Shortly prior to the recent US presidential election, I worked next to a nice, smart young man from California who went to a well-known progressive university in the bay area. Politics was very rarely discussed at work, but in the weeks before the election, there was some cross talk in the isles.
He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious about the thought of a Trump presidency, but I'm pretty far along the open-minded scale, so we chatted about it privately a bit.
My co-worker asked me to not speak about his position and to not let anyone else know about it, because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.'
Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.
You know what? I agreed with his concern at the time, and I still agree with it. Consciously and otherwise, I think that quite a few of the fine progressive folk that we find ourselves surrounded by here in the bay area would hold such an opinion against him in important ways.
I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
At this point, I can't imagine a path forward that has much of a chance of bearing fruit.
> I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
That may be what you personally felt in this single personal anecdote, but it is not at all supported by the results for the bay area in the election[1].
There were an enormous number of Trump voters who explicitly stated that they voted for him because he was the only national candidate to criticize things like NAFTA and other policies which directly hurt them and/or people they knew. Presented with a series of bad options, they picked the guy who spoke to their concerns and naively wrote off the outlandish comments as news-cycle spam. Go back and look at the contested areas in Michigan and Pennsylvania where Trump did well. Or go back and listen to the town hall Bernie Sanders did after the election in West Virginia where Trump performed well-- you can listen directly to what swayed them the most. It wasn't a fear of retribution from progressive tech bosses for non-progressive ideas. It was jobs.
OP is talking about the fact that people did not want to talk about their voting choice, for fear of criticism and being ostracized.
My mom - and almost all of her friends - are also in that group. What was so surprising about her group of friends was that NONE of them talked about who they were going to vote for, prior to the election - EVEN TO EACH OTHER. AFTER the election they were all shocked to find they all felt the same way and almost all had voted for Trump.
Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view.
Progressive culture in the US has become toxic. The sooner people realize this, the better.
> Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view.
You are making that claim where the evidence is people speculating about a case where they decided not to test the veracity of your claim.
Is there any evidence that your Mom and her friends would have been fired for expressing their political views?
I'm asking because here in the South people who voted for Trump a) express their views when I talk to them, and b) then go on about their day. Frustration, contention, and disagreements, and confusion abide but that's largely a function of Trump's high-noise rhetorical strategy and people (esp. older/retired) getting all their news from a single source. (Btw-- what happened to the stereotype of the proud/responsible U.S. working man reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table? Is that just a myth of a bygone era?)
It's not worth the risk. What evidence would you like them to present? When progressive people take it upon themselves to call up the employers of people who they disagree with until those people are let go, the evidence is there, in plain sight.
My mom and her friends do not live in the South. That really should have been your first clue.
About reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table... well, we've spent the last 50 years destroying the family life, time, and perception of our media and journalism that would lead to that behavior, not to mention social media. Why would it survive?
As an outsider to American politics. This is 100% my vision also.
I know a lot of people that have moderate views that are simply shut down by liberals. As a response, they hide and vote for Trump.
I see it as their way to elect someone that is not afraid to go against the accepted view of the elites and therefore going against all that political correctness nonsense.
Firing people for providing criticism of a company's diversity police, while citing science, and letting your friends in media drag the plaintiff through the mud.
Cancelling events and boycotting sponsors because their speaker line up isn't sufficiently in line with imaginary industry demographics. Or even because a blind selection process, the thing people say they want, ends up selecting a wrongthinker.
Bullying comet-chasing scientists into tearful apologies over their choice of shirt. Or a self deprecating joke. That's just in STEM, you see the same in comedy, in politics, etc.
In each instance, a pitchfork wielding mob was summoned with social media outrage by bad faith actors. And get this, they are the ones who also loudly complain about trolls.
The rule to make sense of it is quite easy: when they do it to you, it's just consequences for speech. When it happens to them, it's targeted harassment that makes people feel unsafe and someone needs to step in and ban it.
Sure, you can use science for evil things, like you could use a hammer to hit somebody on the head and a car to run somebody over. The problem here is not hammers and cars. If Damore were challenged on scientific grounds and refuted as such, it'd be fine (tbh, many people did exactly that and stopped there, and they were doing it right). But he was chased out as a heretic, not as someone who wrote scientific paper that was less than solid. He was chased out because him questioning this particular dogma is incompatible with being employed at this place, and because the culture we have now does not allow Google to be perceived as tolerating heretics.
One of the examples is trying to find offense in anything - literally from milk and pumpkin spice lattes to national anthem and math and logic as a basis of science. It's ok to think whether our actions could hurt anybody and adjust accordingly, but when it turns into obsessive offense mining and paranoid banning of anything that could that could be construed as offensive to anybody (usually only by the same people who do the banning, not even by the people that they purport to protect) - for some people it is just too much. It's a difference between reasonable hygiene and OCD when a person washes the hands for 4 hours. The first is great, the second is a debilitating disease. Many people feel the American culture has crossed the boundary into the disease and keeps marching on.
> because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.'
Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.
I think in SV, it is a completely reasonable precaution. If you openly declare you are, say, a communist (I don't mean "support Obamacare", I mean real communist, as in nationalize everything, ban private property, etc.), chances that people would shun you and that hurts you carrier are pretty small. If you say you voted for Trump, chances are higher, and I've heard people say as much pretty much open text.
> I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
I'm not sure this observation has much value. Voting for a candidate that shares your values in a time when those values aren't popular is equivalent to doing so when those values are popular. Either way you're voting for a candidate that shares your values. I'm never going to place a spite-vote for someone who doesn't support my views just because my views are unpopular.
And in any case, I think certain views should be demonized. Expressing disparaging things about gay people (the example from the article) should be viewed with the same revulsion as we would today view the historical opinion that people of color were in some way "better suited" for slavery. The view that some people are somehow "less than" shouldn't be tolerated. The paradox of tolerance is very real.
True but we aren't talking about things at that extreme. We were talking about an unwillingness to talk about your policital candidate, for fear of how "liberals" would treat you.
That should be alot more worrying to people than I think it is.
Leaning in from outside the US, the path forward is obvious.
"Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion.
That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power.
Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing, and that climate change will kill us all if we don't act.
I know this is a joke and I also think American gun laws could need some adjustment.
That said what I've always been told is to start with myself: maybe my "opponents" are dumb.
That doesn't help anything but my ego.
Instead I'd recommend looking into common ground or another way to present my arguments.
I disagree deeply with a good number of you but still I think most of you don’t realize most of the time since I either shut up or at least present my views somewhat carefully in the hope that someone might get some inspiration.
I've also changed my own, long held opinions on certain topics (e.g. drug policy) not because anyone here ridiculed me but because somebody took the time to explain instead of shouting troll, downvoting and flagging.
I wish more people here would opt for that solution.
Yeah, I probably phrased my post overly provocatively but I wasn't trying to be funny, just logical. And thank you for a reasoned and courteous response. My thoughts were:
1) Mass shootings are horrific, and it seems insane that anyone can own an assault rifle with such low barriers, but at the same time, death from gun violence is statistically low compared to, say, auto accidents. If being in favour of stricter gun regulation to save a few tens of thousand of lives (in a country of hundreds of millions) means alienating a huge percentage of the population, then why not let that one slide. Things will be no worse than they are now.
2) Many people (certainly me) would say that abortion is a woman's right but even if abortion is illegal, back street abortions will still take place. They may be in unsanitory and dangerous conditions, and some deaths will result. But again, statistically speaking, that will only impact a small percentage of the population.
3) Climate change however, seems like it presents an existential danger that could wipe us out as a species. Our growth driven economies seem unequipped to deal with this ultimate tragedy of the commons. Statistically, it will kill 100% of us, or severely degrade our grandchildren's lives, unless we somehow get our shit together on a global scale.
To use a crappy analogy, imagine we're all locked inside a giant container with limited air. There's a blocked air vent at the top, which we can only reach of we all stand on each other's shoulders - i.e. cooperate.
In such circumstances, why continue bickering over what music we should play while we wait for suffocation? Surely it would be better to listen to the other guys music, if it got him onside, and allowed us to move away from our tribal stances and work together on some action against the common threat.
While climate change is extremely serious, I don’t think there are any models that show it causing human extinction. The second half of your statement is more accurate to show degradation. But pairing it with extinction makes it harder to see your point through the hyperbole.
If only those gun violence victims knew they were more likely to die in an auto accident, that would totally change things. Are you saying the effects of both should only be taken as death statistics?
The effects of mass shootings isn't just about the amount of people killed. It's about the anxiety it creates nationally or globally. That's basically what makes terrorism so powerful, but it's not as easy to measure those effects and what they can lead to.
Sad that, it seems, any political comment with a spark of humour on here is voted down.
From G.K. Chesterton:
"A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, “If you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects.” I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all.
... The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the pulpits. Or, better still, let him drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men are solemn — more solemn than I am. And even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous — more frivolous than I am. Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can think that paradox and jesting stop the way? It is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own favourite “serious methods;” it is his own favourite “momentousness;” it is his own favourite “judgment” which stops the way everywhere." - from Heretics, 1905
You don't know why Damore was fired and neither does anyone else publicly know. His 'manifesto' is a poorly written rant that leaves holes for people to project their ideology onto, like you are right now. What he wrote was neither progressive nor even conservative, but a naive, meandering diatribe with cherry-picked evidence, all of which would have been water under the bridge if it wasn't blown up by a slow press cycle.
The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.
Neither of these links you provide have to do with Damore's rant, nor are they mentioned in his claims.
Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).
The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.
The first link is an article from Stanford Medicine on the overwhelming evidence for the evolved biological cognitive differences between men and women, how this shapes their interests and average cognitive strengths. It's not a paper, it's a comprehensive review of the research presented to inform the public. Did you even read it?
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...
The second link is about the advantage men have in mechanical reasoning and how it likely contributes to their representation in STEM fields. It's the title of the paper.
Observational correlation != causation. If you had read the articles you'd posted, you see that neither of them claim attributable biological causes to differences in gender behavior and social biases.
From the Stanford article (which is not peer reviewed):
>Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
Yet again, Damore's paper wasn't making the argument that observational biological differences exist, the point of which you've missed because you're eagerly still trying to prove it right now. Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong, and he cherry picked specific data and stretched evidence to falsely support his viewpoint. Which, in context to this thread, is still neither progressive nor conservative and continuing to be proven vague.
> Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong
No, it wasn't. In fact, the exact opposite: he literally says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that ... we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases".
Damore didn't reference your [1] to quote that "women are neurotic", he used it to quote that "greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits".
Your [2] doesn't even cite [1], and in any case, [1] has almost 800 citations, while [2] is only cited by the author herself in her other papers. Seems like a stretch to call [1] "discredited".
[2] is the one of the most recent criticisms of the Big Five method, which is the crux used in [1]. If [2] cited every paper that used the Big Five method incorrectly as biological factor analysis, it would be in the hundreds.
Number of citations is terrible metric to defend a paper because the reason [2] has less citations is because [2] was published 3 years ago, while [1] was published almost a decade ago.
Appeals to popularity are logic fallacies for a reason.
[1] had almost 100 citation in its first 3 years, while [2] still has no citation by anyone else other than its author. If [2] really had discredited an entire field of research, I'd imagine that anyone at all would talk about it even once.
You are bringing up paper which had literally zero impact in 3 years it's been out. Why should I waste time reading it? Clearly, no scientist who has ever read it has found it worth to even mention it. The burden to show that it is relevant is on you.
I really wish Silicon Valley was a place where a man's ideas could be critiqued without the need to attack the man.
You have the base for a really good argument that could sway people who are on the fence about the issue but when you say things like "vagueness of his diatribe" you alienate the people you want to change the most.
Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats, because their party preference is rooted in tribalism rather than in policy, and you'd scare off lots of lefties who don't think the state should be outlawing important medical procedures.
> Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats
That is objectively false - Trump won because white voters in the rust belt swung 25 points from Obama to Trump. If you were right that they voted only Republican out of tribalism then Obama would never have won those states.
Why not? Trump didn't win them by much, but it can still be a big swing if Obama won these states by a lot. A quick google shows that this appears to be the case.
Trump may have won michigan by only 10k votes, but Obama had a margin of half a million in 2012.
Trump used and continues to use racial dog whistles in his speeches and official tweets. It's part of the reason 90-95 percent of African Americans vote for anyone else over a GOP candidate given the opportunity - if you hear it, it's hard to accept anything else from that speaker. Trump got close to the same vote percentages as historical GOP presidential candidates, Trump is not special in that people departed from their normal behavior to vote for him in some large silent wave.
> are you saying this person voted for Trump to "own the libs"?
No, that's not what I said nor is it what I implied. He voted for Trump because, among other reasons, he thought Mrs. Clinton was a terrible candidate and would make a terrible president, and he personally weighed that more heavily than what he knew of Trumps disadvantages.
I don't agree with that assessment, but it is reasonable.
>I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
I read that as "we wouldn't vote for Trump, but did anyways because of how progressives see us". Maybe I misread this.
> I read that as "we wouldn't vote for Trump, but did anyways because of how progressives see us". Maybe I misread this.
Yep. I know a great many people who voted for that reason. They felt marginalized, and their vote was the only way they could strike back - because talking could ruin their lives.
The author says that it's safer to discuss "controversial" ideas in Beijing than America, but I wonder if that's partly because the ideas in question aren't actually controversial in Beijing. Presumably the ideas the author has in mind are those that might be interpreted to impugn certain disadvantaged groups. But if I found it more easy to say "gay people are degenerates" in Beijing, I don't think I would take that as evidence that free speech norms are more robust there--it might just mean that homophobia is the norm.
Yeah, whatever points this article had were completely marred by terrible examples.
Saying it's easier to talk about things in China vs US. I've been to China and you can get thrown in jail for saying the type of things we say re. our political environment. My friends there have to speak in whispers in public while people in SF have no problem raging about our politicians.
And saying we should "allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics". At its least a really poor choice of words there. The choice of words makes it sound like it's okay to stand aside while they spout bigotry. Perhaps he meant it's okay to say it, but we should argue against it - but unfortunately for him that point was not made because the intention of the article was to support free speech. Bad example.
> Yeah, whatever points this article had were completely marred by terrible examples.
The article isn't that complicated. He meant to say exactly what he did say.
Which makes sense, given the entire point of tolerating free speech is that people are free to say terrible things, not "moderately uncomfortable" things.
Executive summary: (1) Open societies are more innovative. (2) Silicon Valley is becoming less tolerant of divergent viewpoints. (3) This is primarily culture-driven, but will likely have an effect on innovative science, which by definition starts as sounding somewhat crazy.
> (2) Silicon Valley is becoming less tolerant of divergent viewpoints.
As measured by what? Are there people being jailed for expressing a divergent opinion, or being refused service in restaurants/hotels/shops/etc, or unable to find employment?
For the latter point, employment, some people are likely to pick one of the few examples that routinely get reused in this discussion - such as Damore + Google, or Eich + Mozilla. But are these kind of things actually happening at an increasing rate? Because I recall similar things happening in the 2000s, and 90s, and I wasn't around before but they likely did too (and go back a few decades earlier, and it'd be saying something like "women can be engineers just like men" or "black people can be doctors just like white people" that'd get you ostracized, so yeah). So unless you have actual data showing that there has been an increase in people getting fired/being denied employment in the past 5-10 years for having divergent viewpoints, there's nothing there.
If your main measure for "less tolerant of divergent viewpoints" is "people being mean to you on Twitter", well yeah, that's part of living in an open society. In fact one could equally argue that people feeling more empowered to call out things they disagree with is the very hallmark of an open society.
Huh? In SF I can walk down the street or go into a restaurant and hear people saying how bad Trump is. In China if someone hears you, they will report you and you will be taken in. How in the world is this the same reaction?
Try explaining to your colleagues at work that the distribution of certain traits is slightly different in different genders and see what happens. In at least one company this didn't go well. The reaction is the same because those in power punish instead of explaining, only the aspect is different. Obviously I much prefer the SF version as at least I'm not in jail and can look for work somewhere else, but the feeling of lost freedom is in there, in many people.
To give another example, imagine if the in a short while the Supreme Court rules that in favor of the CO baker and says that he is not compelled to create a cake for a gay wedding. Would you feel safe expressing support for the decision at a lunch with your team?
A lot of people think you have to watch what you say in China, and they almost always are people who have never been there. There are very specific political things you can't do, but otherwise literally not one gives a shit about you. You can say what you want, and unless you specifically go organize a large group of people and screaming in public something politically sensitive, no one cares. Ideally in a society we don't want those people anyways.
We don’t want organized political activists? Maybe you don’t, but I would say the US, for example, is better off thanks to Rosa Parks, MLK, and those other pesky people that “go organize a large of people and scream in public something politically sensitive.”
