nationalism. It is still considered perfectly normal to prefer people from your 'own' 'country' over people of another country. Tribalism is a very natural moral for obvious reasons.
- Political systems. Democracy is everything but perfect, but suggesting other forms of rule has not even been considered. A benevolent dictator will certainly be a lot better than a different charming elitist every 4 years.
- Drug use. Pot enjoys the popular vote, but XTC and other hard drugs are still very much not done. There are drugs which are inherently bad, but even most hard drugs aren't. Abuse is a symptom.
- Abortion (or further). Why are you not allowed to kill your own new born?
- Any criminal activity. These are just morals put to paper.
Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best. What really works best no one knows. It also depends on the goals. What constitutes a good society? The most productive? The one with the most happy residents? Evolution would say the one that survives. The moral fashions in that sense would equal genetic mutations in order to find the most optimal set of rules.
One thing is certain though. There are no such things as right or wrong moralities, there is only effective and ineffective moralities.
It was Nietzsche's great insight that internal considerations play a much larger role in constructing morality than external considerations. See, in particular, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_. Nietzsche's first questions on encountering a morality were always: what "instincts" are active here? Does this ethic arise from a overwelling of strength and confidence, or from resentment, envy, and fear? Nietzsche called the former good and the latter bad. He despised the Political Correctness of his time. I've no doubt he would have attacked the PC beliefs of our era as well, seeing them the same way that pg does: as arising out of fear.
In our (the Western) society, this is most true for sexual and/or violent thoughts, as well as anti-government or anti-religious thoughts. Particularly when it comes to sexual thoughts, I cannot find a reason for holding back any of them.
If only we could keep the external external. If you have managed that you are way ahead. Don't miss what is happening with those who haven't managed.
If you'd take the extreme ego central perspective, you get the double moral: "I can do anything I want, you may only do things that are beneficial to me." Obviously this doesn't work in society, and even for the strongest individual this becomes: "You should do things that do not hurt me, and I will do everything so as to not make you hurt me."
This may be further fine-tuned in a closely knit society:"If society benefits, I benefit, therefor everybody should do what benefits society".
Basically collective morality comes forth from selfish morality. And when it does not, it is 'naturally selected', e.g. as the French royalty which was beheaded by the plebs or more commonly, the governmental policing of individuals.
I wouldn't say there is any inherent good or bad in acting on strength/confidence or fear/envy. And ethics that arise from those feelings are also neither good nor bad. Some rules are more capable of continuing than others.
e.g. The 'serial-killer'-morale has less chance than the 'pacifist'-morale. This makes pacifism 'better', but not something inherently 'good'.
Agreed. I'm not citing authority, I'm giving credit where credit is due.
>> I wouldn't say there is any inherent good or bad in acting on strength/confidence or fear/envy. And ethics that arise from those feelings are also neither good nor bad.
Well, if we're going to hash out the basis of morality we're going to need a few more pixels. I'm not sure I agree with Nietzsche on this. I am certain that when people are scared, resentful, or envious, they can do a lot of damage. I'm also certain, based on 53 years of living, that people who are happy and confident tend to spread a lot more joy around than those who are resentful. Misery not only loves company, it creates and reinforces norms that spread misery.
>> Basically collective morality comes forth from selfish morality.
I'm not sure where you mean by this, but it's worth knowing that Hilter's National Socialist German Worker's Party stamped the slogan "The collective good over the individual good" on their coins. Want people to obey you, work for you, and die for you? Establish a morality that doing what you want instead of what the nation's leaders want (who naturally claim to represent the collective good) is bad. Or as our current Vice-President says, "unpatriotic".
Maybe happy, confident people have more to be joyful about, and less to be resentful of, than people with less reason to be happy and confident? (That sounds like a tautology, which is kind of my point.)
If your world view is shaped growing up in the slums of Mumbai, vs. growing up in an upper middle class American and getting an Ivy League education, are you more or less likely to be happy, confident, and joyful, or full of resentment?
