
What You Can't Say - rms
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
======
david927
What you're bring up here, Paul, are framesets. Framesets are the context we
place the information we gather. Every minute we get new information, what we
choose to accept and reject (and the angle we view that information) is based
on these framesets. The stronger you are emotionally, the broader your
frameset can get.

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.

~~~
jonmc12
Do you have a reference for 'framesets'? They sound interesting, but I have
not been able to find more info on google.

~~~
david927
It's a term I made up. It's actually part of a much bigger, more interesting
subject: individual-society "ology". Where the individual comes into contact
with the rest of the people around them. (Where psychology covers individual-
individual, and sociology covers society-society relations.) In other words,
when you lie on the leather sofa, you would be asked, "So how are the people
down the street whose name you don't know?" The people we pass on the street
play a huge role in our lives.

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.

------
rjprins
The subject of what morality exactly is has not been discussed. To keep it
short, I think morality is a set of rules to keep a society functional.
Therefor "good" morality would let a society be more functional, have no
unnecessary costs, no unnecessary losses and have optimal productivity and
innovation.

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.

~~~
miked
>> Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how
society functions best.

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.

~~~
rjprins
I don't care who said it (My apologies, I'm always a bit critical of throwing
in famous names in a discussion, the arguments should count for themselves.).
Internal considerations is really all there is.

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'.

~~~
miked
>> I don't care who said it (My apologies, I'm always a bit critical of
throwing in famous names in a discussion, the arguments should count for
themselves.). Internal considerations is really all there is.

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".

~~~
jimbokun
" 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."

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?

------
miked
>> If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have
to turn into Noam Chomsky.

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.

~~~
mark-t
Read the notes: <http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html>

[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.

~~~
miked
Well, I stupidly did not follow the link to the notes, and hence missed that.
In my defense, I think pg would have done better to pick a different example.
The context, indeed the whole essay, is about "what you can't say". For the
reasons stated, Chomsky either says things that a lot of people in the world
agree with or things that are horrific (praise of Hezbollah). Neither of these
puts me in mind of Galileo.

My suggestion to pg: use George Orwell as an example.

Thanks for the catch, in any case.

------
radu_floricica
Huh. I wish there was a wiki of such ideas. Just so we can check out taboos
against other's.

Edit: <http://taboos.wiki.zoho.com/TabooCollection.html>

~~~
philh
As the list currently stands, it looks more like a list of controversial
topics. Maybe you "can't" question capitalism in a "right-wing" setting, or
defend it in a "left-wing" one, but that seems fairly tame. And it's well-
known and accepted that there are two groups who disagree on the subject.
Noone will argue that you should be locked up for taking either position; you
won't be ostracised from your community even if it predominantly disagrees
with you.

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.

~~~
rms
"Post-term abortion" is quite a euphemism, I think that one goes beyond simple
controversy to total taboo.

------
sethg
A friend of mine once remarked that it's good to have an open mind, but not so
open that your brains fall out.

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.

~~~
Raplh
Sure, you can't evaluate every dingdong idea. But when you find one you are
going to skip, you can either do so respectfully, or you can declare to
everyone around you that even in the absence of any thought on the matter, you
happen to know (how?) that this is just wrong and BS and worthless.

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.

------
rms
This is apparently one of those things:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580981>

~~~
tvon
(I offer some level of apologies in advance, but this whole thing has touched
a chord with me and any attempts to express myself eloquently seem to come up
short, so I'm going to just let it out... some foul language may follow...
though I'll probably delete this in an hour or so to stem the karma damage)

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.

~~~
palish
So would you say all of that to my face? That was really harsh. I _am_ a
person, you know. I get happy and sad and have stupid ideas, just like
everyone else.

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.

~~~
tvon
Since you don't seem to understand what led up to it, I will explain. I only
posted after the following transpired (from my perspective):

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.

~~~
palish
Alright. Emotions flared up on both sides of the issue, so it's probably best
to just forget about the whole thing. Thanks for explaining your stance.

------
galactus
We all love to think of ourselves as rebels.

------
nebula
Wondering if this piece would have been upvoted this much if it didn't have
PG's brand.

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.

------
babyshake
I couldn't help but think of all of the taboos surrounding Israeli politics.

<http://bit.ly/ZycR9>

------
rms
Deeply ironic that this was vote weighted... I guess that's probably the
general policy on repeats though.

------
hs
yesterday i made a comment in swine flu thread: "can *.flu spread to plant? go
vegetarian!"

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?

~~~
SwellJoe
I've been a vegetarian for 15 years. I would have voted such a comment down,
simply because it is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because no one has
contracted swine flu from eating pork, to the best of my knowledge.

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.

~~~
hs
by definition, putting pork meat in mouth puts one in extremely close
proximity to swine

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

~~~
mark-t
> ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do

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.

~~~
Raplh
It almost certainly correlates better with how recently you leared English
than with your ability to structrue thoughts.

~~~
mark-t
I agree, up to perhaps a log-log scale. My grammar isn't likely to be
significantly better in 30 years. However, when comparing among groups with
similar English experience, grammar is likely to have a reasonable correlation
with well-structured arguments. Also, the amount of time since learning
English is not under your control; adherence to the rules of grammar is.

~~~
SwellJoe
Perhaps more importantly, it wasn't actually grammar that I criticized. It was
erratic use of punctuation (which was clearly for effect and to catch
attention rather than clarity), lack of appropriate capitalization (which
negatively impacts readability, and definitely doesn't require extreme English
skills to get right), aggressive tone (which I find annoying pretty much
anytime I see it on the Internet, as it provides no value), and sounding like
a self-righteous teenager (which _everybody_ older than ~24 finds irritating).
Though one could argue that capitalization and punctuation are components of
grammar, I used specific terms rather than a general one for a reason. I tend
to be quite forgiving of grammatical mistakes that can be attributed to native
language differences and different levels of skill with English. But, I'm less
forgiving of things that are very easy to control and get right, even for non-
native speakers, and that negatively impact my ability to read and understand.
When wrapped in negativity and an aggressive tone, I tend to feel negative
towards the person. So, I explained why his tone made me feel negative towards
him, and why I thought people were voting him down.

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.