> You can say what you want, and unless you specifically go organize a large group of people and screaming in public something politically sensitive
note: screaming includes what we would call "organizing" and "protesting", including simply using online groups to form such protests.
So, yes, you do have to watch what you say. If you criticize the government for corrupt police or a chemical plant explosion that caused unjust deaths, you can expect to be locked up for an unspecified amount of time and forced to sign a confession of wrongdoing.
Heck, even if you're outside of China you have to watch what you say. Book dealers in Hong Kong have been abducted and held indefinitely in China for selling the wrong books. So much for "one country, two systems"
I found that to be the case in Cuba. It actually felt more liberating than a typical American city, in that I could walk down the street alone drinking a beer at night in the middle of the city without fear. However, I also know that, like most totalitarian regimes, they'll allow a good bit of flex until they decide not to anymore, and then the crackdown is swift.
As a tourist that's how you felt, but did you speak to the people who live there? What you'll find is a people scared to criticize their dictatorship government, which is incredibly rich and lives a life of luxury whilst their citizens are very poor.
Yep, I did. In fact, our government-provided tour guide was pretty open about that. I'm sure he felt that he could be open with us because the government largely doesn't care that much about micromanaging the impressions tourists get. So monitoring what he tells us simply is not a high priority. They care about long-term domestic control.
My point was just that for any short amount of time in most totalitarian states, you're unlikely to encounter the arbitrary crackdowns that have a chilling effect on free expression for people who live their permanently.
Care to clarify what do you mean by "Ideally in a society we don't want those people anyways."? Everything happens around you and me are politics. Do you really think a 1984-like PRC is best of the citizen there. I don't think so.
Also, perhaps the authors status in San Francisco means that any comments he makes will be more likely to get attention (and hence criticism) than in China.
In China, the author is a visiting foreign multimillionaire — the type of person whose conversation will be enthusiastically received no matter the content.
I thought it was ironic that earlier today I read an article about China's (by way of private companies) "Social Ranking" score from Wired[1], part of it entails journalist Liu Hu being part of the "Supreme People's Court black list" and the fallout that it entailed.
Seems like a sensible theme to explore but is this data or conjecture? I'd make a similarly anecdotal conjecture that you'd be met with rigorous debate but your social character standing won't be affected by bringing this topic up, nor would it be socially acceptable for your opponent to use ad hominem at any point. This is the theme the author is addressing.
Even Justin Bieber is banned because 'he has engaged in a series of bad behaviours, both in his social life and during a previous performance in China, which caused discontent among the public', and he isn't even politically active or anything. China's public sphere is highly controlled.
I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science.
Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.
Particularly when we start involving healthcare, a "move fast/break things" type approach can be extremely detrimental, for example.
> We need to accept that some of these ideas ... are inherently dangerous.
This line of reasoning leads to censorship. It's the same line of reasoning used by every dictator and demagogue as well as China today. Why? The idea of democracy seems dangerous to a king.
Ideas are not dangerous. Ideas are never dangerous. Ideas acted upon might cause danger or harm, but an idea itself never does, never has, and never will cause harm directly.
Open debate of ideas, or the testing of opposing ideas to find the best among them, is necessary for progress... not only to find and establish new ideas, but to question widely held ideas today in the hopes of finding something better. To have open debate--to find the best ideas--you need to listen to ideas with which you might not agree, or which you might find--if acted upon--dangerous.
Yes, some ideas are inherently dangerous. An idea of atoms splitting leads to an atomic bomb, for instance.
Some substances, tools, machines, etc are also inherently dangerous, and can't be made not to be.
Does this mean that we should never use a saw, light a fire, or discuss [insert a controversial topic here]?
Somehow people came up with protocols to work with inherently dangerous material things that lower the risk of a serious injury to acceptable bounds. I don't see why this would not apply to inherently dangerous ideas.
I'd hazard to say that for the last 2500 years quite a few devices were invented in this space, allowing to think much of the previously unthinkable without turning into ravaging monsters or becoming insane. I suspect that we could just continue using these devices (e.g. "freedom of speech", "critical thinking", separation of author's personality form their ideas, etc), instead of running in terror from "dangerous ideas" while swinging a banhammer.
> Yes, some ideas are inherently dangerous. An idea of atoms splitting leads to an atomic bomb, for instance.
You're missing the parent's point. An idea not being acted upon is not dangerous. The idea of splitting atoms is not dangerous and the atomic bomb is not dangerous: An atomic bomb getting built (the idea being acted upon) is dangerous.
Why are full disclosure policies recommended by security researchers? Why is open source healthy for security in general? Why is "security through obscurity" frowned upon? Because it is important to be able to discuss threats in order to better protect yourself from them.
Burying your head in the sand is just a shitty tactic for dealing with danger. Being able to discuss controversial ideas is extremely important, whether it's to better protect yourself from them (eg. extreme-right ideology) or to independently research facts hidden from you by people who don't have your best interests in mind (eg. north korean censorship).
And let's be honest here, from what I've seen of my (left leaning) twitter feed, Sam is being attacked extremely harshly for his "controversial" post. If people here think that the article is wrong, this is a terrible way to prove it so.
Leave the security community out of it. Your rhetorical questions are not at all settled dogma in the community.
> Why are full disclosure policies recommended by security researchers?
This is still a somewhat controversial issue. Coordinated or "responsible" disclosure appears to be advocated by most security researchers. Meanwhile, the full-disclosure mailing list still exists, but the activity on the list is far lower than it once was.
> Why is open source healthy for security in general?
This is also controversial. Open source software has its fair share in-the-wild 0days. The "many eyes" theory only works if there actually are many friendly eyes, and so far, it seems like that is not true. Nobody does this crap for free.
> Why is "security through obscurity" frowned upon? Because it is important to be able to discuss threats in order to better protect yourself from them.
"Security through obscurity" does not come from the "information must be free" community. The phrase comes from the idea that you should assume that your adversary knows everything about the defenses you have set up.
A gun not being fired is not dangerous. A deadly virus that is contained is not dangerous. Ideas are seeds; action is impossible without them. All you're doing is pushing the responsibility one step further; instead of preventing the spread of ideas we have to prevent their effects. Now instead of dealing with the cause, we have to deal with the symptoms.
A meme like "immigrants are the source of all our problems" is a dangerous idea, because of the actions it can directly cause. Preventing its spread is just good mental hygiene.
Cults are another place where ideas are most certainly dangerous; but this time for the individual. So is any religion/ideology people are willing to die for.
Most ideas are not dangerous. Also, I might be completely wrong; if I lived in Galileo's time, I might be claiming heliocentricity is a dangerous idea.
Beyond what 'scrollaway wrote, I'd add that even granting some degree of danger inherent to an idea, it's only because dangerous is synonymous with powerful, which - in case of science and technology - is usually synonymous with useful.
So the idea of atoms splitting leads to atomic bombs, which - when used on people - are evil, but it also leads to nuclear power plants (and by extension, to fixing current energy problems in an environmentally-friendly way), it leads to new scanning methods in medicine, it leads to improvements in agriculture, etc., and it leads to many similarly powerful spin-off ideas. Hell, it could open up the Solar System for us if people weren't scared shitless of it. Sure we got MAD, and we pointed a lot of nukes at each other, but we survived, and so far we're much better off with the idea of splitting atoms than without it.
And genetic engineering, while opening us up for new kinds of dangers, also has so much more potential than nuclear physics. It has the theoretical capacity of solving most of the problems of humanity, from food supply and environmental damage, to sickness, decay and death. I'd say that the biggest moral hazard here is not pursuing it.
And ultimately, let's not forget that scientific ideas are either good or bad models of the world, and whatever practical danger that comes of it is because of people who go apeshit and exploit achievements of science and technology to further their insanity. So maybe let's focus on restricting the impact of dangerous groups of people. As for the ideas themselves, to quote Eugene T. Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Having an ethical outlook is a great idea. And it's good to criticise ideas you think are unethical.
The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.
> The entire point of the post is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them.
But that wasn't the entire point of the post. The post also didn't like people criticizing life-extending research, when the examples were people criticizing the direction of the research itself.
The post was hazy about what, exactly, it wanted people to stop doing, but it seemed to dislike any criticism.
Whether the "life extension is bad for the environment" argument was a good argument or not, criticism of the ethics of work must be part of free discussion.
The article made the distinction between criticism of an idea and criticism of the person behind the idea. "Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea." It says right there that criticism of an idea is welcome.
Moreover, "heresy" implies that a person becomes heretic - socially despicable - by embracing an idea. This is what the author opposes. And for good reason - embracing the concept of heresy means you're only allowed to think things sanctioned by the current sociopolitical philosophy. And since every society has some amount of batshit insane ideas it believes, allowing for heresy means cutting out the safest / most peaceful way of correcting that insanity.
It's fine to criticise the ethics of the work. Beneficial, in fact. The problem arises when you can't separate the ethics of the work from the ethics of the person doing the work.
When "this is a bad idea, maybe you should stop" becomes "you are a bad person".
It's fine in theory to criticise the ethics of the idea alone, but there can be a limit to that.
If the CEO of a mining company has the "ingenious, un-PC idea" to increase mining profits by lobbying Congress and donating to sympathetic lawmakers to ease EPA regulations so he can dump mercury directly in the river, my ethical argument against the idea is that it damages the environment and the people in the communities, possibly for generations.
If his answer is "I know that, but I value profits more," what is left to discuss about the ethics of the idea? We agree on the facts of the matter.
All that's left is for me to say "I think your moral framework is very different from mine," which is really not that different from my saying "I think you are a bad person."
But can't you see the difference here? There is no argument that dumping mercury in a river is good for society, the environment or anything else. It's only "good" for this companies profits and even the real value there is a question given the impact on most people working there.
But extending human life? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe people will keep having children at the same rate and with no one dying anymore the whole planet is completely full of selfish people who don't care about others of the environment. Maybe only the rich will have access, block everyone else from getting it and control the world by simply out living anyone who is in their way.
But what comparable things do we actually see in history? In every country I'm aware of, once basic survival is taken mostly for granted people stop having kids as quickly and often as they can. In fact these days people often wait so long they depend on science to make birth even possible in their advanced age. And most people have, at most, 2 kids.
Imagine if we lived 10k years. Some people might say "well, lets have our kids right now so we can give up 18 years or so now and then have the rest to ourselves" but I suspect most people would say "what's the rush?". Some would even say "why invest 18+ years to extend my legacy to someone I can't control, can only marginally influence for a decade or two? In 10k years they're bound to solve death all-togher. I'll be my own legacy! And if, after 9,900 years they still haven't done it, I can always reproduce then". Imagine not wondering if there was a Troy, we could just ask the people who lived there. In society, we tend to be safe from some tragedy until most people who lived it are dead then we fall in the same trap again. What if they didn't die?
I say all that to say, it is not remotely obvious that extending human life is in the same category of behavior as dumping mercury in the river to make a few bucks so the consequences should not be the same or even similar.
Sure, life-extension is a nuanced question, but the topic under question is whether we should ever criticize the person presenting an "outside-the-box, maybe un-PC" idea, rather than criticize the idea itself.
My mining company example was much closer to the kinds of ideas that are actually pushed by people in the real world, quite frequently, more so than the article's anecdote about life-extension being criticized.
I'm saying that some people seem to pursue profits in such a way that they clearly have a moral framework that doesn't match mine, and arguing over the ethics of the idea with them is fruitless.
Did whoever it was at Volkswagen who had the bright idea to make cars have a system to detect when they were being tested, and change their emissions accordingly, really need someone to debate with about the ethics of the idea? I don't think that was a case of someone with a simple lack of knowledge of the ethical arguments.
These are the kinds of "innovations" people are coming up with in the real world, more-so than life-extension. People are going to create new apps that allow microloans with Bitcoin, with usurious rates, and market them to poor people. People are going to create dolls that listen to your kids and use the info to market toys to them. People are going to create devices to allow you to monitor your health, and sell the info to drug companies, or even to employers. There are going to be plenty of Bad Ideas where the people peddling them know the ethical arguments against them. At some point, we get to criticize the people coming up with these ideas as well.
On the other hand, people not only drive, but also oppose progress; as a smarter than me person (don't remember who it was) said: Science advances one funeral at a time (it's basically like evolution). If people stop dying (barring accidents), we'll basically stop advancing as well.
Aging eventually impairs the brain. If life extension is possible, it will have to protect pretty much all your organs from aging, and why would the brain be excluded?
Again, you're preseenting assumptions. We don't know that things will still work that way if people lived radically longer. You certainly don't know that well enough to shun people who try to find out.
Fearing damage to your reputation if your ideas are unpopular is literally how society works. Unethical ideas aren't just unethical out of the ether, they usually involve harming someone or some group. Putting those ideas forward should come with risk to yourself because it definitely comes with risks to others.
This is a reasonable point in the abstract, but it doesn't account for the current reality in which "Look, I found a heretic" affords such outsized rewards in karma (or social cachet, or the personal satisfaction of having taken down a baddie, or whatever you want to call it).
Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you would be fired and shunned. Progress, right? The problem is, that power - the power to destroy careers of people who have done something bad - is not being wielded consistently or sparingly. We're aiming it at misogynists and homophobes, and also their defenders, and also people aren't defending them per se but kinda sound like they are if you only read the headline.
(But the point of the essay is not that Brendan Eich and James Damore shouldn't have been fired; it's that the "Brendan Eich and James Damore should be fired" position has caused a chilling effect on open dialogue.)
Nitpicking here, but your example was somewhat ironic, as 50 years ago, Computer were predominantly programmed by women [1] , so the heretical idea would have been to say that men should be programming computers.
"Programmer" was a data entry job that we automated away. They were basically compiling flowcharts that were written by "systems analysts" doing the work we would call programming.
It's like an "EPROM programmer", which is a tool to make the hardware run the software.
In the old days it was thought that only the implementation of an idea could cause harm. The only evidence I've seen presented that the idea itself is harmful rests upon an assumption it will obviously be implemented or you wouldn't be thinking about it. It's aenthema to a free thinker.
It is not clear or obvious that allowing people to live longer is unethical. Resorting inmediately to an ad hominem is not an appropriate form of debate.
No individual has a moral obligation to debate ideas. However if debate is shut down with fallacious arguments it limits the ability for the idea to progress.
If this happens too often then progress will be slowed. That is the point of this post.
But the argument isn't fallacious and it's not an ad hom...
Extending life expectancy will increase human population and harm our environment and that harm to the environment will harm future generations so individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations and that's unethical which makes them unethical. You can disagree with the argument but it's not fallacious.
Regardless ideas need to be discussed divorced from the people presenting them. Medical care is no more or less ethical because Hitler is making the argument.
Yes but this isn't about presenting an argument, the one example given in this blog post is about someone working towards a goal. If that goal is unethical and the person is working towards it we should be able to call them unethical. It's not about whether Hitler is saying medical care is good, it's about whether someone working to exterminate the Jews can be called unethical.
Everyone has done something that caused harm at some point. If that is the bar to declare a person unethical then we all are. In this framework you are right but it makes the label useless.
Most people would require action which creates direct (not second order as in this example) harm of a large magnitude before applying the label to a person.
In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
>Most people would require action which creates direct (not second order as in this example) harm of a large magnitude before applying the label to a person.
That doesn't make any sense. If I directly try to eradicate the Jews I'm immoral, if my actions just have a second or third order effect of eradicating the Jews then I'm not? Most people probably use the direct vs second order distinction when it's themselves who are doing something unethical via second order effects but that's just to save some cognitive dissonance. If I know my actions have second order effects of hurting lots of people and I still do it that's unethical.
>In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
Reality isn't an honest debate, reality is realpolitik. People are likely to be emotionally charged when they're told that it's okay they're being hurt because it's just a second order effect after all. Learn to deal with that emotion and argue against it, not make posts on the internet opining for something which never existed.
> If I directly try to eradicate the Jews I'm immoral, if my actions just have a second or third order effect of eradicating the Jews then I'm not?
This is a common moral principle; it is found in, for instance, the classical Christian doctrine on homicide, where directly willed killing is (leaving aside war and capital punishment) categorically prohibited, but killing (even when it is a certain result, or as nearly so as practically occurs) incidental to some act with a different end is not categorically prohibited, but judged according to the proportionality of the risked harm of the act with the harm it was avoiding. (Self-defense doctrine in American, and some other, law is ultimately strongly influenced by this principle, though it diverges a bit from it.)
First order effects are easily anticipated such that intent can be assumed. Second order effects are not always obvious even to experts in the field and so require debate and consideration. Intent is unlikely in this case without evidence to the contrary.