1. You started with this as a premise, and reached it as your conclusion.
2. Distinguish "right or wrong" and "effective and ineffective."
Chomsky could, I suppose, be taken as a heretic. After all, he did write an introduction for a book that denied the Holocaust. He also traveled to Lebanon and had hail-fellow-well-met meetings with the leaders of Hezbollah.
He also demands that people divest from Israel -- a nation he has criticized -- while owning several million dollars of real estate in the U.S., a nation he has criticized a lot more -- to worldwide applause. Indeed, in a poll a few years ago -- Europeans rated him the world's most important intellectual. Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism (often, not always, dressed up as anti-Israeli sentiment) are some of the most widely accepted normative beliefs in the world today.
All of these would be criticized by many on the American right, but, with the partial exception in developed countries of Holocaust denial, most of the world's people would have no problem with them.
You seem to see Chomsky as a heretic. I see him as a prime example of something Eric Hoffer wrote about over a half-centruy ago in _The True Believer_: the formerly creative man who has lost his powers and who compensates by becoming a fanatic. Chomsky's books are international bestsellers. Chomsky's MIT faculty peers made him an Institute Professor. I'm a fan of your writing PG, but I'm sorry, I'm missing the heretical heroism. YMMV.
The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."
He's not anti-Semitic; he's Jewish and is critical of some of Israel's policies.
The history of Jewish anti-semitism goes back at least to Josephus, who sold out his fellow jews to the Romans. Karl Marx, whose early writings were filled with anti-semitic hate. Etc. Etc. (I should add, BTW, that I'm not Jewish, just a friend of Israel who's never been there.)
>> ...and is critical of some of Israel's policies.
Well, that would certainly explain his hanging out with the mass murderers of Hezbollah and fronting books on Holocaust denial.
>> The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."
Ah, well, that clinches it.
On the face of it, Israel is a state which controls a group of non-citizens through the use of tanks, walls, and laws (they are non-citizens with the limits on legal rights that go with that).
Yet there is a group, including brilliant people, who label objections to any of these policies as anti-semitic, even when those objections come from Jews, and indeed even when they come from Israeli Jews.
It is hard to believe hearing these responses that they are "honest," because it looks so much like exactly what you would do if you had a plan to shut up your opponents. It is enough to make me question the very nature of rational discourse.
And indeed as I read this, I wonder will this comment be downvoted? And if it is, will that be because it is too political, off-topic somehow? Or will it be because the agreed upon fantasy that dictates what can and cannot be said is on the wrong side of this comment?
I would agree that anti-Israel opinions are not anti-Semitic, I would agree that anti-Pakistan opinions are not anti-Islamic. I would agree that anti-Napoleon comments are not anti-French. I would agree that anti-Nazi comments are not anti-German. I would agree that anti-Bush comments are not anti-American. etc.
Brilliant people also have self-interests.
It's my impression that debate about Israel is much more open in Israel itself than it is in the US. Here you can't utter so much as a whisper indicating that you think their current policies may be un-optimal without being slapped with all kinds of labels.
The closedness of national debate may be something which varies across the world, and the U.S. may be on the more-closed-than-you-woulda-thought side of that. As I read some other comments in this thread about not being able to discuss capitalism, I was thinking "they sure can in Europe." I think the Europeans are a little less self-conscious about their kinkinesses :)
I think many European countries have stricter laws against hate speech than the U.S. Which on the face of it may make us U.S.ians think we are doing better at this free speech thing. When in fact it may just be that we do a better job of unofficial suppression of free speech than the foreigners do. It reminds me of Fred's explanation of the high gun-murder rate in the U.S. in the great movie Barcelona. "It is not that Americans are more violent than Europeans, we are just better shots."
[15] By this I mean you'd have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky's opinions = what you can't say. If you actually said the things you can't say, you'd shock conservatives and liberals about equally-- just as, if you went back to Victorian England in a time machine, your ideas would shock Whigs and Tories about equally.
