
What you can't say (2004) - baud147258
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
======
weberc2
Interesting how moral fashion trends in the U.S. have changed since 2004. As I
recall, in 2004, it was morally unfashionable to criticize the war effort. In
2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice
movement. Although I was much less afraid of being a heretic in 2004 than I am
in 2018; I'm curious if others have similar or different experiences/opinions?

~~~
Meekro
Do you know any examples of people being fired from their jobs for criticizing
the Iraq war in 2004? There are many examples of people getting fired for
questioning the tenets of social justice, including some fired for relatively
minor violations.

~~~
natestemen
could you give some examples of people being fired for "relatively minor
violations"?

~~~
livestyle
Andrew Torba former YC'er got kicked out for triggering other YC alum for
saying "Build the Wall" -

or we can go w/ Brendan Eich getting booted from Mozilla.

The list can go on and on and on.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozill...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-
ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/)

[https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref...](https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref=story)

~~~
chickenfries
Clearly it wasn't just saying "build the wall," from your own link:

> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling
> bullshit and shove it.

> I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.

> I could give a shit less about your respect for me or anyone else's. Build
> the wall is exactly what the fuck it means: build the wall.

At almost any office job in America this is not an acceptable way to talk to
your colleagues. At what programming job am I allowed to call people cucks for
disagreeing with my politics?

~~~
livestyle
1\. It wasn't his job. It was the YC network he was thrown out of.

2\. His own testimony was that "John Levy called me and said that because I
said "build the wall" I am now removed from the network."

~~~
chickenfries
1\. The same principle applies, unless you want to argue that YC should have
lower standards than the average tech job.

2\. I don't know much about this person, but I'm going to need something more
than his word on this one. The much more obvious explanation that it was his
behavior towards other founders.

------
jlelonm
> So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas
> against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will
> be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?

Has anyone actually collected a whole bunch of information on this?

In my head I'm imagining a table, with the columns being cultures (i.e. 1990s
America, 1850s Britain, etc) and the rows being contentiously debated actions
/ ideas (i.e. age of consent being "low", male students having sex with female
teachers, etc), and each cell representing a boolean "yes, this culture is OK
with this" / "no, this culture is not ok with this"?

I'd be really interested to see something like that.

~~~
adamrezich
Such a thing would be seen by many as incredibly dangerous information.

------
jstanley
> In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as
> they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even
> when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually
> paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something
> there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge.

Or perhaps they thought there might be something there, considered it for a
bit, and decided probably not. How often did their eyes pause at sites that
turned out to be totally benign?

~~~
lolc
And if we try to count the times their gaze lingered on a benign site, are we
sure it was benign? Or was that an actual tumor and it was missed?

------
kirkules
"So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your
current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that
something is wrong." \-- is a litmus test that fails. It's okay for these
kinds of terms to trigger you to double-check something, but it's not the case
that, for example, every use of "racist" is indicative of faulty thought or
misapplied labels.

~~~
ColanR
From his "reply" [0]:

> You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many
> otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth
> century."

> This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves
> socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that
> Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact.

[0]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html)

~~~
claudiawerner
> "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the
> twentieth century."

I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky
implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is
implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label
(socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of
capitalism etc.)

So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic:

>I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think
the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or
medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.

This _immediately_ jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in
which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged
by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the
reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which
mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist
at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than
the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it
being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government
does, the more socialist the country is".

I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s,
50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's
ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists.

On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to
take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't
say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are
regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they
investigate its cause and name _technological rationality_. Unlike PG they
provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s
which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being
unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a _major_ demotivator, it seems to
imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves.
But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it
for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take
him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates.

PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least
dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original
formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques.

[0] I'm not saying getting rich is bad.

------
stephengillie
> _Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of
> a group of your peers?_

It's been said before that if you're not risking downvotes, you're not
contributing to the conversation.

It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not
respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you
hold those opinions.

Times change, trends come and go, but humans are largely the same today as
before we invented the Atlatl[∆].