Of course If your definition of unethical doesn't require intent to harm then this is a meaningless distinction. Another Reason why labels are unhelpful.
>Extending life expectancy will increase human population
[citation needed]
>harm our environment
[citation needed]
>individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations
[citation needed]
We don't know any of those things. You can debate it. Even passionately so, but it's wrong and dangerous to assume your unproven beliefs are facts and label people based on them.
And yet here we're discussing an idea for which you personally believe that someone or some group will be harmed but it is not certain, some of us would say it's not even likely. Some of us would even say it would be a great benefit to society and have the opposite affect you claim.
But because you believe (perhaps even irrationally) that the idea could harm you give yourself, and anyone who thinks as you do, the right to damage people's reputation. History has shown this to be very dangerous behavior.
The criticism quoted wasn't about ethical problems in genetic engineering research. It was about life extension as a goal.
I can imagine a debate about that, but I can't see how it is appropriate to create a toxic environment for life extension advocates.
Apparently these researchers / advocates found the environment so toxic they were motivated to move. Perhaps they were over-reacting but it seems likely something is wrong.
And "move fast / break things" applied to human biology research is entirely an insertion of the commenter, not remotely an implication of Altman's piece.
> We need to accept that some of these ideas are inherently dangerous.
We created atom bombs. Some say AI can destroy humanity (perhaps Sam himself) but here we are, I don’t think you can stop science.. it’s what makes us human.
And to yours, I'd add "for values of 'anymore' smaller than last 30 years", and kindly remind everyone that US military used to spray pathogens on its own, unsuspecting populace, in order to experimentally explore the areas of bioweapons defense and offense.
yeah honestly puzzled why that's so downed since there are still living person whom did that shit, it is not even one generation past and this place is like "we're the supreme moral force of the world! hurr durr"!
I thought yours a very interesting, worthwhile and thought-provoking comment. I'm puzzled why it's voted down. Maybe too succinct. 3^4 words good, 3^2 words baad?
> We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.
ostracizing hypothetical talks is the problem here, not pursuing the unethical goal; just talking about what part of the goal makes it unethical is being shut down (according to the article)
What do you mean by "ethical outlook?" Who doesn't have one? You may not agree with their ethics, but they're there. If you're talking about shared ethics, that's known as morality.
Complex indeed, it's a multidimensional balancing act.
Both technology and ethics can progress and regress across a huge range of concepts. Too much unexamined progress (of either tech or ethics) in one area can lead to terrible outcomes.
Being able to debate and have these conversations is essential to finding the balance.
I'm reading this as complaint about opinions condemning discussion of certain concepts, which is fair. But to ignore that other concepts face the same type of condemnation in China is... amazing.
That's exactly what the blog post wasn't realizing. Throwing out ethics is like throwing out law and order because it inhibits you from doing whatever you'd like to do. Does anyone really think they can stand upright against the winds when the weather turns nasty?
Just like laws, ethics are there for a reason, and the social changes going on are happening for a reason.
It's critical to understand that it's not an intentional simplification. Altman and the rest of the rarified VC-connected people on both coasts are very, very disconnected from what its like to live in the lower or middle classes and especially what it's like to be a part of a systemically marginalized community.
This isn't happening in only SF, or only in tech. It's happening all over, and across the spectrum of ideas.
Is the argument that social media is tearing apart our society correct? I think it goes deeper than that, and that it's tech in general. We've grown impatient with right-swipe, immediate communication (whether through texting or calling on a cell phone; remember when you had to find a phone, or wait until you got to home/work?), immediate gratification. No time or desire to think things through, just react.
The happiest time in the past 25 years was the first half of 2016, when I swore off almost all tech for 7 months, road tripped, and visited with people--strangers--and learned what made them tick. Guess what--not technology. And I was relaxed, happy, free.
Technology isn't the cause of a toxic society, but it definitely is a/the catalyst.
The lack of patience seems right on to me. I get the feeling that a lot of these discussions where people feel afraid to speak their mind are issues where the orthodoxy feels it has resolved the issue and moved on to talking about something new. They're tired of having conversations they see as repetitive. And when someone questions some part of that perceived-resolved issue, there's a lack of patience to, as they see it, go back and discuss it in a rational and level-headed manner and, instead, a it's easier to apply a stigmatized label that connotes that the person is somehow behind the times and move on to talking about the subjects that interest them.
With more patience could come calm and reasoned responses that could help move other people towards a more progressive outlook. But I agree that our society and the somewhat-recent trend towards immediacy of everything in our lives has led to a desire to have the same immediacy in conflict resolution. We don't tolerate as many diverging opinions because they'd take too long to integrate.
The happiest you've been is taking a 7 month road trip vacation? That's not really surprising or novel. Most people feel relaxed, happy and free when they have nothing tying them down (whether or not technology is in the picture).
I still remember my excitement after getting my first iphone (4), and how fast later i realized that my happiness visibly worsened. Now after 25 years working in IT I’m saving money to start a new life in the countryside.
I tremble when some people says we must teach programming to children.
I'm extremely aware of this as someone who is socially conservative in terms of abortion, gay marriage, trans issues, etc (seriously not trying to start a flame war).
It's weird knowing that a large portion of the country has similar values to me, but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable. It doesn't matter that these things have zero impact on my behavior at work; you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms.
From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) gay marriage is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral? I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.
It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
I totally empathize with this perspective. It would never be appropriate for coworkers to criticize (directly or indirectly) your lifestyle, identity, or personal decisions.
With regards to your statement "I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.", in many ways I totally respect that concern.
But I also think it may be symptomatic of how our approach to these topics has become non-constructive. We've too closely tied support for a person with support for everything they do/believe. To my thinking, whether I take you seriously or want to work with you has nothing to do with the aforementioned topics, and entirely with how you behave/execute at work. And if I'm going to undercut you at work because I disagree with your beliefs, the issue isn't that I disagree with you, it's that I'd be willing to undercut anyone I work with.
That's totally fair -- and I appreciate that you're willing to engage seriously about these things!
Your last point is well-taken. It may even be the case these days that the majority of people who hold views similar to yours think the way you do. But I think we need to take into account the uncertainty that people in these situations face. It's hard to know what the other person is thinking -- and if all you know is that person's opinion, it's hard to know what's going on when you're not looking. Bigotry is often dressed up in talk and behavior that seems polite, even respectful at first glance, but that is ultimately materially harmful.
For example, I think a lot of LGBTQ people from religious backgrounds have had an experience of being told that their family or community will "love the sinner, but hate the sin" -- and then subsequently being subjected to unfair and harmful treatment (bullying, psychological abuse, ostracism, being disowned).
This is a really good reminder that there is indeed a tragic past of marginalized groups being treated poorly and receiving harm/violence. And there still is in certain areas, meaning that even though my standpoint may be that "of course I value them as a person", from the recipient's standpoint that cannot be assumed, and indeed it may be safer not to. This is super important to keep in mind, and at times may be worth stating explicitly (if the topic comes up/is appropriate) when talking about this with folks. I can't assume they know I believe this.
> How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral?
Isn't that a restriction you are putting on yourself? As I see it, it is your requirement that someone has to share your point of view, and to get it to be so has to be your cost, not theirs.
Everyone things something someone else is doing or thinking is immoral all the time. It even has the composition problem: I think its immoral to sabotage people because you think its immoral! Thus who is the immoral!
> It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
I agree. There is a price you pay when you have a contrarian view point. You must. However today that is not vocal disagreement, its firing people and exile. Some twitter mob victims have become unemployable. Thats not reasonable to me.
I guess this is a cultural thing. As an irreligious person in a mostly religious country (Turkey), I don't really feel anxious sharing the same workspace or classroom with religious people, unless they are murderous/violent fundamentalists. Apart from that, about every person I encounter have ideas different to mine, also WRT what's moral or not. A vegan might think it's immoral to consume meat, a pious person might think it's immoral to not believe in the one true God, a conservative person might think that fiddling with marriage undermines family values, et cetera, ad infinitum. I eat meat, am irreligious, and support marriage to be something the individuals define for themselves[1]. Should I avoid all the vegans, all the religious, and all the conservative people? Is it practical at all to only coexist with people similar to us? Should we part ways with anybody that disagrees us? Most of my family is somewhat religious Muslims, and some practising Christians, should I just dump them because they think my irreligiousness is immoral and I'm sinning?
Well my answer is no. See, I'm secure of my ideas, and respect people's ideas, and am not reluctant to hear criticism about the way I live my life or what ethical values or philosophical stances I have. And I prefer living among everyone no matter what they think of the way I live. Otherwise it's living in herds. But I should respect that the US society is transforming and maybe it's expectable that these particularly fragile topics like gender issues or racial issues are very hard to discuss. But if people like you are going to avoid anti-marriage-equality people, what you'll end up is going to be segregation and polarisation, which will only alienate you among them and them among you, undermining society and progress. The fact is no matter how logical or correct your opinion is, one has to convince others if the question regards them. Otherwise all the glory, should you win at your cause, is going to be temporary---until the opposers are going to be strong enough to undo what you did. And you end up with a bipartisan vicious cycle.
[1] Actually I beleive that all the marraiges should count as civil unions for the state, and that the persons themselves should define what it means and how it is lived.
I work with vegans who think the fact that I use and consume animal products is immoral. They regularly make smug or passive-aggressive comments. And frankly I don't give a shit, and it doesn't stop us from working together.
But isn’t it simplistic to equate all transphobic people with murderers who commit violence against trans people?
Would you also be scared of working with men because they typically commit homicides more than women?
I think being afraid of your life simply because someone is a bigot who hasn’t exhibited any violent behavior is on you, not the bigot. A small number of bigots are violent and dangerous, that doesn’t mean all are.
But isn’t it simplistic to equate all transphobic people with murderers who commit violence against trans people?
When your life is on the line, it is generally wise to err on the side of caution. If you assume someone openly transphobic is a threat to your life and you are wrong, you are at worst being rude to them. If you assume they aren't a threat to you and are wrong, you may end up dead (or maimed or otherwise egregiously harmed).
With those stakes on the table, the only logical thing to do is to vet people you can trust, not give assholes the benefit of the doubt that maybe they are merely assholes and won't violently assault and/or murder you.
By that reasoning you should avoid everyone right? Because all people have a potential for violence.
The odds of a trans person being murdered by a transphobic person are phenomenally low. I think you need to balance risk vs return. Just like driving a car has costs and risks it may be worth it to get to the grocery store.
No, not really. Most people are not violent without good reason. But if you are gay, trans or in any group that gets targeted for violence by irrational people without any provocation beyond being a member of that group, you need to consider that open verbal hostility is a potential indicator of willingness to harm you in some way.
How grounded is this in data? I think there are two questions that need to be answered. First, it is not a given that everyone is capable of violence. There are some people who will not carry out violence, this is pretty much the vast majority. But it’s hard to predict who can commit violence and who will not. Given this small amount of people who commit violence, what is the probability of people with open verbal hostility who commit violence?
Without answering these two questions it is rather illogical to have your behavior change at all to someone who engages in open verbal hostility.
But you also need to distinguish between verbal hostility that is threatening vs non-threatening (ie, “I really don’t like people of class X.” Vs “I am going to punch people of class X in the face.”)
This also doesn’t account for the people are aren’t gay or trans yet are also targeted by irrational people (eg, Las Vegas victims).
I have had college classes on Intro to Psychology, Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I spent a lot of time in therapy and have done a lot of reading on social subjects and so forth. I was a military wife and history major and I have an AA in Humanities. The one urban planning conference I managed to attend, I went to all the social lectures rather than, say, design stuff.
I probably can't readily produce the kind of data you would like to see and I am sure I don't want to bother. Your remarks make it pretty clear to me that it would be a waste of my time. There would be no convincing you of anything.
I am leaving this remark here primarily for the benefit of other people, plus to give notice that if I don't reply further, it isn't some tacit acknowledgement that you are right. I just don't really want to play this game. That's all.
I will add for clarity's sake that the phrase willing to harm you in some way was carefully chosen. It doesn't assert violent intent. People can do you enormous harm without being violent and it is shockingly common for people to be willing to do some kind of material harm, even if they are disinclined to be violent. Marginalized peoples very much need to be leery of that fact.
While you certainly have a lot of experience and impressive education, I’m not sure how this shows how willing people are to commit violence. Or whether this is a significant probability. Or even an attention worthy probability.
Through your studies have you been able to identify evidence for a range or risk / odds ratio difference of haters to commit violence vs the standard population?
This is certainly hard to quantify, but seems important if it’s going to impact how you interact with people and how you recommend others interact with people.
I’m a bit disturbed that you seem unwilling (or unable) to discuss this and end the thread with “just trust me.” I certainly would like to trust you, but I try to shape my worldview through evidence and defendable evidence.
No, I am not unwilling to discuss this. I just sometimes hit my limit for putting up with being dismissed and treated with contempt on HN for being the wrong kind of nerd.
As I already stated as clearly as I know how, violence is not required to do serious harm to a person. To try to elucidate:
I have a life threatening medical condition and was also homeless for nearly six years. I was quite open about that on HN and other forums. My only goal was to find a means to earn money online as a solution to my situation.
I got a lot of flak from people in forums who wanted me to shut up about my problems because they liked wearing their goodness on their sleeve, we're unwilling to help me in any way and my presence made them uncomfortable. I often could not even get answers to my questions. I was accused of panhandling the internet and my goal of learning to make money online was completely dismissed by many people, making it that much harder to accomplish.
Treating a seriously ill homeless person like their desire to earn a living is not valid is not far from allowing someone to die by standing by and doing for them. You could compare it to denying blacks treatment at a white hospital, which is exactly how the black inventor of blood transfusions died following an accident where he couldn't get the blood he needed because he was the wrong color.
People who are in certain categories can be at significant risk if being egregiously harmed by the actions or inactions of other people, without violence being any part of it. People are shockingly comfortable with such things, which is an underlying principle that keeps things like racism alive.
We can, for example, measure harm to African Americans in terms of both trillions of dollars and in terms of disease and death. Most people don't really want to hear it. Recent articles calling for reparations to Blacks get routinely dismissed as "meh, everyone has been taken advantage of at some point." The idea of reparations has no traction, though the ongoing death toll for African Americans is routinely in the news.
The more eye catching incidents where Blacks get shot and killed by cops is really a very minor portion of the death toll. A much larger portion comes from historical redlining and White NIMBYism, which has forced people of color into neighborhoods with terrible air quality and substandard housing. Respiratory problems have gone up dramatically and the effect of living in neighborhoods with terrible air quality can be measured in dollars, incidence of disease and mortality.
A study in India found that male children receive slightly better care than female children. For example, a sick boy was more likely to be taken to a doctor the same day. A sick girl was more likely to be sent to bed with plans to see a doctor in the morning if she did not improve.
Girls in this study were absolutely not being abused. In most cases, they weren't even really neglected. They just weren't doted on like boys.
The consequences of these small differences in treatment could be measured in terms of mortality. Girls had a measurably higher death rate.
Marginalized people with any kind of survival instinct are wise to give a wide berth to anyone giving voice to open hostility to their kind. Such people can have a great deal of power to help them into the grave without ever lifting a finger to commit violence, sometimes simply by not lifting a finger to help when they need it. Often, the rest of the world will look on and see no wrong doing.
Having been subjected to such treatment as a homeless person, it us both horrifying and deeply psychologically scarring. My fundamental trust in humans has been irreparably harmed. And homelessness is curable. You get off the street, you aren't homeless anymore. But you don't stop being gay, trans, Black etc.
The most charitable interpretation I can find for how others behaved towards me is that they are incredibly ignorant of some things and blind to the serious consequences of their actions and inaction. That was not much comfort at the time it was happening and has done little to help me make my peace with it.
> Marginalized people with any kind of survival instinct are wise to give a wide berth to anyone giving voice to open hostility to their kind. Such people can have a great deal of power to help them into the grave without ever lifting a finger to commit violence, sometimes simply by not lifting a finger to help when they need it.
This makes no sense. Avoiding people whom you perceive as having hostility in their words is not a good strategy for finding a support network. A good strategy to is find people who have demonstrated that they are willing to 'raise a finger' and including them in your life. While there is a negative correlation between those two groups, excluding the former group from your search for the latter will limit your ability to build a strong support network.
That does not fit with my experience. Giving openly hostile people the benefit of the doubt never resulted in me finding hidden allies. It merely wasted a lot of my time and got me actively crapped on.
So let me ask: are you a member of a marginalized group? Because I can't help but wonder at the reasons behind our very different point of views.
A bigot, by what I think is a reasonable definition, is someone whose prejudices are resistant to contrary evidence. If someone is irrational in that way, then it is rational for me not to trust them, especially if their prejudices concern me directly. The fact that everyone, including me, has their own prejudices is not germane.