My suggestion to pg: use George Orwell as an example.
Thanks for the catch, in any case.
I'd like to see a place where a Chinese reader can point out what he considers a default taboo in western culture.
Edit: And a list of 100 taboos has a better chance of hitting a couple I'm not aware of.
Some default Western taboos are the inability to question the institutions of capitalism and democracy.
Look at the coverage of Hugo Chavez in the US. He's been elected several times (and had referenda fail) in internationally monitored elections, yet coverage often puts him in the same sentence as Castro. That's what happens if you are really thinking about alternatives to capitalism.
Canada, Europe and the rest of the Western world has a deep understanding of the limitations of Capitalism, and the word Socialism can be said without it being confused with Communism.
Sex and minors is better; "children have sexuality" can be said but "children are emotionally capable of choosing sexual partners outside a narrow age bracket" probably can't outside of NAMBLA.
I've also added holocaust denial.
In a world with almost seven billion people, there are many folks who believe that Darwinian evolution is a fraud, or that 9/11 was actually a Mossad plot, or that astronauts never actually landed on the moon, or that Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans should be the absolute monarch of France. I see no reason to waste my time giving these "theories" the attention required to even refute them.
I don't care how much of a bold and contrarian and politically incorrect thinker you are--at some point you have to draw a line and say that certain ideas deserve to be ridiculed because they are, well, ridiculous.
Sure its frustrating when you stop trashing all the ideas you reject. But it has some good results too. Like you get a more realistic idea of how limited what you know (vs what you think) is.
It's not that you can't say it. It's that you should say it some place where it will be appreciated. I see that it got a pretty good amount of upvotes before being deaded by an editor or pg, so I may even be in the minority (you and palish have been around about as along as I have, so it's not an "oldfag vs newfag" question), but I definitely don't care whether palish has a conversation with God tonight while under the influence of LSD.
If I wanted drug experience discussions I would go to erowid: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/
And, if I wanted repeats of pg essays on HN...well, I would never want repeats of pg essays on HN.
I really don't want to hear about that crap. Not because i find it taboo, or offensive, or because it is somehow too extreme for my fragile view on the world, but because this kind of crap is mundane, uninspiring, unoriginal and juvenile.
FFS, the highest voted comment was "draw some pictures", you have to be kidding me, how lame and predictable can a thread like that get? This is HACKER NEWS, maybe the discussion could revolve around that a bit, ya think? How about you try to write some fucking coherent and maintainable Perl? Maybe you can do that on acid...
And did you read the list of questions he was asking? "When I see a shape shift or melt, then reach out and touch it, will I feel the shape that I see, or feel its true form?" Are you fucking kidding me, really? Is there a cute chick with a Velvet Underground t-shirt standing around here somewhere that I'm not seeing?
You want to drop acid? Great, go for it, you have my blessings, but don't post to HN about it pretending you want to take some lame fucking pseudo-scientific approach to it.
This is Hacker News, I don't want to come here and feel like a fly on a wall at an art school scenester coffee shop full of Volvo driving trustafarians. I sure as hell don't want to read an entire thread about someone discovering hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. That discussion has it's place, that place is not here.
Also, just because that story was flagged or moderated or whatever, does not mean that you are some how being persecuted for your "counter-culture" beliefs. All too often someone says something stupid on HN (more often Reddit, but it seems to be happening more here) and they're moderated into oblivion, so they edit their comment claiming that their statement was just too mind blowing for the sheeple to accept, so it unjustly modded into oblivion. The reality is that the sheeple are quite open minded, they just think the comment sucked, was stupid, and deserved being moderated into oblivion.
I was trying to be helpful. I honestly thought it would be. I'm sorry for wasting a few minutes of people's time; trying to provoke an interesting discussion; not meeting your high standards of "worthy" content, and apparently churning out crap. I'm not sure what else to say. But I don't identify with Hacker News anymore, I don't think.
