
Sam Altman complains political correctness (gay) “Free Speech is dead in SF” - gamechangr
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/12/15/sam-altman-complains-political-correctness-san-francisco-says-hurting-innovation/
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refurb
I'm surprised Sam said this. However I do applaud him for it.

The point being is you can argue against speech you disagree with. "Gay people
are evil" can be met with "That's ridiculous, and most people find that
incorrect and offensive." And leave it at that.

Shutting down speech is the problem. Why? Because once you've made it
acceptable to shutdown speech that is offensive, suddenly the definition of
offensive gets expanded and it's used to bludgeon any ideas that don't align
with current thinking. That's dangerous.

~~~
bbctol
At the point where you think China's doing better on an issue than California,
you're not talking about free speech anymore. People getting mad at you for
saying things they don't like is not "shutting down speech," it's... speech.

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makecheck
We have several “modern problems” that make completely-free speech potentially
naïve.

One, the sheer magnitude of _easily accessible_ information is far greater
than it has ever been, and this quantity not only overwhelms us in terms of
how many headlines we will read but also how _deeply_ we are willing to read.
At some point, we are mostly reduced to headline-skimmers that trust far too
much about the first few sentences of whatever is posted, and we place great
trust in “something” to help us filter it out (and so far there aren’t a lot
of great ways to determine what makes an online source valuable).

It is also _incredibly_ easy for people to set up their own online echo
chambers now, which means that people can saturate their input with whatever
they want to hear and leave it at that. People have shown that they’re clearly
not responsible enough to intentionally diversify what they take in, which
almost ensures a very skewed perception of reality, especially when combined
with massive quantity and low quality.

And, perhaps controversially, I believe that people are not being educated
very well at all to recognize and adapt to these problems. (It’s learning
about critical thinking, statistical significance of sample sizes, etc.)
Indeed, young people are able to easily access online material from almost
anywhere with no friction but all of the echo chamber.

~~~
gamechangr
>It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo
chambers now

You nailed it. Look at the elections _ Hillary was winning in almost all
online conversations (certainly in my limited social circles = echo
chambers)...then the reality proved otherwise.

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putroce
This article is disgustingly biased against him. Why does the author think
it's alright to add these little snarky comments? I don't care for her
opinion, just tell me what's going on.

~~~
Retroity
Welcome to Journalism in 2017. Impartiality is dead.

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austincheney
As an outsider looking in people in the bay area can be way too damn
sensitive. With all the social justice warriors running around I am really put
off in moving to that area (even if it weren't so damn expensive).

~~~
greglindahl
Well, if you want to refuse to refer to married gay people as married, or call
transgender people by their pre-transition pronouns, AT WORK, you're going to
get fired. If that's a problem, you probably shouldn't work at a company where
the HR manual says you should treat co-workers with respect.

On the other hand, if you're OK with being respectful to people even if you
disagree with their very existence, you're pretty much good to go in the Bay
Area.

As an example of this in action, I have a gay friend who eventually moved to
New York City with his husband. He works in a big bank in a mid-level job,
you'd recognize the name. His manager constantly refers to my friend's husband
as his "partner". My friend thought he was going out on a limb when he
corrected his manager with "Actually, he's my husband." It's fine to be
forgetful; it's not fine to be disrespectful. So far nothing bad has happened,
but who knows how it will turn out.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I'm sure I must be exhibiting some form of hetero-privilege here, but I never
got offended by any of the people who referred to my wife as "my partner".

~~~
greglindahl
That's nice for you. I suppose you didn't notice that for a while gay people
were only allowed to become "domestic partners", not married? I hope that now
you don't now refer to your gay co-workers who are married as having
"partners".

Because it's not about you. The Golden Rule is not "call people by the name
you are ok with if you were them", it's "call people by the name they want to
be called by". If you like, I can pull out my Miss Manners book and quote that
rule to you, from the 1950s.

~~~
refurb
I was going to say something like "is everyone taking crazy pills?", but I'll
aim for a more serious response.

The problem is that people read way too much into what other people say. It
sounds like you hear "partner? this person is clearly insensitive to the
history of discrimination again LGBT people."

Instead try "I don't like the word partner, but it is a pretty standard term
for not only the unmarried, but also married people. This guy probably doesn't
understand it bothers me, but I'll give him the benefit that he meant no
harm."

~~~
greglindahl
Actually, I'm with the second, not the first.

And so is my gay friend in NYC. It's just that he's scared that his boss is
actually a passive-aggressive homophobe and he's going to get fired for
politely insisting on "husband".

~~~
refurb
Does he have evidence his boss is a passive agressive homophobe beyond his use
of the word "partner"?

~~~
greglindahl
No, and he's not accusing his boss of anything.

He's just scared.

Keep in mind that he spent the first decade of his career working in places
where he could be legally fired for being gay.

And there are lots of parts of the US where he could still be legally fired
for being gay.

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vfulco
You can only talk like this when you are wealthy since you can/will survive
the beat-down from the SJWs and others who demand you only talk in their
approved way. Sad...

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gamechangr
It's funny how trying to stop closed mindedness towards anyone/anything
aggressively, ends up over time creating another version of closed mindedness
as a reaction.

~~~
greglindahl
There's nothing new here. The same thing happened in the civil rights era; if
you didn't like black people, you were expected to keep it to yourself at
work.

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gamechangr
Tim Ferriss says that there is a "a peculiar form of McCarthyism" in Silicon
Valley

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836)

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dragonwriter
The title here is neither the original not even coherent. If the issue is
space limitation, ”Sam Altman complains SF political correctness hurts
innovation” would be a natural shortening of the source title.

------
mtgx
> “I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in
> Beijing than in San Francisco.”

I don't follow Sam's life, but has he lived there for at least a few months to
be able to say that? Or he just went to a conference or two there?

Even so, it may be easier for an _American_ or other foreigner to "speak their
minds" in China, especially if they are known to have a lot of money. But if
he was a Chinese, I think there's a much higher chance something like this
would happen instead:

[https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl...](https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed-
for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007)

The only thing you may have to fear for in SF may be your reputation, but not
that you will go to prison for saying the "wrong thing". Not yet, at least.

~~~
gamechangr
I think he is just using an extreme example (China) to point to the fact that
SF should be much - much -much easier to for "discussing controversial ideas".

I think your link connects the dots of using China as an extreme example.