If someone is angry about something all the time that really (from my POV) shouldn't concern them, it doesn't make them a murderer that should be locked up right now, no, but it could nevertheless reasonably make me wonder if they are dangerous or will "go postal" at some point.
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you feel the same about other groups than bigots? What about people with mental illness? Would you not want to work with a schizophrenic in case they forget to take their meds?
Do you think religious people are irrational? Are you one those people who freak out when a Muslim steps onto the subway? It seems like your line of reasoning would mean you don’t want any Muslims working at your company. That’s pretty messed up.
Comically, thinking that bigots or Muslims might go postal at some point is highly irrational. It’s like worrying about meteor strikes. So since you’re irrational, you might snap. Therefore people with your mindset should avoid working with you?
I'd encourage you to think of this from the perspective of the person who's fearing for their life. It's rational to assume that the likelihood of someone potentially harming you is much higher if they're vocally expressing hatred about your identity.
It the fear is irrational, then it’s really not that wise to try to think from their persective. Since that irrationally might make someone flip. Like those people who self radicalize.
Now, this is quite different if someone is expressing or advocating violence. But some old catholic lady being against gay marriage represents zero threat of violence. Especially if she isn’t vocally expressing the hatred at work, but does something outside of work.
The issue I have is that simply expressing disagreement “I hate class X” is not a threat compared to “I want to cause grevious harm to class X.”
Plus, saying "I believe it is wrong for people to do X" is not the same as saying "I hate people who do X". So a lot of the use of the word "hate" in this discussion is unjustified.
Conservatives who are against say gay marriage aren't necessarily saying they hate gays. There are lots of completely benign reasons why people might believe that gay marriage shouldn't be a thing.
Little late to the discussion so I am not sure this will be seen...
I think I can change two works of your statement and make it a criticism of the Bay Area.
From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) supporting Trump is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral? I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.
It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
The issue I have with this perspective is that it is not applied equally. I do think you should get protection but I think that same protection should be applied to all groups. Next week I could say in front of my team "All Trump supporters are deranged psychopaths." I would get a few odd looks, my manager might tell my privately to tone it down. If I said the same thing about LQBT folk I would guess I have a 50% chance of being fired.
This feels like a double standard to me and makes me question if the people who support diversity and inclusion really mean it or if they only want what they approve.
It's interesting that you'd compare supporting Trump with being LGBTQ, part of a minority or a woman. One is a conscious decision, the other one is part of who one is. You might be a Trump supporter today and a Trump detractor tomorrow, but minorities don't get to change their gender identification, skin color or the reproductive organs they were born with. Trying to compare the two is ludicrous.
The victimization complex Trump supporters seem to have internalized is such a bizarre thing.
>How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral?
So everyone needs to ensure they hold no oppinions you might find offensive or be homeless? It goes both ways: how am I supposed to work with someone who thinks it's ok to ostracize people for personal beliefs?
I agree, we're making the same general point -- it does seem crazy to ask someone to "ensure they hold no offensive opinions". So why, for example, should the opinions of the person who wants to speak their mind about the immorality of gay marriage get precedence over the opinions of the person who thinks they should be allowed to get married?
I agree with that. "Don't go around pissing off co-workers" is a sensible rule. But it's also our responsibility to not look for reasons to be offended. If you ask me about something I'm not going to lie. But I'm not going to shove it in your face either, if I think it might offend.
And it is your right not to work with that person, whether that means you choosing to leave or take internal action depending on circumstances (e.g. threats). However, who is entirely exempt from ostracizing others for their beliefs? For every person there is some universe of beliefs that are seen as such a threat to their reality, principles, or well-being that they will fight those beliefs and their representatives. That universe of beliefs may differ in size or relative merit on the basis of evidence for each person, but it exists.
I work with people like that all the time. I don't give a shit. As long as they aren't doing anything to directly harm me, then let them have their stupid opinion. It's better than the alternative of social oppression, because I'm sure I have some stupid opinions as well.
> but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable.
The situation isn't great right now, I agree. But wild exaggeration doesn't help. It just makes people that you might be able to convince that the situation isn't great dismiss everything you are saying because of that wild exaggeration. Or at least some of those people, there may be an age divide here. But the point is if you want to be maximally persuasive you should avoid wild exaggeration.
I live in a major city in the US. I know two or three quite vocal Trump supporters. Yes, they face social sanctions. Yes, it might affect their career on the margin when it comes time to look at e.g. who to promote or who to lay off. No they aren't unemployed, much less unemployable.
I appreciate the feedback. That wasn't intended to be an exaggeration, that is often how I perceive the situation (look at Brendan Eich), but it is certainly fair to consider whether that perception truly reflects reality.
I think you're missing a key distinction. The problem is not that merely that you hold a political belief-- as you say, this by itself is over-the-top and unreasonable.
The problem rather is that your particular political belief is viewed as being actively hostile towards people themselves or towards their friends or family or others. Voicing opposition towards gay marriage comes across as an attack on all gay people. That's where the reaction comes from.
A political belief that's not treated as openly hostile towards others (for example, supporting charter schools or something) doesn't get this reaction, of course. It's not merely that "you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms"; you're missing the nuance here.
The issue is that with just a little bit of lather, it's possible to construe virtually any controversial opinion as "an attack" on the people that may be affected by it, however tangentially. Nothing in life is free and it is rare that there is a clean "perfect compromise" waiting to be discovered, which means that most trade-offs will have groups that can interpret the activity as hostile, even if their group is totally unaddressed ("Why does group Z get that thing and group Y only gets this thing?").
If we accept this argument that some opinions or positions are unconscionable because they are fundamentally "against" other people, we end up on a slippery slope, and the situation in SF is somewhere on that slope (in my opinion, nowhere near the bottom).
Everyone wants in on the sympathy train and everyone loves shaming and silencing their opponents. We have to be careful to actively protect civil dialogue from such encroachments, because while they may feel sympathetic and nice at the time, that self-righteous reward system gets put on a feedback loop and drowns out everything else.
If we've already seen people getting agitated into conflating arguments over the semantics and technicalities of a dry legal instrument like marriage with their individual right to self-existence and safety, that's proof of this phenomenon in itself.
What I would take away from that notion is that large is relative. A large portion of the country still has fewer people than New York City.
I am of course, not trying to start a flame war either, but my take on it is that those sorts of issues would be inappropriate to bring up at work or in a job interview in the first place, regardless of your position.
Based on your description, I believe I probably espouse the opposite position on those issues, and even though I work at a large tech company in NYC I still don't bring them up at work.
That said, I can totally see where you're coming from. I have a friend who ended up being a pretty staunch Donald Trump supporter, and I watched as a lot of colleagues ostracized him (even though he never really brought it up at work).
It takes hard work to see past issues that divide us. In the case of my friend, I always just try to focus on our shared interests. It's what has kept us friends.
In closing...there are of course different degrees of ideas that people will tolerate, and it may just be that large cities have spoken, and they don't want intolerant people in their ranks.
That's a great point and worth clarifying. I agree that neither side is super appropriate to bring up at work. I'm referring more so to circumstances like your friend who is a Trump supporter.
It also gets murkier nowadays because companies are expected to take stances on social issues, and with certain ones are criticized when they don't.
Companies have always been expected to take stances on social issues. Within living memory, companies in many parts of the country were required by law to segregate their customers by race. In other parts of the country, many companies were expected to do this as well, although it wasn't a legal requirement. Similar things were true for companies' treatment of same-sex couples, unmarried heterosexual couples, single women, and non-Christians.
The main difference I see is that the expected stances are more liberal than they used to be, and the penalties for failing to conform tend to be much less severe.
I don't mind people being socially conservative, you can have whatever opinions you want about how you think people should live their lives or whatnot, and I'm perfectly willing to discuss them with you. I may not understand how you came to hold those views, but that likely goes both ways.
What I'm not OK with, however, is people not respecting other people's rights to have their own views. And that goes from calling them names to refusing to serve them in their business to refusing to offer them the health insurance they want.
Edit: Just to be clear, I agree that merely expressing views should not result in an online inquisition. That people whose views I generally agree with do makes me very uncomfortable, and I agree with Sam Altman that this makes it difficult to have serious discussions.
I've lived in cities on both sides of the political coin and can comfortably say that this is consistent for both liberal-dominant and conservative-dominant cities. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the issues you mention are seen as moral rather than ideological because peoples' values become so deeply rooted once they've spent enough time in like-minded communities (and perhaps some of the issues were really a question of morality to begin with). Beyond that, there's a heightened degree of generalization of "the other" when you're in a homogeneous community - if you support anything that aligns with an opposing political party, people will tend to project other values onto you that are generally associated with that party, regardless of whether or not you've expressed them.
One of things no one talks about: correlations. I have seen several of people lose their careers after become right wing spokespeople. These people work in difficult, ambiguous fields including patent prosecution (IP Law) and network security analysis. The fields are all about considering probable outcomes from ambiguous or untrustworthy data. They weren't pushed from their jobs; they stopped being able to juggle the ideas. Both employer and employee wanted them to leave by the time the left. They never succeeded again.
He is claiming becoming more right wing makes somebody less likely to understand statistics.
Personally I think leftists, rightists and centrists are terrible at grokking stats because the human brain can't handle multifaceted realities very well.
It is possible for instance that all political positions are correct, even the apparently contradictory ones because they are part of the Elephant (the one with the blind men).
Of the places I've lived (not necessarily in order):
- Deep South (18 years - born + raised)
- Boston MA (5 years @ college then job)
- NYC (6+ years)
- Los Angeles (1yr @ startup)
- San Diego (1yr @ startup)
- Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company)
I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never encountered such a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest (where I grew up). Someone literally told me once that "people from the South eat their children" in a half joking tone.
I don't think you can call it "racism" per se, but definitely the most oppressive form of prejudice I've ever encountered, by far, was found among people I worked and came in contact with in the SF Bay Area.
EDIT: Of course, I met (and stayed friends) with really amazing people in SF Bay Area. People with different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes. And the raw intelligence of most people I interacted with - technical and otherwise - is off the charts. But the attitudes I mentioned above were expressed frequently enough to leave an impression on me.
Okay. I grew up in small town Louisiana, across the street from a swamp, where a baby alligator once crawled up into our ditch. Coming to California, and then to San Francisco, felt like shrugging off a weight I'd never realized I'd been carrying. I think what you're experiencing is value mismatch. When the culture won't bend the way you're used to, it can seem as though it's resistant to bending at all. But you yourself admit that the Bay Area accommodates "people different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes". Not that I wouldn't say the same about my birthplace: it's just biased at a different point in the multidimensional space of personality.
> I think what you're experiencing is value mismatch. When the culture won't bend the way you're used to, it can seem as though it's resistant to bending at all.
If I need to match a culture's values in order to have an open discussion, that culture is intolerant.
No one is absolutely tolerant of every other position. The question is to what degree one is willing to tolerate (or more important: accept) other points of view.
While this is a good point, it’s exactly the statement Altman is making. The complaint is that the degree to tolerate is too low and that is harmful to society.
No one is calling for absolute tolerance where Nazi pedophiles and sexually harass people. But perhaps firing the CTO of Mozilla because be donated to Prop 8 is too strict a level of intolerance.
To add to that as someone who grew up in Dallas, Texas, has lived in what many consider the most "liberal" parts of the U.S., and now back in Dallas (Texas forever); The thing I hear the most from people who have moved to Dallas recently or visiting is "Everyone here is so nice".
I hear it all the time. Even work colleges who are in town for business. I heard one say a few weeks ago how nice people are here after somebody waited a little longer holding a door open than what is considered normal.
I guess I've lived here most of my life and it's normal to me. You can literally strike up a conversation without almost anyone random and you won't get a disdained look back.
I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the acceptance of things they thought everyone in the south was against.
> The thing I hear the most from people who have moved to Dallas recently or visiting is "Everyone here is so nice"
I lived in Dallas, it was the only place I've lived where people would yell "faggot" at me on the street. People there aren't that friendly if you look different.
Intolerance based on thoughts you have a choice to verbalize is markedly different than intolerance based on physical/physiological attributes you can't control. Someone having a bad experience because they expressed an unpopular opinion in SF seems bad if you've never been the target of disdain for just existing.
Ive found it's much easier to shrug off discrimination based on my skin color than it is to shrug off discrimination based on my core beliefs.
I'd love to see some research on this - do people who can be discriminated against based upon sexual orientation (which can be hidden) have it a lot easier than people who can be discriminated against based on skin color (which they obviously can't hide)?
I am not white, and indeed, discrimination based on skin color is much easier to shrug off for me, than discrimination based on thoughts or beliefs. I think it's because I equate my identity to my thoughts and beliefs, and not my skin color. This perhaps also comes from stoic philosophy, i.e. I don't bother to think about things I can't control such as my skin color.
I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the acceptance of things they thought everyone in the south was against.
Is the contradiction here intentional self parody?
No, I'm saying there is a difference between Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio and the rest of Texas, like rural east and west Texas.
I think you have to compare apples to apples here. San Fran to Dallas/Houston/etc. You can't compare rural west Texas to San Fran or the rural wine country around SF to Dallas.
I understood what you meant, I was wondering if you noticed that you, as a self-proclaimed open-minded Houstonite, made a broad brush stereotype about "Rural people".
Well, I didn't say it definitively. But I suppose you can say that. But this whole thread is one giant stereotype to begin with, so yeah. From my observation is what I should have said.
Also due to ancient tradition. My general experience is traditional cultures are nicer. Hospitality is usually a sacred value, e.g. Bible's story of Abraham unwittingly being a host to God.
Your point of course stands, but this example may not be ideal. It is a country where the predominant religion follows ideas very closely related to those in the Bible.
I think this is absolutely true, but you'd think the Quakers would have left some wholesomeness in the Northeast as well, right? I would hope that we don't need to depend on religion, hundreds of years later, to instill good values in our children.
I grew up in southern California, and my wife grew up in Columbus, Georgia. We met in the midwest and lived there 15 or so years, and so visited Columbus frequently. For the last 4 months of her dad's life, we lived in Columbus.
We've lived in the SF Bay Area for the past 8 years.
> [SF Bay Area ...] most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture
I think I know what you're getting at, and I don't necessarily disagree out of hand.
I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.
I don't mean this to be a counter to what you're saying, I think it's a different thing.
>I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.
Probably because Columbus GA is 45% black and San Francisco is only 6.4% black. Hard to have black/white tension when one of those groups comprises such a small percent of total population.
But San Francisco is also 33.3% Asian and over 15% Hispanic. The white to non-white percentages are very close between both locations. And while the story of Asian Americans in SF is not the same as Black Americans in the South, it was hardly a picnic for them (for one example, Angel island).
As someone who grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Boston, I'm also familiar with tension, and I remember it being far more racially-defined within the poor communities than elsewhere. Upon moving to nicer areas, however, the tension felt more like rich vs poor, with race (very sadly) often signaling to someone's level of wealth. They also seemed less tension-prone overall, in comparison to the poorer communities.
What I mean to say is that:
1. Tension between races seemed to primarily exist at the poorer levels, and that at the wealthier levels, the tension between classes very much overrode any tension between races.
2. Wealthy communities just seem to be more educated and accepting, as they see the better [1] individuals of all races of people.
I haven't spent too much time in the Bay Area, but would you possibly say that:
1. The wealth inequality in the Bay Area creates enough of a class divide to where the racial divide isn't noticeable?
2. Alternatively, does the racial diversity in the wealthy of the Bay Area remove stigmas that result in racism altogether?
I'd be interested in your thoughts! I'm not aiming to counter either, but just curious.
[1] By 'better,' I don't mean to pass judgment on any people; just that people in worse conditions in life will often be forced or incentivized into worse actions. For example, a child's friend is far less likely to steal their toy or game in a wealthier community than poorer. It's not evil, it's just worse conditions resulting in worse actions.
Outrage culture in the Bay is strong, and it makes many conversations here impossible or uninteresting.
However, I think Sam occupies a rare position that he may be blind to: He is famous and the media is paying attention to what he says. That makes saying interesting things, which require taking risks, more dangerous, because more strangers are listening to him, his comments are more likely to be removed from their context, and reporters seeking clicks will deliberately misconstrue him.
So while I don't think he's wrong, I think his perception of this environment of outrage and right-thinking is exaggerated by his own celebrity. Famous people are forced to be more careful in what they say. That is less true for the rest of us.
as a counterpoint, i have a similar geographical history and felt and saw more raciscm in the south than elsewhere (although to be fair, it wasn't vastly more so).
what you're feeling in that smugness is an exercise of social power on you. my guess is that you're white, which is why you didn't feel racism in the south but did feel the smugness of the "coastal elite" (and why you tie those two things together in your mind).