1- Your initial 'Ask HN' post in which you said:
"Please try not to post a meta-comment about whether this should be killed -- just flag it. If it's detrimental, it'll be killed, and that will be the end of it."
2- But then you complained once it was flagged, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581039
3- And you denied you were complaining about it later: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581122
4- Then rms called it censorship here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581046
5- And rms decided to post this story, and what I perceived as a passive-aggressive reference to your 'Ask HN' in the GP comment.
Really, I should have left it alone as my feelings were summed up better by someone else here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581091). But as implied by my list, the sequence of events was enough that I felt the need to rant about the issue.
So to answer your question, I would have said something to your face had a group discussion equivalent of the above happened, though probably not those exact words and fwiw, I would have been directing it at rms more than you for he is the one that decided to make it a two-story issue.
Also, I've only bee here a month (despite my join time, I didn't use the account until recently), just because you perceive something I say as dickish and unnecessary doesn't mean that the identify of HN has changed (whatever it was, I don't know). In other words, I am hardly representative of this community.
Now don't get me wrong; I read this one years ago, and I liked it. Just that from what I have observed of social behavior on HN, no one would have bothered to go read it and appreciate the ideas, given that its title is not catchy and doesn't have the right keywords in it.
i got -8 or so, at first i wonder if my post is irrelevant to the flu discussion. none of the replies indicates that.
reality is they don't like the 'go vegetarian' thing: unhelpful, unfeasible, malnutrition, deficiencies and more ridiculously labeling me as 'pusing an agenda'
just about everything like in pg's essay ... i said the taboo -- maybe i should keep the secret and live longer (read 'the china study' for scientific references)
hn, why so afraid? not eating meat won't kill you ... it's definitely legal and non-addictive ... about as harmful as giving up tv
just try it like a month or so, don't you like experimenting, go against the norm? are you not a hacker?
I'm tempted to vote this comment down because it is complaining about you being voted down in a wholly unrelated thread. (See the site guidelines. Complaining about votes is distinctly uncool.)
And while I'm providing constructive feedback, your erratic use of punctuation, lack of capitalization, aggressive tone, and generally sounding like a self-righteous teenager all leave me feeling a bit negative towards you. I'm sure you're a very fine person in real life, but I'd prefer it if you weren't trying to start arguments in threads that aren't even about the topic you've decided to talk about.
no i'm never complain about being voted down, if it's really about karma, i won't say taboo things
my prev post is relevant because i happened to experience what pg described in his essay
sorry about the 'challenge', but really, i'm curious how many will take it
ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do
Dead, cooked 'swine'. Entirely different to getting up close and personal with an infected live pig.
I think you just turned "rational" into a label. Apart from your attempt at sarcasm, this statement is probably true. Like it or not, your ability to structure sentences reflects your ability to structure thoughts.
I thought I was providing a helpful suggestion for how he could better present himself and his ideas on HN, but one can only do so much to be helpful.
I've heard no indication that eating pork is suspect in the outbreak, or has been indicated as the means of transmission in any case.
There are actually a lot of contradictory reports on this but that isn't the point.
This is entirely new to me; the post I responded to gave no such evidence (however suspect the evidence might be). But I suspect your evidence is also made up.
The fellow I was responding to gave me no reason to believe he wasn't just making stuff up. And, a quick googling reveals that he was, in fact, just making stuff up.
From the CDC:
Can people catch swine flu from eating pork? No. Swine influenza viruses are not transmitted by food. You can not get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products.
Reference: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/key_facts.htm
why so quick judging unpopular view as false? and why take what you're told (by govt) as true?
can you be sure that there's no pressure from meat industry to government?
this disease is pretty new, has cdc done large experiments on the effect of eating infected pigs to healty americans? if they have and the conclusion matched then i'm glad.
don't you realize that your action, along with labelling me as self-righteous and teenager mimic what's described in what-you-cant-say?
this is the last time i will say taboo. bye
# echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts
# echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts
Somehow, I'm not saddened by your departure.