[∆][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-
thrower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower)

~~~
kennywinker
Fair enough, but also don’t play devil’s advocate if there’s no reason to.
Just being contrarian is a trap of it’s own.

~~~
cirgue
I think the point was more that if you wander into a discussion where you
already agree with everything being said, your contribution is comparatively
less valuable than if you're in a discussion where you disagree.

~~~
stephengillie
> _Likewise, one of the biggest pests in business is the carbon copy—the
> fellow who always says: “Yes, Mr. Wrigley, you’re absolutely right.”

Perhaps meaning: “Have it your own way, you old buzzard, what do I care!”

Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a
finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary._

\- William Wrigley Jr., 1931

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/)

------
40acres
This seems like another description of the overton window.

 _The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of
ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator,
Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public
Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea 's
political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window,
rather than on politicians' individual preferences._

The overton window is constantly shifting, and in regards to American politics
it seems like it's shifting faster than ever. In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell
was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military,
today such a law would be viewed as archaic. The timeline from when the first
state legalized gay marriage to the supreme court decision is also very short
in compared to other movements (abolishment of slavery, womens rights, etc.)

~~~
dragonwriter
> In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights
> of homosexuals in the military

No, it wasn't.

It was, _when it was announced_ , seen as a betrayal of the gay community by
the Clinton Administration.

At any rate, you are looking at policy changes, not dialogue changes, that
tells you about something moving, but not the Overton Window, which need not
move in the same direction as policy (though one would expect a sudden
backlash if they moved in different directions long enough, but then that's
not inconsistent with observations, either.)

------
skybrian
This article is written with an implicit assumption that expressing opinions
is useful. I'm skeptical about this. Sharing sources and stories of our
personal experiences (our inputs) seems more useful than sharing unsourced
summary outputs.

But that's more difficult, so all I'm giving you is yet another opinion.

~~~
athrowaway3z
We couldn't function if we had the account of every personal experience that,
for instance, is in favor of democracy.

Ideas are told and spread by unsourced summary outputs. Best case, they can be
justified by some archetypal experience.

------
PerryCox
See previous discussions here:

2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420)

~~~
adamrezich
A recap like this is more interesting for this article than most because each
comments thread is a snapshot in time of the then-current discussion about
what is and is not taboo. Absolutely fascinating to skim from a contemporary
perspective.

~~~
marvin
I hope we can keep this trend up over the next decade too. It will provide a
fascinating account of evolving taboos and the power shifts and power them.

------
3pt14159
This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault
here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling.

In Bruce Schneier's book _Click Here to Kill Everyone_ [0] he mentions how it
took him two years to write the book because of a false start.

In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind
when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous
systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs /
strategic threats.

I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1]

I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after
multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government
about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written
about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now
that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic
threats I can update my priors and partially relax.

But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this:

Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize,
but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the
tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to
it being around we're all convinced someone else _surely_ has figured out how
to mitigate the downsides.

(It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!)

[0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My
think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed
it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up.
I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy
a copy for every MP in Canada.

[1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was
broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class
/ domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The
stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a
larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of
thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves
out of it.

------
kadendogthing
You still can't talk about Unionizing in some of America's biggest employment
venues, that span across every industry and every domain. Not only is it
personally unpopular in private conversation a lot of the time, but it can
also injure your livelihood. Everything from getting passed up for a promotion
or straight up getting fired.

------
jstanley
> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be
> reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

> Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for
> things we can't say that are true

I'm interested... are there some good historical examples of people getting in
trouble for expressing ideas that _didn 't_ turn out to be correct?

~~~
christophilus
Creationists, pretty much any religious heresy, various scientists who go
against the prevailing, accepted scientific opinion...

------
rpassar4
Paul puts his finger on the cost/benefit of saying heretical things out loud
in a very useful way here.