I want to respond with a bender quote, "this is the worst kind of oppression, the kind against me"
But honestly your comment is so vague I'm unsure exactly what you want to be heard from your words
Can you clarify what kinds of oppression you noticed in SF and the kinds you noticed in other places
When you speak so indistinctly everyone is forced to fill the holes themselves
Those that agree that SF is oppressive will fill those holes with their own aggravating experiences and those that see SF as progressive will read your comment as "I just want to tell my coworkers that their lifestyle is offensive to god but SF is too intolerant of me and my wants"
> self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country
I'm not sure what this has to do with "political correctness." People being jerks isn't the same as demarcating hate speech and saying that it has no place in public discourse.
I think what happens is that someone will propose something that another constituency worries will have violent outcomes for them, and they push back saying "that's unacceptable." Then the first party gets defensive and says that they're being tone policed instead of engaging with the substance of the complaint. For people like me (white men) this can sometimes be the first time when our presuppositions are challenged, or that we're told that we might not be totally objective, rational observers in a chaotic universe and its very very easy to get defensive.
Further, it's important to understand that people who worry about "PC" as a threat to the free exchange of ideas are actively having their rhetoric coopted by others on the far right who are actively trying to move the overton window into a place where they are able to espouse things like racism in public without backlash.
Considering that 50% of the people in the Bay Area are foreign born, and have no experience of the South, I find your comment "a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country" to be hyperbolic. May be you are projecting based upon a few interactions ?
People don't need to have experienced something firsthand in order to have a "self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude" towards it. In fact, they are more likely to be hostile to things they haven't experienced. This seems to be genetically programmed, as it transcends cultures and history.
The man is an elected official in Alabama. Also an idiot and a bigot who think only Christians can be elected to Congress. It's okay to look down on him for being ignorant, but a lot of the comments attack his regional accent. That's not okay.
I think the use of the word "tolerance" here muddies things.
To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course, but there are plenty of places where that distinction is clear.
I don't think political tolerance is inherently virtuous. If a coworker tells me they don't think women are suited for technical work then I don't feel any moral obligation to be "tolerant" of that viewpoint.
> To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course
The gray areas are miles wide in many cases. Tolerance of what people are is fairly easy for most people to agree on, but in some cases what people do and what people are is disagreed upon. That is, to some degree, the crux of the debate about homosexuality still. People disagree on whether it's something people do, or are. At the same time, an older debate under similar grounds (but, ironically with less evidence for it being towards the are end of the spectrum) is religion. Are you a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or do you just practice those religions?
I don't think boiling it down to are and do particularly helps for a lot of the really controversial topics we are currently dealing with.
Except you're conflating a person thinks with what they do. It is still entirely possible for your hypothetical coworker to give a more honest evaluation of a female colleague's tech work than for one who was a women's rights firebrand and perhaps prone to overlook poor female performance because of his or her own biases. You are right to demand impartiality where judgment affects another person's equality. It's unfair however to assume without evidence that someone is incapable of impartiality because of what they think.
I am reminded of an old quote from George Washington:
"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [1]
"Tolerance" has a clear power dynamic. One group allows another group to exist. It is therefore shouldn't be looked at as the ultimate goal of a just society. Instead we should simply ask that people are "good citizens."
Whether your coworker believes women don't make good tech workers should be irrelevant to you. What should matter is whether they are a good employee and whether their views manifest themselves in anyway that hurts anyone else (e.g. they should not be in a position to supervise other employees if they can't prevent their beliefs from harming those employees)
Have you heard this? I have not. I have heard people make the case that there are very minor biological differences between men and women, and seen them get tainted with the brush of holding a far different view.
Honestly - in my experience, they are not. I didn't know anything about SF before I moved there. No one around me in the South ever talked about it. Now that I go back home and I mention I lived in SF I may hear people say something along the lines of "wow they are really liberal out there aren't they?". Nothing along the lines of the vitriol I hear in the Bay Area.
People in the south don't think about San Francisco at all. Only the Fox News anchors based in New York but charged with representing the politics of the south care about San Francisco.
This is not true. I live in the South (Nashville) and I've heard (and overheard) multiple disparaging comments about people from the coasts. It's not like they're obsessed, but they talk about NY and CA as much as NY and CA talked about the South when I lived in both places.
As recently as two nights ago I helped entertain some startup founders from SF who were genuinely suprised that Houston (the 4th largest, soon 3rd largest city in the US) wasn't just a few strip malls.
Houston is always surprising to people who've never been there (and was surprising to me when I first moved there as a 19-year-old kid). It's among the friendliest places I've ever lived. And, for all its horrible traffic, the drivers are among the most polite I've seen, as well (though they drive terrifyingly fast on average). It's one of the biggest/best cities that nobody's ever heard of or thought about. Great music, arts, and food, on par with the best cities in the US, as well.
As an aside, there was a study many years ago about the friendliest cities, and New York and Houston were at the top of the list; both were considered surprising by the authors, I guess based on reputation. While the deep south was way down the list well into the "unfriendly" category, which also seemed surprising to the authors given the reputation for "southern hospitality", but I'm from the deep south and I wasn't surprised, at all. The deep south is, by and large, insular and mistrustful of outsiders, except in a few larger cities. Poverty makes for higher crime, as well (one of the tests of "friendliness" included leaving a wallet in public places and seeing whether it made it back to its owner with cash intact...in NYC and Houston it almost always did, in some other places, not so much), and the south is pretty poor on average.
But, Houston is not a "southern" city. It is an international city with a huge amount of people who've moved there from other states and countries. It doesn't feel southern, though it does feel like other big Texas cities to some degree. I don't really consider Texas the south, though small-town Texas kinda looks like small-town Georgia or whatever. But, also, small-town California is kinda like small-town Texas...lots of cow towns, oil towns, and farm towns, just like Texas. And, tends to be Republican-leaning, just like small-town Texas.
One follow-on to your final paragraph: the thing is that small-town Texas (depending on the area) does look a lot different from Georgia.
It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport).
In some ways (if you look up the statistics above) rural Texas most resembles rural California.
I agree with you; rural Texas is more like western rural cities than the deep south, including California. I pretty much always argue that Texas is not part of "the south", and often get ranted at because Texas is so far south...it's as southern as you can get in the US, but I think its character is just so different from SC, NC, GA, AL, etc. that it doesn't make sense to group them in most conversations.
Honestly, as a native of (urban) NC, I felt like TX was very similar when I visited. And the few Texans I went to school with didn't seem to feel too out of place in NC either. We've both got nice people, growing and diverse cities, a solid college education system, and super religious people everywhere just to keep you on your toes... Really the biggest differences I could tell was that TX got hotter and you have crazy long stretches of road with nothing at all on them (which is indeed a uniquely western thing).
But I think the whole concept of "deep south" vs the "new south" is where you see the differences come into play. Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, and many other NC areas, are great, diverse places that have far more in common with Dallas/Austin/Houston than with whatever the stereotypical image of "the south" is that most folks have in their heads. So in other words, I think TX is just as southern as NC is, and that isn't necessarily anything to be ashamed of.
I would expect you to get ranted at because of its alignment with the Confederacy in the Civil War, which otherwise pretty much defines "the South" as a geographic term in common usage. South = Confederate states, North = Union states, West = a few physically separate states and various non-state territories at the time. At least with the North and the South, less so with the West, these groupings lasted long after the end of the civil war due to the effects of reconstruction and cultural identity related to the outcome of the war.
San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco.
Why are you associating those douchebags with the south? Newt I get, but aren't the rest of them in NYC?
The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.
I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.
Roy Moore and Newt Gingrich are about as South as South gets and they definitely campaigned against San Francisco values. Newt Gingrich essentially defined the modern Republican Party's approach to campaigning and governing.
First, Roy Moore lost. It wasn't a resounding loss, but he did lose.
Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.
The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.
But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.
The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.
But I feel like you're blaming the victims. It was actually people like Rupert Murdoch who set up the whole "our culture is being destroyed by PC run amok" thing, and they did it to gin up ratings for Fox News and to gain power.
We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.
Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.
Fox News dates to 1996. Newt Gingrich (Atlanta suburbs) was already Speaker by then and had been recruiting and training candidates on his methods for close to a decade. He started as a pro-environment wonk Republican back bencher but saw this perfection of Nixon's Southern Strategy as his only path to power.
It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.
Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your intent and is definitely not all your responsibility—it's just that things predictably happen this way, given such initial conditions.
Most of the comments here are about culture war and missing the more interesting point of the essay. We knew political tribalism was getting bad in SF. But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.
These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.
Another very important point was missed here. The smartest people can have the absolute weirdest political beliefs. They are the least likely to conform. And the most likely to not shut up about their weird ideas even when the consequences are obvious.
Are life extension and genetic engineering really becoming a victim of this? Or is this just a mostly inconsequential reaction by people who have noticed that wealthy Silicon Valley technologists love to talk about improving humanity but mostly end up producing products which make life easier for wealthy Silicon Valley technologists?
I believe that it is a reality that people die through the side affects of political hegemony.
I used to be a Jehovah's Witness and am familiar with those outside the religion criticizing it because it frequently occurs that their children die due to the refusal of blood transfusions.
However I now think there is a similar type of ignorance which has stemmed out of politically correct thought.
I believe biracial children are more likely to die due to the side affects of ignoring racial topics in our society. Here is how: biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.
I have never seen this discussed before but it seems self evident to me. In order for a Congolese-Belorussian (a real family I know) child to obtain a bone marrow match it must be sought out way in advance of the illness, if a match can be found at all that is.
Since few if any people are aware of the rarity of matches for biracial people it must mean a lot of them die, there just isn't enough time to source the match in time.
Of course there are failure modes for rightist thought also. Were biracial couples illegal I don't think that would be a step forward. Still the failures of our current order linger in my mind and I believe that a slightly more right wing policy with respect to biracial couples (activating searches for organ/marrow matches in advance) would save lives.
Some people here may suggest that this isn't right wing, it is merely common sense or logical. Sure, but as Sam Altman's blog post suggests, sometimes good ideas are quelled if they could potentially interfere with political heuristics.
>biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.
Sure, but the vast majority of people will never need this in their lifetime. I doubt this alone would make a noticeable dent in life expectancy statistics. (Also we are within a few decades of being able to clone organs anyway.)
On the other hand biracial people are believed to have stronger immune systems and potentially other characteristics ("heterosis").
>But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.
You don't think there are any political ramifications to the possibility of dividing the world into new categories of "haves" (life-extended and genetically-modified) and "have nots"?
There could be, but this is exactly why politics is toxic. People start to bicker about who gets what piece of a pie before it's even baked, and they're willing to kill each other and destroy the oven over that, even though without that pie, everyone will starve.
But it's clear who will have access to these technologies once they exist -- those who can pay the most. Access to such technologies will probably also give the user better economic outcomes, so there's a very legitimate fear that such technologies will significantly widen the already wide chasm separating rich from poor.
The kind of argument you're making only stands to benefit those who will get access to these technologies by default (i.e., the rich).
I'm not rich and yet I'm making the argument, because it seems to me that a) life-improving inventions that can scale eventually scale to everyone, even if initially they were limited to the well-off, and b) (and this may be controversial) all in all, still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.
>still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.
But that's already the case. There are people right now who will live longer than others because they have access to better healthcare.[1] Why should it be strictly better (addressing only your point b) for the situation to change from "people with an average lifespan plus people who live 10 years longer" to "people with the same average lifespan plus people who live 20 years longer"?
Or in other words, is longevity some sort of unalloyed good? Is arithemtic the only tool needed to judge the merits of life extension? Another comment asked us to consider what would happen if Einstein were still alive; maybe there are some other people whose continued existence would not have been a net benefit to humanity?
[1]Yes, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, people on welfare have access to some healthcare, but after going from a premium employer-paid insurance plan to what's available under my state's Medicaid expansion, I can guarantee that the former has a higher standard of care.
To me it's all contingent on whether your brain is healthy, functioning properly, ideally at an optimum. People who talk of Life Extension say that improving 'healthspan' and lifespan are connected.
Probably society needs a range of brain ages to function, or has done until now at least. That said there is no possible utility to people getting degenerative brain disease, I don't see the point of keeping the vehicle if the driver is dead.
Also consider the tasks a person does in life. A blue collar man dies much younger than rich woman, I think 20-30+ years. Some of that may be avoidable through better healthcare or technology or simply unavoidable because of genetics but it's also hard to imagine intense physical labour doesn't affect your metabolism in such a way that it ends your life sooner.
As a blue collar worker I'm becoming aware of this drawback..!
On the other side I know workers who've worked physically demanding jobs who are in their 90s and are still trotting about, have full head of dark hair.
This could be wrong, I am not a biological scientist.
I suspect in practice this is a non-issue, a kind of fake argument we like to make because it sounds right.
I think genetic improvements don't give massive improvements in a single healthy individual, that kind of technology is science fiction and would require many iterations of experimental use over many generations. So boosts of +20 or +200 IQ points or +20 or +200 attractiveness points is off the table.
What we have the power to do is reduce incident of genetic disease and very modestly improve outcomes for more healthy functioning brains.
This levels the playing field between the rich and poor because the rich hit the optimum for genetic improvement very fast (having already a lion's share of genetic advantages to start with), then they must experience diminishing returns for their money. It is likely that most common genetic improvements are also the most widely spread about in the population, the opposite of your vision.
Now having foolishly stuck my neck out I shall ask Gwern whether I am full of it. ;-)
> These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.
That's just like, your opinion man.
If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare)
These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.
If someone's feelings are hurt because there is a backlash against their technoscientism, that's on no one else but them.
>If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare)
Why not? People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.
But this is beside the point. These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.
>People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.
Which doesn't really matter unless you have a time machine that can send them back 50 years. At least, none of the poor people I've known (including myself) have ever said "I can't afford to give my children better opportunities, let alone leave them something in my will, but hey! at least they'll have nifty pocket computers!"
Sorry, I just don't see the world in terms of "anything that makes one person better off, necessarily makes someone worse off." That kind of world view is toxic to progress. It completely flies in the face of everything we've achieved in the last 2 centuries.
> These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.
Agreed. But wait, is anyone actually getting ostracized now for having different opinions? Has Sam Altman been refused service somewhere, or denied employment, or suffered any consequence for holding the opinions he does, besides maybe being called a dick on Twitter?
Because this all seems to me like rich people getting their panties in a bunch because they don’t like being called dicks on Twitter.
People in this very thread are saying anyone who works on such technologies are inherently unethical people. Do you not see how this kind of labelling is dangerous and distructive to debate?
No. Given the technologies we're talking about, what the parent wrote in those two quoted sentences is literally as close to stating an obvious fact as possible when discussing future technology.
> These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.
Discourse and criticism? Fine. But first, understanding. And some basic math.
The way I see most of those objections look, some people would literally prefer everyone to keep dying over the possibility that they won't be the first to receive a life extension serum. It's one of the most selfish beliefs I've ever encountered.
It's not necessarily selfish. One argument I've heard against life extension is that if it is only - or even deferentially - available to the upper stratum, the power of compound interest will allow them to accumulate and hold even greater proportions of social and economic resources (esp. zero-sum resources like status and power). Others caution that social structures will become more resistant to change if those with the most social capital are also the longest-lived. Most people really do care about status relative to their contemporaries-not just absolute status - and how it affects their agency. And then there are environmentalists who have ecological worries, and others with different specific but impersonal concerns.
Death is a great redistributor for all forms of capital - social, economic, and organic.
I can think of counter-arguments to these points, but they do not necessarily stem from selfishness,merely different preferences.
Yeah, you summed up perfectly one of the main counter arguments.
If the richer you are, the healthier and smarter you can make your babies, and the healthier and the smarter your babies, the more access to jobs/education/etc they get, it’s not much comfort that poor people will be somewhat better off than they were 50 years prior as the inequality gaps keep getting wider and wider.
70 years later, our society is still very much suffering the consequences of things like real estate redlining, which heavily discriminated against black people in the US. Thinking that things like targeted gene therapy and radical life extension couldn’t be harmful in the same way is either pure ignorance or delusion.
> Given the technologies we're talking about, what the parent wrote in those two quoted sentences is literally as close to stating an obvious fact as possible when discussing future technology.
Yeah uh, it’s statements like these that make people so angry at Silicon Valley nerds who think they’ve got it all figured it out and that anyone who disagrees with them are beneath them.
These things aren’t facts, they’re statements that are very much up for debate and discussion. If you can’t even see that, maybe try signing up for an intro course to philosophy at your local community college or something.