'Eating properly handled and cooked pork and pork products is safe. Cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160°F kills the swine flu virus as it does other bacteria and viruses.'
So you CAN get it from pork if it isn't cooked properly. Why are you twisting the truth? Didn't you notice this?
In other news - 'China, Russia and Ukraine banned imports of pork and pork products from Mexico'
Of course the original mutation that causes the virus to occur could easily have happened differently to the current means of transmission.
I just cannot understand why you are so dismissive of the notion that pork could have something to do with this. Perhaps this subject is more taboo than I thought.
Surely you can see now the the subject is at least worthy of discussion and should not be automatically shut down.
Actually, there is no evidence that you can, and you're twisting the truth by saying the paragraph says the exact opposite of what it actually says.
The "cooked properly" thing is pretty much always included in mentions of pork by the CDC and other government entities, because of trichinosis, e-coli, and salmanella, and it is intended to further make it clear that not only are you not going to get swine flu from pork because it just doesn't work that way, when it is cooked it would kill off the virus, anyway.
If you aren't cooking your pork properly, you're risking your life every time you eat pork, regardless of whether there is a swine flu pandemic underway. Undercooked meat is dangerous, nobody is arguing about that, but I've seen no reputable source say that the flu can be contracted from eating pork or any other meat. And, you have provided none.
I just cannot understand why you are so dismissive of the notion that pork could have something to do with this. Perhaps this subject is more taboo than I thought.
You can't understand that every reliable source I have at my disposal tells me you can't catch swine flu from eating pork. What do you hope to achieve by getting all riled up about something that simply is not a vector of infection for this disease? Take your crazy scaremongering over to twitter where people eat that kind of nonsense up like candy.
Surely you can see now the the subject is at least worthy of discussion and should not be automatically shut down.
Surely you're joking. You've provided no sources. There have been no cases of swine flu that are attributable to eating pork. What is there to discuss? No cases. No connection. Nothing but some random nuts on the Internet with a bone to pick.
As I mentioned, I've been a vegetarian for over 15 years. I have zero interest in defending the meat industry. But, you're talking like a nutcase, and I don't find paranoid fantasies an interesting topic for discussion. Unless there is some evidence of a link between eating pork and the swine flu, it is a subject that is not worthy of discussion.
It's just not interesting to argue about all the things that might (despite lack of evidence) cause someone to get sick. The rays from your monitor might be causing you to get cancer of the eyeball as we speak, and the use of a mouse might cause Parkinson's. There is no evidence...but it could happen. Shall we discuss that, too?
If either of us had read the link you provided in more detail we would have noticed that it is written before the current outbreak and is about the swine flu that is endemic to pigs - not the current virus that appears to be endemic to humans. They are related obviously but not the same thing. If the later version can appear in pigs (some say it can't) then this would could easily raise the risk of infection from use of pork products.
The thing I find interesting this is that given the fairly vague statement posed by hs you have consistently chosen the narrowest and most disputable angle. The general interpretation I had was something like 'vegetarian food production doesn't cause flu pandemics'. But you chose something like 'there is a pork contamination'. Then you tell me to 'Take your crazy scaremongering over to twitter' when I am actually speculating about the origin of the disease. I think you should probably take a little more time to look for the good in people rather than assuming the worst. I will also do this.
As a vegetarian I am annoyed at the bad things that happen to the world because of human meat consumption. When something so directly linked to the meat industry such as this occurs, I believe it is only right and proper to remind people that it doesn't have to be this way.
Nonsense. This particular flu strain has never been detected in pigs. It's called "swine flu" because the virus itself is similar to previous swine flu viruses. Your quip about pork bans is taken out of context. Every article mentioning the bans goes on to criticize them for being unscientific.