------
candiodari
> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the
> professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn
> how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French
> literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original
> physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above
statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? The central idea is
that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to
their statements. Especially when it comes to different attitudes about _gasp_
their intelligence, even in groups specifically selected (at least partly) for
their intelligence.

Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps
after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above
statement racist.

~~~
dragonwriter
> > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all
> the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to
> learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French
> literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original
> physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

Kind of depends on who is judging the papers.

> This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above
> statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ?

Nope.

It's not even a forbidden statement.

It's not even _a statement_.

Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could
possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than
you do, and then build on that error.

> The idea that people both are different, and that that justifies different
> attitudes to their statements.

This is not an uncommon idea in social justice circles, though each specific
versions of it is controversial with different supporting and opposing groups.

Heck, the entire idea of group privilege as a basis for distrust frequently
found in such circles is exactly a form of this idea.

> Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps
> after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above
> statement racist.

Since, on top of not being a statement, the implicit axis of differentiation
(assuming an answer other than “neither” or “it depends”) in the hypothetical
has nothing to do with race, that seems improbable, and may say as much about
your thought processes as about theirs.

~~~
candiodari
> Kind of depends on who is judging the papers.

That would mostly be physics phds and professors versus literature phds and
professors.

But if you want other examples, the group of people who keep failing to
distinguish others' bullshit from "real science" thing are the social sciences
[1][2][3]. And if you consider management "science" as a social science,
there's roughly a century of this (most higher institutions do consider
management science a social science) [4]

At least French literature is studying _fiction_ , whereas the social sciences
claim that they're a valid science studying real, repeating (non-fiction)
phenomena.

> It's not even a statement.

Unless a statement is very different from what Google answers when I type in
"define:statement" I'm going to go with that it is a statement

And judging by the downvotes, it's indeed not allowed.

> Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could
> possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than
> you do, and then build on that error.

This sentence does not parse. Could you perhaps rephrase it ?

I find the statement by Paul Graham obviously defines a "total order" [5],
which means I could even translate that statement into logical symbols if you
like.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)
[2]
[https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/10/03/33299646/academi...](https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/10/03/33299646/academic-
hoax-reveals-deep-problems-in-social-sciences) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project)
[4] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-
fast](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast) [5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order)

------
ChuckMcM
John Cusak wrote a book on this topic [https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-
Cannot-Said-Conversations...](https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-Cannot-Said-
Conversations/dp/1608467171)

------
why_only_15
Why does he have all these footnotes that aren't actually in the article?

~~~
adamrezich
"Notes" hyperlink at bottom of article links to this:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html)

------
writepub
Among the consequences of morally unfashionable speech is a rate-limit or ban
on HN

------
api
The problem with this reasoning is that some heretical ideas are perhaps
correct, some are just nuts, and some are both nuts and very damaging. While
it is true that moral fashions and taboos of discourse can exclude good ideas,
the inverse does not follow. It does not follow that an excluded idea is
therefore good.

I think this even works in previous ages. While medieval heretics did not
deserve the punishments they received, the _majority_ of them were probably
nuts and believed things that were at least as irrational as the dominant
paradigms of the time.

They called Einstein crazy. They also called Otis Eugene Ray crazy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube)

Would you have considered letting Otis Eugene Ray go from an engineering
position if he started arguing for his bizarre stuff?

They also called Willis Carto crazy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto)

How about those heresies? Would you want him on your staff if he were
outspoken about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Jews are responsible for
all the evils of the world?

Seems to me that a great many of those being excluded from present discourse
are being excluded for arguing for very strong forms of biological determinism
coupled with a naturalistic fallacy (if it's natural, it's therefore good)
argument for the legitimacy of racism and sexism. Those are dubious ideas with
a demonstrated recent track record of motivating acts that cause tremendous
harm to a lot of people. They're not heresies of the beneficial sort.

~~~
BryantD
All of this, yes. The problems with ascribing value to ideas based on how
controversial they are should be obvious. This is possibly the by-product of
investment mentality: investing in bad companies is punished financially, but
does not appear to pose any societal risk.