(Oh and a little tip for you: angrily repeating that something is an obvious truth over and over doesn’t make it so, surprisingly enough)
I have no idea what this article was about. As someone who grew up in India, lived extensively in Europe and Arizona before settling down in the Bay Area, and travel to China 2-3 times a year, I find Bay Area by far to be the most open, tolerant, accepting places I have ever lived. And it is not even comparable. And it is borne out by simple stats. People vote with their feet. Bay Area is almost a majority minority area, with equal representations of white folks, south asians, east asians, hispanics (although smaller African American population). This is not a coincidence. This is because people here are naturally accepting of other cultures, view points etc.
And comparing this to Beijing is laughable. When I travel to China, my life is put on hold as you cannot access Gmail, Facebook, Whatsapp and myriad of other mundane websites. I dare not write anything negative about the Chinese government when I am there.
India is also becoming intolerant by the day, where even the though of eating beef can lead of mob lynching or ending up in jail. Even benign things such as a Bollywood movie (Padmavati) is in trouble for imagined cultural threats.
I have lived extensively in Netherlands and Denmark. I love those countries as they are progressive in many ways. Except for the acceptance of a brown man. I don't hold any grudge, it is what it is and it is difficult for such a small country to be open about cultural integration.
I have found Bay Area to be an open community, where no matter you background you just seamlessly integrate. You go to work without thinking how you have to tweak your accent or deep dive in cultural norms to progress through corporate hierarchy (I have done that a lot as a consultant). All it matters is your work and output.
Sure, we have yet to figure out how to approach "tolerance of intolerance", but it will evolve over time and we will arrive at a sweet spot. Many countries have taken a extreme free speech stance on "tolerance of intolerance" - for example, UK allowed one Egyptian preacher to openly preach hatred and violence from the streets of London. Is that a good thing for society ? I am not so convinced.
In America, you can criticize the government but cannot talk at all about controversial social issues. Many Americans abide by the rule: "do not talk about politics and religion among polite company." I've known people who have legitimately ended friendships over political opinions. Such a thing is almost unheard of in China.
In China, you cannot criticize the government but you can talk all day about social issues, and you will actually hear a diverse range of different opinions on hot-button issues. I've heard all sorts of wacky and very interesting opinions, many of which have forced me to think deeply about my beliefs, when talking with people in Beijing.
You can certainly talk about controversial social issues in America, you just have to be prepared for people to not like you.
I think you may be running into another facet of American culture and misinterpreting interactions through that lens. In America, you pick your tribe. If you don't like someone, don't hang out with them! Friendships tend to come and go based on your circumstances of the moment, and if they fade away, it's no big deal, you'll make new friends. While in China (and many other places in the world), you're born into a tribe, and people will make significant compromises to their individual happiness to maintain relationships. Many Asian families exhibit behavior that borders on child abuse by American standards and would result in a kid cutting that parent out of their life, while such a thing is basically unheard of in Chinese culture.
I've got one Chinese parent and my wife is full Taiwanese-American. This was an uncomfortable cultural difference for both of us to learn, and we still sometimes feel the loss of that social web. But American society makes more sense when you view relationships through the lens of "people only maintain them while it is mutually beneficial and fulfilling for both parties, and if one person doesn't feel like the relationship is worth it they'll end it, and so your actions better bring joy and fulfillment to those around you."
So then you get fired, and get another job. Or found a company that ends up dominating the company you got fired from, as the heads of IBM, Apple, and Pixar all did.
American business culture is the same as social culture: association is voluntary, and once either party no longer finds it worthwhile, bye. The flip side of that is that there's relatively little judgment attached to being fired. Future employers may ask a few extra questions to try to determine whether the factors that got you fired from your last job are likely to impact your performance in the next one, but if it really is a matter of cultural mismatch (like a difference in political opinions would be), then you can basically be sure that there is some company out there that doesn't care.
You're absolutely right that the Bay Area offers more freedom than India or China in terms of safely espousing your views. In our lack of government-imposed restrictions, however, we've come to restrict ourselves as a society, and many believe that we've taken these restrictions too far.
America has progressed through openness to ideological diversity, and through healthily engaging in debate. We're lucky that those who have created/promoted controversial technologies and ideas have been able to so legally, but what is it worth if they're never engaged with? What is all of our ethnic diversity worth if everyone, full of unique perspectives, is forced to tiptoe around most subjects?
It's great to have freedom of speech, but its societal value is substantially diminished when we aren't willing to communicate with the people it protects.
> UK allowed one Egyptian preacher to openly preach hatred and violence
As a side note, our freedom of speech in the US is more hard-wired and extensive than that of the UK, and even we don't allow speech that directly incites violence.
No, not true. The Bay Area is ideologically safer in only two regards: you can criticize the city, and you can criticize the government. If you have personal beliefs that are even a tiny bit different from orthodoxy, Beijing is a far safer place.
Really ? Do you openly discuss LGBT rights in Beijing ? What about rights of Uighur folks in China ? Do you discuss that in Beijing ? What about Tibetian rights ? Is that discussed ?
Yes. You can talk to people in Beijing, especially college students, about these issues and more. One of my friends is an ethnic minority in China and talked about these issues with Han Chinese folk with no negative consequences. Many young people in China are also ready to talk about LGBT issues. There is no problem.
As long as you don't try to subvert the government or anything, you can talk about it.
Yeah. That's precisely the idea behind "freedom of speech", that even if you're restricted in doing a lot of things, the restrictions on talking about is as little as possible.
Talking about it influences opinions, and when critical mass is reached, even autocratic governments sometimes are forced to abide by the consensus of their people.
Noone's claiming that China is a better or more progressive country btw, just that in this very specific regard, US is worse than China.
I used to live in Frederiksberg, which is practically Copenhagen. I loved Denmark, but as with most European countries, there is a specific definition of what "Dane" means. Foreigners will always be an outsider(vastly different than living in the Bay Area). I also sensed some discomfort with "white collar" brown folks. As most of Danish interactions with brown people is limited to Doner Kebab restaurants and Afghani run grocery stores. There were very few non-white white collar workers. I also faced outright racial hostility, but thankfully those instances were very few. If you are considering a move to Denmark, think about this is an European moving to India and China. It is like expat living as chances of integrating to a Danish society will be minimal.
I'm with you on this. I've been living in the US for three years and literally never faced any racism of any sort. I went to vacation in Amsterdam and some shit faced kid decided to harass me cause I'm Indian within two days of being there. Anecdotal, but yeah.
While in SF / SV, can you feel the general air of the ideas acceptable here? A small experiment: take an idea which obviously contradicts that air, and imagine rationally discussing it with people who you typically meet in SF. Will it be more than slightly uncomfortable?
I have in fact had many rational discussions with people I disagree with in SF. Around guns, libertarianism, and unlimited freedom on the right and huge taxes on the rich, free healthcare for all, and socialism on the left.
This isn't that hard! The trick is you have to start with an open mind and try to understand where they're coming from. That's true in every place in the US - you aren't going to convince people of your "truth" 99.5% of the time, you're only going to understand their truth.
However! Expecting everyone to want an open discussion or even to hear about your pet controversial topic will make your life hard no matter where you go unless people are pretty close to you politically.
While on HN, you can feel the general air of acceptable ideas.
Sam Altman is not concerned that a leftist can't have a sane discussion on this website. But he IS concerned that a bigoted racist can't be openly bigoted at work.
Weird. I wonder why it is that Sam Altman is so concerned about the rights of bigots to be openly bigoted? Definitely couldn't be related to his relationship with Peter Thiel. No way...
> Definitely couldn't be related to his relationship with Peter Thiel
You might have the arrow of causality reversed there. Also, please don't lash out personally. It's true that public figures are just cartoon characters in most people's minds, and you don't owe any better to cartoon characters, but you do owe better to this community if you're commenting here.
I don't see left agenda oppressed on HN. E.g. posts about universal basic income, allegedly a rather left-wing policy, appear here often, are highly upvoted and, to my mind, discussed in a quite civil manner.
It's always easier to assume that your argument is being dismissed because the other side is ignorant or intolerant. As dang points out in a sibling comment to yours, it seems to be universal.
I've found most of HN willing to dive fairly deep on any topic as long as you remain respectful and don't present your self unwilling to actually reconsider your opinion. The problem is that all too often, assholes don't realize that how much an asshole they are comes across very clearly in how they present themselves or their ideas, and many people don't like interacting with assholes. The other problem is that we're all assholes sometimes.
>I don't see left agenda oppressed on HN. E.g. posts about universal basic income, allegedly a rather left-wing policy, appear here often, are highly upvoted and, to my mind, discussed in a quite civil manner.
And further, I've noticed that even the most anodyne comments here that express even slightly right-of-center views get heavily downvoted.
It sounds like sama just discovered that sacred cows are different in different locations. The experience of discussing whether women are are predisposed to avoid tech careers, or the problems associated with ethnic minorities, as a wealthy American speaking with Chinese startup leaders and other expats is probably different from that of speaking to a US audience. I suspect part of the reason is that the wider US audience is more likely to include ethnic minorities, politically active gay people, and ambitious women in tech[1]. I doubt a discussion of Chinese sacred cows would be as open - in fact, I doubt most westerners without expat experience could even detect the absence of many locally controversial topics from the discussion.
PC stifling of speech often gets laid at the feet of politics and academia, but the hyperbolic increase in thought-policing really seems to be a tech-related phenomenon intersecting with corporate priorities. There are a lot of people outside of tech and SF who are willing to discuss hard topics as long as everyone is willing to have skin in the game.
[1]although I acknowledge that there are a lot of women in Chinese tech and that the social dynamic is different, and suspect that they are more receptive to the idea of sex differences in occupational preferences.
I don't live in SF. I live in the Bay Area suburbs. SF represents about 1/7th of Bay Area's population. I was referring to overall Bay Area. Although SF is freaking awesome too
California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember.
Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
This is a pretty good point. People complain about Californian culture being too sensitive but choose to stay there. If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway.
NYC has plenty of tech talent to work with. Altman is not staying in SV because he can't afford to move. He's staying in the area because he actually prefers working with the people he's complaining about.
Well that, and he runs a company whose value proposition is very explicitly tied to SV being the best place to start a startup, so it would be kind of awkward if he moved.
"Can we do it without moving to where you are?
Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them come to YC events in person."
Their stated reason is more about dealing with people face to face, and less about SV. It also sounds like they only tried it once, which probably isn't a big enough sample size considering that most startups aren't successful in the first place. It sounds like they never gave places other than SV a fair shake.
Agreed on the face-to-face point, but YC also used to have very strongly worded language on the FAQ that said, essentially, that setting your startup on the path to success meant moving to SV, due to the strong network effects. I can't find it now (probably because they've updated it) but it pretty closely tracked the language in this PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
You just classified a statement that includes "probably" as absolutist. Perhaps you should reexamine it and consider whether your own context is causing you to interpret it slightly differently than intended.
And yet I don't think it's clearly inflammatory. Again, perhaps what you are interpreting as clearly inflammatory was meant to express something other than that.
Of course, this could all be cleared up if you actually explained what you thought was so horrible about the original comment. So far you've called it "absolutist" and "clearly inflammatory" but not actually explained why you think so. Obviously, at least one person disagrees, so perhaps backing up your statements with your reasoning would help.
I'm cool with it being considered inflammatory to oversensitive Californians. Their reaction is exactly why people in the other 49 states don't like California. You can't remotely criticize CA at all, it's a wonderful magical land where everything and every person is better than everywhere else. They'll take offense even when they don't meet the profile that the criticism was intended for, just because it might offend someone else in CA.
Yes, I believe that statement. There are two things that being located in SV gets you:
1. Ability to hire elite programmers that are a few percent better than those in NYC. You'll pay for that quality though. Plus the cannon fodder programmers that you'll hire if you get big cost more in SV for the same quality as NYC.
2. VC money that is a bit easier to get for tech startups compared to NYC.
Your business is not robust if it would be successful if you hired a 99th percentile programmer and had $5mm in investment in SV, but it would fail with a 95th percentile programmer and had $3mm in investment in NYC. People that don't think they could make their idea work in NYC aren't confident in their idea and just playing entrepreneur.
Exactly why I moved to NYC after 10 years in the Mission.
It’s an elegant way to avoid dominant cliques, tribalism, etc. of which I already had my fill. No one can truly own or define the Culture or the Right Way to live in New York, it’s simply too big and too diverse for that.
But your work for hire laws suck. Do something on the side while you have a main job, and guess what. By default your current employer owns the code that you wrote!
A competent lawyer can fix this if your NY-based employer attempts to put such language in your employment agreement. Speaking from experience several times over.
If there is no such language in your employment agreement, that is the default arrangement.
I'm not going to bother having to get a lawyer to fix something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place. In California it isn't a problem. I'm firmly convinced that this fact is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is in California and not New York.
Silicon Valley is in California because of historical reasons related to a) US defense R&D spending following WWII and b) the 60's counterculture, not because of differences in each respective state's employment law.
IANAL, but declining to hire a lawyer out of principle because you think that certain aspects of a given state's employment law "shouldn't be a problem in the first place" is really dumb.
Whatever the history, startups are fragile. Were California law different, it would definitely have a chilling effect on startups.
As for hiring a lawyer, most of the people who really need to know this don't know up front that they should negotiate such terms. And most employees, including me, don't really want to start off a new job haggling over the contract. It really doesn't make a good first impression.
> And most employees, including me, don't really want to start off a new job haggling over the contract. It really doesn't make a good first impression.
Important to note that this is not true. If you, say, have a side project and want to ensure that it remains your property after you join the company, and that you can keep working on it and keep having it belong exclusively to you, having a lawyer review the draft contract a potential employer sends with your offer is not going to piss off anyone you would ever want to work for.
Companies that hire quality engineers are used to potential employees having lawyers, and do not get ruffled when those lawyers do their jobs. If they do, it's a major red flag.
I completely agree, but when I was walking to the train station this morning with a 25F blast of wind going straight through my coat I was actually thinking how great CA would be. :)
I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced. I don't mean this as a criticism of liberals or liberalism specifically here, since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers to.
Maybe I'm old and grumpy, but things seem pretty crazy these days on campuses.
When I entered university in 1989, there was an extremely controversial professor at my school [1]. There was outrage accompanied with generally peaceful protests.
How it was handled at my school back then was that they organized a live TV debate with someone to argue the side against the professor's position.
In other words, we the students (and the public for that matter) were treated like adults and we were expected to be able to hear and process ideas we may not agree with without overreacting or having our heads explode. IIRC, the whole notion of going to university, among other things, was to further develop our critical thinking skills. That seems to be hard to do in an echo chamber.
It's interesting that the word "liberal" has morphed so much in America to mean the opposite of its original meaning.
Liberalism is rooted in liberty and freedom, and yet here we are in 2017 discussing how non-"liberal" ideas cannot be freely expressed in the most "liberal" cities.
I say we stop calling these people liberal, because they're anything but.
In what world are these opinions not voiced? I don't think this argument stands up to empirical scrutiny -- there's an incredibly robust network of vocally conservative student organizations.
When the list started it was fairly evenly distributed between right and left leaning speakers being disinvited. Now it's much more commonly right leaning speakers.
That's about speakers being disinvited from campus, not views not being represented. There are a number of problems with that analysis:
1. Several speakers are overrepresented (I see a bunch of Milo invitations), which could well just reflect their aggressiveness at getting themselves invited / the strength of their own PR team. If one political side wants to make persecution their thing, they'll show up more commonly in that database.
2. In recent years, we've had a bunch of new forums for dissemination of ideas, which is a good thing. Twitter didn't exist in 2002. YouTube didn't exist in 2002. Podcasts didn't exist in 2002. Smartphones in people's pockets didn't exist in 2002. Today, anyone who wants to know what any of these speakers' opinions are can find out, easily, what they are, without needing them invited to campus. (And anyone who doesn't will just skip the talk anyway.)
3. In Milo's case specifically, he wanted to out a bunch of undocumented students on-stage. That I think doesn't fit the profile of political views being censored. (I agree that preventing him from speaking technically counts as censorship, but it's a very different discussion.)
4. Fundamentally, this list and the original article here both suffer from a blind belief in the "Great Man" theory. If person X doesn't express an opinion, or publicize their idea, or something, chances are absurdly high that someone else will have the same opinion or idea, too. If Newton were imprisoned for his alchemy, however unjust that might have been for Newton as a person, Leibniz would still have invented calculus. What I'd like to see is if certain types of ideas are being censored, not whether certain individuals who happen to hold those ideas are being censored.
It's true that some speakers are over-represented, but I don't think that changes the trend substantially. I also don't see how you can draw a distinction between disinviting speakers and censoring the ideas they came to talk about.
And yes, there are new forums for dissemination of ideas, but that doesn't mean they are equally open to all ideas. Some things you can't write without being shouted down. This is distinct from criticism of the idea. These are personal attacks on the person who voiced the idea in the first place.
I don't understand your last point. There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc. I don't see how you can take an objective look at university culture and say anything otherwise.
> I also don't see how you can draw a distinction between disinviting speakers and censoring the ideas they came to talk about.
Milo is perhaps the best example here: Milo comes to campuses to cause a spectacle, not to spread new ideas. Sure, he's talking about some ideas. But that's not his primary motivation.
Milo is not an academic. Would he be happy with letting some academic go in his stead and present his same ideas in the form of an academic lecture?
> There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc.
Do you have any evidence for this?
(Note that you can't talk about things like variations in IQ across races as if they existed more strongly than they actually do or mean something they don't, and expect to be taken seriously. But that's not universities censoring dissident politics, that's universities expecting basic scientific literacy instead of people pushing a political agenda in the guise of science. The concept of IQ is an idea that came from the academy and has been refined by the academy; using an old understanding of IQ and what it means is essentially an abandonment of science.)
Interesting, attempts to disinvite more left leaning speakers in 2017: 4
Attempts to disinvite more right leaning speakers in 2017: 24
At least on YouTube it does seems like there are more attempts to prevent conservative ideas from being voiced on campuses by rowdy demonstrations that interrupt speakers.
I believe this evidence is consistent with my point that a robust (and perhaps growing!) network of campus conservatism exists.
Specifically, this evidence could be explained by an increasing rate of conservatism on campuses. The rate of disinvitation could be the same, it's just that there's a greater number of conservative speaker invitations going out from a greater number of conservative students. And right leaning speakers are disproportionately invited by right-leaning student organizations.
If the US Academic reaction to such a straight forward request was so hostile, then I can imagine many people feeling unable to voice actually difficult opinions
This was in no way a hostile response. The operative sentence from the complaint is "I find the use of the term as the catchy title of an academic conference with no bearing on their situation unfortunate and write to encourage the conference’s organizers to change its name."
"Unfortunate." "Encourage the conference's organizers to change its name."
I'm a researcher. I'm also unusually thin-skinned. Compared to the naked brutality that is the peer review process, that's nothing.
Is your concern that people shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about trivia? I'm afraid academia's definitely guilty of that. Or that you disagree with the complaint? Perfectly fair, but then so did lots of the other people on the list. Or is it something else? I'm finding it hard to parse.
> I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced.
This does not seem to match the reality at university campuses - only the caricature by people who find it politically expedient to be seen as persecuted.
Just off the top of my head in the last year or so:
Social scientist Charles Murray was censored then physically assaulted at Middlebury because he wrote a book about the correlation between intelligence and success [https://youtu.be/a6EASuhefeI?t=19m25s]
Biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College had himself and his family physically threatened because he refused to participate in a protest that asked all white people to leave campus for a day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk]
A professor at Diablo Valley College smashed a dude with a bike lock just because he was on the different side of the political spectrum as he was. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug34vogS3Fw]
Everything that Jordan Peterson had to go through at University of Toronto because he publicly opposed a draconian bill to forces professors to use specific pronouns when referring to students [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG71YrB_Nw]
Lindsay Shepard at Laurier University had to face a star chamber from a 'diversity committee' because she showed a video clip of Jordan Peterson in class [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4&t=1m18s]
Please see my other reply in this thread about censoring people vs. censoring ideas. The only one on this list that's somewhat convincing is the Laurier one, since that was in the course of an academic class. Milo isn't an academic. A professor beating someone with a bike lock might be inappropriate and criminal but isn't about academic discourse unless the other person is a professor, and it seems this person was a former professor, anyway. Jordan Peterson himself has been able to spread his ideas far and wide via his YouTube channel, which as far as I know is not censored on any campus network. etc.
Not necessarily - they're being censored because of their refusal to engage with the scientific community and insistence on presenting their views as scientific when they're not (e.g., Murray) or because their purpose is antics and not ideas (e.g., Yiannopoulos). Both of those are things that a university should disinvite speakers for.
I went to my sisters graduation at Northwestern where Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker. I don't see a difference between the antics of Colbert and Yiannapoulos other than what tribe they represent. One is a keynote graduation speaker, one has riots that prevent them from speaking on campus.
To be honest, I don't think I can defend inviting Stephen Colbert, either. (Especially if he's in character.)
However, commencement speeches do not have a high reputation for academic rigor to start with, so I think inviting an entertainer to speak at one is sort of different from inviting a speaker with some specific experience (either academic, or political/industrial/etc.) to give a lecture.
All that said, keep that Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley. That's the sort of thing I mean by "antics." I don't think Stephen Colbert does anything of the sort. His partisanship and his satirical character mean that I have trouble saying that anything of value will be lost if he stops being invited to speak at college campuses, but he seems qualitatively different from Yiannopoulos.
The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the speakers that they've found to present it, even sympathy for someone who got obviously crushed by their opponent. When I was a debater I've seen some truly outrageous motions get passed simply because one side was funnier.
I understand. I was responding to comment that said its totally baseless caricature.
I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account?
Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?
Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself.
(And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results that are useful. Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.)
If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1 of being chosen. So it's statistically maximally valid. We (political scientists) tend to squint a bit and say the opportunity to vote is equivalent to actually voting, so non-voting doesn't harm the legitimacy of elections. I don't personally buy that, but it's a tricky problem to fix.
Because I, for one, didn't know it was happening and therefore could not participate. My chance of having my opinion count was zero. So pretty much by definition the poll is not representative of the universe of people-who-include-me. And by induction of all the other people who had no chance to participate.
There's a single democracy. There's no shortage of random polling websites. Telling me "You are ruled by this person, who was selected in a process you knew about since childhood" is one thing; telling me "This is likely true because people on this website you've never heard of say it's true" is another.
(And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't publicly announced are in fact illegitmate and widely recognized as such.)
I claimed a thing was true. You said that the results of a debate disagree with me. Either you meant that my position was likely to be untrue as a result, and in turn the position advocated by the "winner" of the debate was likely true, or you didn't mean anything relevant at all. Which is it?
At the meta level this is a symptom of the fact that the polarization of our culture is extremely deep. We are polarized on epistemology, metaphysics, and what it means to be human, with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology and a mutable model of human nature and the right favoring revelatory or traditionalist epistemology and an immutable model of human nature.
The latter is true of the secular right as well. Just substitute "evolution" and "history" for God and mystical revelation. The secular right believes that human inborn characteristics are immutable and culture is a product of evolutionary processes that cannot or should not be rationally understood or modified. All the Neo-racists and HBD types are basically evolutionary-historical conservatives or reactionaries who see inequality as a revealed result of a process that is beyond human understanding.
It's getting to the point that it is not even possible for the two sides to communicate because they do not agree on language, logic, or basic rules of discourse. The left and the right are cognitively inhabiting different universes.
Humans subjectively experience extreme cognitive dissonance as actual discomfort. I think this explains the intolerance. People are emotionally reacting to the level of cognitive dissonance this divide generates as if ideas from the opposing side are physical attacks. I agree that the right is no different. Go into one of their bubbles and voice liberal ideas and you'll get the same reaction Milo gets on a Berkeley college campus.
Those things are part of the reaction I describe. The right is also creating its own enclaves.
I would not be surprised to see the United States physically fragment and balkanize in the next 10-20 years. I get the sense that some on the hard-right and possibly also the hard-left have that as a goal.
'More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.'
That's toxic? First, sounds very straw-man. Second, okay, someone said they think something's unethical. Maybe it is? Maybe they have a point they didn't articulate well? Maybe they're straight-up wrong! If you're arguing for free speech, then you're arguing in favor of people being vocally critical of ideas you hold dear. Hiding under the pillow fort of "California is so intolerant" makes it seem like what you're actually complaining about is people disagreeing with you.
Yeah, I think this gets to my core objection to the essay. It presents as being in favour of free speech, yet also implicitly says that anyone questioning progress (in more or less any form) is dangerous.
The idea that you should be able to say or do whatever you want and also be shielded from criticism of those ideas is silly. Especially when you're some of the most rich and powerful people in the 21st century. No-one is stopping you from doing anything, they're just questioning you about it. If you can't (or don't want to) answer those questions then maybe you should consider why that is.
But look at the form of the statement quoted. To paraphrase, 'I disagree with this idea, therefore any proponent of it is a bad person'.
The underlying assumption (or one of many) is that all perspectives have moral judgements attached, and the offended party is the sole arbiter of that judgement.
In other words, it's one thing to question progress, it's another thing to say 'I disagree with this form of progress, therefore the person working towards it is evil'. Judge action all you want, but assume good intent absent concrete evidence to the contrary.
- Harming the environment is ethically wrong. (this is elided)
- Therefore, Extending human lifespans is ethically wrong.
This is muddy thinking and takes a great leap when it ignores the ethical _benefits_ of extending human lifespans, but I don't think it is indefensible.
No, the issue is not that extending human lifespans is ethically wrong (it may or may not be, but that's an opinion about research.) It's claiming that people working on such research are unethical people.
A very basic part about good-faith discussions is to discuss the topic at hand and not the people having the discussion.
Huh, I don't see the difference really here. If extending human lifespans is wrong (I think you and I agree that's not the point we want to argue), then doesn't that mean working to extend human lifespans is ethically wrong?
I think the conclusion of your line of argument is that you can never say a particular person is unethical. I don't think I like that consequence - it absolves anyone of guilt for anything.
In an extreme case, how about this: "Stealing thing is wrong. Therefore, thieves are unethical people." Seems clearly reasonable to me.
Saying "you are unethical for doing this research" is very different from saying "I think there are serious problems with extending human life". One is a legitimate criticism and is vital to public debate. The other is name calling.
Sure. But does it really matter? Are we that sensitive?
I mean, the essay makes the argument that allowing disparagement of gay people might be a necessary in order to allow the investigation of novel physics (which, wtf) - why not also make the argument that being called unethical might be a necessary cost to allow the investigation of life extension?
Is the idea worth perusing? Then you can probably stand to be called a name or two. Especially when you're also proposing allowing whole groups of people to be disparaged in the name of progress.
It does matter if you want to actually talk about it. If you're just interested in making yourself feel better by calling other people names, then maybe not. But it's very basic human psychology to be less inclined to hear people out and take their concerns seriously if they call you names, and it certainly doesn't signal to me that it's worth my time explaining my position to you.
> Then you can probably stand to be called a name or two. Especially when you're also proposing allowing whole groups of people to be disparaged in the name of progress.
I don't really know what to make of your interpretation of Altman's statement. He was making the point that if a physicist has homophobic views, we should not dismiss their contributions to physics for that reason alone. Put another way, we should be tolerant of people, but not necessarily of their views.
> Sure. But does it really matter? Are we that sensitive?
Sensitivity isn't the issue: it's that calling someone names for reasons that are entirely speculative (and longer lifespan == ecological catastrophe is definitely that) is the domain of at least two other groups: grade-school children and the alt-right.
Remember that Altman is most likely paraphrasing his interpretation of a hypothetical person or class of people responding to the idea. So parsing Altman's quote too deeply might not be useful. It's entirely possible no one ever actually said those words.
People tend to "tune" the details of a story to fit their argument. Especially when they feel aggrieved.
Also, the comment assumes a certain supremacy of science (or physics) over social concerns which everyone might not agree with. Physics is wonderful. But as far as improving people's lives, decrying and eliminating homophobia might also be a very important thing to do. So to say "I'm willing to sacrifice the well-being of gay people so physics can progress..." Not everyone may agree that the exchange is worth it. And that's valid.
Sure. How about voicing the controversial opinion that private citizens should have a right to free speech without being fired (as in, believing that free speech should apply to more than just the government).
IE, free speech, applied to private companies, as the controversial opinion that a person is getting fired for.
A company has to continue to employ you no matter what dumb things you say at work?
(Also, no place worth working for will fire you for saying “private citizens should have the right to free speech without being fired.” What is the controversial opinion you’re actually worried about expressing at work? That Windows Mobile is making a huge comeback? That pina colada Oreos are tasty?)
Apparently, free speech is so controversial, that people like you believe that a person who supports free speech must obviously hold some sort of deep dark evil opinion.
The fact that you automatically assume some nefarious motive, proves that supporting free speech is indeed a controversial opinion to hold, and that it is rational to be worried about being persecuted for believing in it.
I think the title of the essay actually begs the question a bit. The Galileo quote ("Eppur si muove") refers to an incident where the objective facts were on the side of the persecuted speaker. Here the author discusses a clash of opinion: depending on the criteria used to assess its outcomes, or how the technology is developed or implemented, radical life extension work could indeed turn out to be unethical - we don't have access to the relevant priors of the discussants. It's possible that utterances like this give people an impression of unexamined or unearned certainty to which they react negatively.
There is a difference between thoughtful disagreement and treating the speaker as an outcast. We should engage and attack ideas based on merits.
One of my favorite ideas here recently is a "steel man" argument. It's putting the best version of an opposing argument forward before explaining why it's wrong.
This charity to the people behind the ideas is missing when you're looking for a soundbite or worse looking to banish to an out group.
I remember being in argentina a couple of years back and seeing the "Political correctness" pro-trump slogan and thinking how dumb that sounded.
Moved back to SF, and there is a HUGE difference of what it was for me 5 years ago. The people I know are way more cautious and the people I don't are even more afraid.
The Damore essay is still one of the unspeakables. I know I fear getting fired if i publicly said i agreed with it, even though i never read it or did anything of the sort. That to me is a ridiculous state of things.
The difference with Argentina is that Damore would have been told to make a constructive argument backed by actual science, rather than be hailed or STFU. Instead, in the US people were hailing him as a martyr of PC culture and telling everyone that they should "respect all points of view" (no matter how flawed or ignorant they are.)
Argentine culture has it's advantages, but "tolerance to new ideas" is not one of them. I should know, I grew up there.
Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. That's probably why it got so much attention. The original had a bunch of links and graphs and plots. But the version most people read was published by some newspaper that stripped all that stuff out (and titled it an "anti-diversity screed" just to show how unbiased they were.)
>they should "respect all points of view" (no matter how flawed or ignorant they are.)
Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant. Democracy sort of works because we tolerate each other anyway. When political polarization increases too much, bad things happen.
> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies.
Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced his preexisting beliefs, which is kind of the opposite of science.
It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
> That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
> Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech.
This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.)
If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.)
I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
You've done a bait and switch on me. I'm talking about personality types. Maybe you can argue that women are less likely to be e.g. introverts, because of culture. But that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that.
And that was basically Damore's argument. You have personality types like INTP being vastly overrepresented among programmers, yet 4 times less common among women. You have the same percentage of young girls interested in computer science at a young age as work in the tech industry. You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
> ... that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that...
So what you are saying is that:
a) We don't know if this is a cultural issue or not
b) So the tech industry shouldn't do anything about it
Huh?
> You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
There's definite proof to the contrary: certain cultures (like Soviet Russia, for example) had a much bigger female representation in STEM fields than others [1]. Heck, even Mexico today has a higher representation of females in CS degrees than the US [2]
How do you explain that if "it's definitely not culture"???
I'm saying the disparity is due to personality difference. Which, even if cultural, can't be changed by the tech industry. I find it very implausible that the differences are cultural at any level. And many possible cultural explanations have been ruled out.
Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests. And so statistical differences in interests start to matter.
> And many possible cultural explanations have been ruled out.
You say this, but quote absolutely no science to back it up. Maybe this is just an intuitive perception that you have, rather than a fact? I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
> Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests.
So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role? Unless you use the word 'culture' in a very narrow definition that only includes things such as food, drinks and folk dances.
Communist countries, especially Russia, made a big deal about erasing gender inequality (they saw gender roles as another form of oppression.) That's the main reason why Russia had such a high participation of women in STEM, it wasn't because "parents would force them because they were poor."
I'm all for having a conversation about this, but are you willing to take new evidence and process it, rather than keep pushing your intuitive notion?
>You say this, but quote absolutely no science to back it up.
Yes I do, and I've been over some of it with you in this thread.
>I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
>So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role?
In poor countries, yes. How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth? I had trouble finding statistics, the only stat I could find is this:
>In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%.
Which is about the ratio of women in STEM in the West.
> Yes I do, and I've been over some of it with you in this thread.
I looked for all your comments with your name in my history. Not a single one of them links to anything.
> What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
You haven't addressed it, though. You claim it's based on economic growth, yet cite no evidence. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary: the UK has a bigger (and more advanced) economy than India, and a bigger participation of women in STEM. The same goes for Norway vs. US. In fact, Latin America has a much higher participation when compared with, say, Asia for comparable economic growth.
Even if we take the US in isolation, your claim doesn't hold up: we have grown at a relatively steady pace for the past few decades and more women participate on STEM fields today that they did in the 80s and 90s. If "economic growth" was the one driving factor, you'd see the exact opposite.
Again, are you sure you are putting enough effort into validating your statements? Here are two sets of statistics you might want to consider [1][2]
> How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth?
Russia has gone through a huge amount of "Westernization" since the Berlin Wall came down, so trying to make the case that economic growth or cultural shift are 100% to account for the changes is a fool's errand.
> In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%
What makes you think that patent filings of all things represents industry participation? You have to be careful, you could easily conclude there are no males younger than 24 in a given industry if you used patents filed as your only data source. I think the links I posted above, in particular [2] are a better reference.
Your hypothesis doesn't explain the data any better than mine. Would you really predict the Arab states, with their incredibly progressive views on feminism, to have higher percentage of female researchers? It really isn't weird to you that Russia, in just 20 years, went back to the same levels of everyone else after all the "progress" they made? Cultures don't change that quickly.
The statistics are nearly useless anyway because of how differently they are measured. Women are much more represented in "soft sciences" like biology. But in math etc, the percentage has been pretty consistent. Math majors show a huge increase in women. But when you dig into it, it turns out that they are going into it to become math teachers. And the actual percentage of female Math researchers is the lowest of all of STEM. And pretty consistent through time. And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
>gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are
‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men.
Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-
inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolution-
ary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear
to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
d=1.18 is one of the largest effect sizes I've seen in a social science. It means something like 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average woman.
> Your hypothesis doesn't explain the data any better than mine.
My "hypothesis" is that without trying to eliminate the cultural factors, we'll never be able to actually measure how strongly the alleged biological factors affect behavior. So no, my hypothesis doesn't explain anything, because it doesn't try to.
> And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
Our academic scientific culture is barely 200 years old. Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women". Our current cultural system is thousands of years old, yet you expect that the last 100 years of science to have fixed all disparities accrued over millennia. Doesn't sound very realistic.
> Why is it so implausible to you that it's biology?
Why is it implausible to you that it is culture, when there are reams of data showing that different cultures perform differently? You are cherrypicking data that supports your thesis and completely ignoring everything else. Why?
Notice that even the paper you link is hedging when making the claim: "In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences." But you, somehow, are 100% sure. Weird. Makes me think you have an agenda first, and look for evidence to back it up second, just like Damore did.
Before I go any further, just answer this one question. Is there literally any conceivable evidence that could convince you that you are wrong? That there are biological differences between men and women?
This is a basic scientific question. It has nothing to do with politics. You accuse me of "having an agenda" just because I disagree with you. You accuse damore of being "alt right" and defend his firing, just because he believes a relatively uncontroversial scientific claim. You accuse me of "cherrypicking data" when I've done nothing of the sort. Yet apparently cherrypicking a few random countries with different stats to support your bizarre culture theory is fine. But as I've shown your model doesn't make any sense of the data either, which apparently isn't a problem for you.
What even is your theory? Yeah, it's "culture", sure. But what predictions does that make? How can it be disproved?
If I show, for example, that there's the same percentage of female computer science graduates as female tech workers, does that disprove it? Does your theory predict that? "But the sexism is happening before the industry then." Ok.
So what about the same percentage of female high schoolers interested in computer science as female computer science majors. Does your theory predict that? "The sexism is happening before then."
Well we can go back to middle school. Hell let's go back to early childhood, and we find boys and girls show strong preferences for different kinds of toys. That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
But that's far from the only evidence. Does your model predict neurological differences between male and female brains? That doesn't make any sense if all differences must be explained by culture.
>Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women"
Exactly! 160 years ago women were excluded from many areas. There were no women doctors, few women at universities, no women lawyers, etc.
Now, in 2017, we've reversed all that. There are more women getting university educations than men! They make up 51% of law students, 50% of medical students, 75% of psychology majors, etc, etc. And yet in engineering they make up 20%. And it's been that way, consistently, for decades. And shows no signs of changing even as culture continues to change.
Think about this. It makes no sense to your theory. Why should culture change so quickly for every other area but engineering.
(And also why the double standard of caring so much about gender ratios in engineering, and not any other area like psychology or university in general?)
> Is there literally any conceivable evidence that could convince you that you are wrong?
Oh, for sure, if it was proven beyond reasonable doubt culture is not a factor in decision making.
> That there are biological differences between men and women?
This is not what I am arguing. There's a huge difference between "there are differences between men and women" and "they comprehensibly explain the current gender ratio in the Tech industry".
> That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
Not really, because for the fifth time: my "theory" (call it: my anti-theory) is we don't know the extent of how potential gender differences might affect career selection, as long as we have a culture that has embedded strong gender identities even before the first career decision is made. Even if you think girls should play with toy ovens while boys play with toy guns, you can just discount the effect such boxing will have long term.
----
For the rest of your post, let me draw an analogy:
Let's say that we are working out of the same office. At some point you are trying to load a website (say, Hacker News) and it doesn't load. You ask me if I know what might be going on:
Me: "Yeah, the WiFi has been terrible today, we called the management company to come and fix it".
You after trying to ping google.com, and getting about 50% packet loss: "I know what it is, it's the database they use to store the articles, it's broken and that's why Hacker News won't load".
Me: "Wait, but the internet is really bad"
You: "Yeah, but there's some connectivity, so it must be the database"
Me: "Have you tried pinging the host?"
You: "No, but I pinged google.com"
Me: "Have you tried loading google.com?"
You: "No, because I know it's the database"
Me: "But... how? Nobody else can't connect to anything because the internet sucks. Even if the internet worked perfectly, there's a bunch of other stuff besides the database that could be broken."
You: "Is there any piece of evidence that will convince you it's the database? Why are you so against it being the database? I know it's the database!"
That's pretty much the conversation we've been having over the last few days. If a coworker of yours did that, you'd think twice before asking for their next time you have to debug something, wouldn't you?
Weird analogy. But from my point of view you are the guy screaming about the database. Replace "database" with "culture". You can't even consider the possibility it's not the database. No amount of tests or other possible explanations seem to have any effect on you.
You latch on to one tiny scrap of evidence that might point to a database issue. Say, the Russian site had a slightly better packet loss. And they have a different server over there, or something.
Then you make it political. And start ranting about how I'm a "database heretic" that should be fired for daring to question the database theory.
The Damore case has nothing to do with the validity of the science. If the scientific interpretation had been perfectly reasonable there would still be a flip-out and would have also been fired.
Damore was fired not because his science was flawed, but because he made himself essentially impossible to work with. Would you be "scared" if someone refuses to take a shower for months on end and a company decides to fire them?
I disagree entirely and vehemently to what you are saying.
> he made himself essentially impossible to work with
Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him.
But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him?
He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
> But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him?
I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you?
Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination?
> He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself.
Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
> I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you?
I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it.
Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility?
> Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
> Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility?
Someone being actively nasty towards women in his team just because they are women will most likely get fired, so that's a self-limiting problem.
> He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
What timeline? There's only one timeline:
1) He releases a "manifesto" expressing his opinion
2) Someone reads the manifesto, is disgusted and a controversy ensues
3) Media picks up on the controversy
4) Google is forced into a really shitty position by being asked a bunch of times what they are going to do
5) Damore gets fired
6) Damore goes to "men's rights advocate" Stefan Molyneaux podcast and wears his "Goolag" shirt. He does a bit of media, tweets out some really ambiguous tweets.
As I explained to conanbatt, the problem is that he put himself in a position of being perceived as biased against women. Even if 90% of the company agreed with him - even if the CEO agreed with him - any Legal department would recommend firing him, rather than have to deal with the liability.
I propose a mental exercise: let's say that Damore had written a similar "manifesto" but instead of concluding that "women are not that interested in engineering" he concluded "black people are not that interested in engineering". Would you see a problem with that? Do you think that might create some friction with fellow engineers of color?
You're not convincing me when your argument is literally "it doesn't matter if he's right, it's illegal to talk about it."
Which isn't true anyway. As I said, his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capable or should be treated any differently.
> "it doesn't matter if he's right, it's illegal to talk about it."
I never said it was illegal. I said it was stupid to do it at work. There's a lot of things that while not illegal, are stupid to do at work and will get you fired.
> his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capable or should be treated any differently.
His opinions demonstrated that he holds biases against women and minorities, and he thinks the company is doing the wrong thing by hiring more of both. Whether those biases are justified by his "science" (they aren't) or not, is neither here nor there, he's a walking legal landmine. On that basis alone, it would be perfectly justified to fire him.
Now, should he be able to express his opinions? Sure! Talk to your friends at a bar. Find people you think are like-minded and discuss this. Better yet: find people you know to hold the opposite opinion and discuss it with them. Don't fucking spread something company-wide and then complain when you get fired.
It's a double standard. Feminists with far more extreme beliefs can talk about their opinions at work. Not only that, but actually have them become official policy. Even policies that intentionally discriminate against men, which is insane.
But if you dare to object to it... Against policies that are actually sexist and actually relevant to your work. Make an actual scientific case for your side. Then somehow you are an evil sexist that wants to discriminate against minorities.
> Feminists with far more extreme beliefs can talk about their opinions at work.
Please give examples.
> Even policies that intentionally discriminate against men, which is insane.
Again, provide examples. I hear this argument a lot "poor men are being discriminated by women!!!" and yet I have to see a single shred of evidence of this. Again, for context, I'm a male working in the tech field and I have worked at Google.
Do you personally feel that a field where 80% of the workforce is male (vs a 50/50 split in overall demographics) is "actively discriminating against hiring males? I find that argument very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
> Then somehow you are an evil sexist that wants to discriminate against minorities.
What exactly do you propose was Damore's original intent?
Read page 6 of Damore's memo. He gives a number of very serious examples.
>Do you personally feel that a field where 80% of the workforce is male (vs a 50/50 split in overall demographics) is "actively discriminating against hiring males? I find that argument very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
What are you not understanding here? If 20% of qualified applicants are female, but 30% of new hires are female, you must be discriminating against men. A 50/50 split would require severe discrimination. Damore suggested they were lowering hiring standards and setting arbitrary quotas. I find this very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
> What are you not understanding here? If 20% of qualified applicants are female, but 30% of new hires are female, you must be discriminating against men.
Thing is, you don't have these numbers. And you are making them up, to push your narrative. Which is another massive flaw on Damore's argument: he's trying to solve a problem he doesn't even know exists.
> Damore suggested they were lowering hiring standards and setting arbitrary quotas.
Damore suggested based on assumptions. I find that very, very, VERY difficult to defend.
Those - as far as I understand - don't exist at Google. I interviewed tons of candidates there. I was never told to benefit this person or the next because they were of a particular gender or ethnic background. In fact, there was mandatory training on how to not fall for your own biases.
> Women-only lectures, events and benefits.
So you are all for "freedom of thought" but you don't want people to be able to group in whatever way they want. That's an interesting take.
> Why does it matter. Thats not the point.
That's totally the point. Why on Earth would he write the manifesto otherwise?
You keep doing this in all the arguments you have in this thread: you ask a question, and then when you get a response you reframe the question. You are being either dishonest or a zealot.
> Those - as far as I understand - don't exist at Google.
You asked for example of extreme "feminists" opinions that are allowed in the workforce and I gave you some. Also Damore's argument is that google is propping the numbers in a way akin to quotas, by jigging the selection process. (Well, I heard people say that, i haven't read the essay).
> So you are all for "freedom of thought" but you don't want people to be able to group in whatever way they want. That's an interesting take.
Now you are reframing the question as in a constitutional matter. That was not the question you asked. You asked for examples of extreme feminist positions in the workplace and women-only events is an example of one. Man-only corporate events dont exist, and if you called it one, there would also be public outrage. Women-only is actively discriminatory. Some people are fine with that, some aren't. The standard is not the same for everyone.
> That's totally the point. Why on Earth would he write the manifesto otherwise?
So if a feminist had written the essay, you would agree with it and would find it enlightening?
Its a simple ad-hominem. It can be true and Damore be the worst person ever born at the same time. Its not an argument of anything.
> You keep doing this in all the arguments you have in this thread: you ask a question, and then when you get a response you reframe the question. You are being either dishonest or a zealot.
Or maybe I'm trying to consider the whole context of a nuanced and complex topic before reaching a conclusion. Dishonest, idiot me for not taking every discrete input as an absolute determinant in order to keep the argument "simple" for your benefit.
> Also Damore's argument is that google is propping the numbers in a way akin to quotas, by jigging the selection process.
Damore does not provide proof of anything like that happening. His biggest gripe is that Google is proactively reaching out to minority groups in order to try to get more candidates from that pool. He also mentions a "high priority queue for diversity hires", but I haven't found any evidence of that and he doesn't provide any.
> (Well, I heard people say that, i haven't read the essay).
So, let me get this straight: you are criticizing my analysis of a manifesto you haven't read (I have), written by someone working at the same company I used to work for (Google) on a topic I have researched quite a bit on my spare time (causes of gender disparity in Tech and other STEM industries). Your criticism is not based on published statistics, academic studies or any other kind of hard evidence, but rather hearsay and anecdata. Wow. That has to be the most Argentine behavior I've seen in a while. La Argentinidad al palo.
> Now you are reframing the question as in a constitutional matter
No I'm not. You cited things that are perfectly legal as examples of "extremist behavior". Damore's behavior was legal too, it was just stupid.
> Man-only corporate events dont exist, and if you called it one, there would also be public outrage. Women-only is actively discriminatory.
It's kind of bizarre that you are trying to paint males as some form of oppressed minority. Have you ever stopped to think why some of these events might want to avoid having males take the spotlight from people trying to discuss something? Maybe it's because they deal with that every day?
> So if a feminist had written the essay, you would agree with it and would find it enlightening? Its a simple ad-hominem.
You attack my supposed ad-hominem, by offering an ad-hominem based on a completely baseless assumption. Meanwhile you complain about me being dishonest. Again... wow.
> Or maybe I'm trying to consider the whole context of a nuanced and complex topic before reaching a conclusion. Dishonest, idiot me for not taking every discrete input as an absolute determinant in order to keep the argument "simple" for your benefit.
I'm still not sure if you do this on purpose or not, but you again answer a question that was not asked. I didnt make any conclusion in the previous post, so you are responding some question about conclusions that is not relevant to the context.
> Damore does not provide proof of anything like that happening. His biggest gripe is that Google is proactively reaching out to minority groups in order to try to get more candidates from that pool. He also mentions a "high priority queue for diversity hires", but I haven't found any evidence of that and he doesn't provide any.
I dont work at google, but i have never heard any of the rebuttals or official statements by google saying that it's not true they benefit minorities in their process. In any case, if Damore claimed that was happening and it isn't, then everyone can be happy, because Damore was asking precisely to stop doing that, and noone needs to feel attacked.
>So, let me get this straight: you are criticizing my analysis of a manifesto you haven't read
I think you haven't read my first post at all ,where i start by saying it haven't read it. Talk about accusing people of not reading the source!
> Your criticism is not based on published statistics, academic studies or any other kind of hard evidence, but rather hearsay and anecdata.
My criticism is based on the most classical anecdotal case, that Damore made an essay, there was a shitstorm and he got fired. That was my original topic. I have made no opinion on the contents of the essay , because i haven't read it nor its a topic I find interesting.
> That has to be the most Argentine behavior I've seen in a while.
Thats xenophobic. Bear in mind that if you had made this comment on twitter, you would run the risk of being fired and also become unemployable.
I think this last comment is enough. You sounded sour for a lot of your exchanges, but when you start insulting I lose interest. Hope you enjoyed the conversation.
> In any case, if Damore claimed that was happening and it isn't, then everyone can be happy, because Damore was asking precisely to stop doing that, and noone needs to feel attacked.
Damore claimed a lot of things in the manifesto, for example he claimed that conservatives are treated unfairly at Google. Had you read the text, you would know that the manifesto was more of an alt-right screed than a treaty on the biological determinants of behavior.
> My criticism is based on the most classical anecdotal case, that Damore made an essay, there was a shitstorm and he got fired. That was my original topic. I have made no opinion on the contents of the essay , because i haven't read it nor its a topic I find interesting.
So you are painting Damore as a martyr of PC culture, but haven't bothered to actually inform yourself on the subject.
> Thats xenophobic. Bear in mind that if you had made this comment on twitter, you would run the risk of being fired and also become unemployable.
That's cute. I lived most of my life in Argentina, my family is in Argentina, I am an Argentine citizen and an active member of the Argentine community in San Francisco. Nice of you to take a joke and try to make yourself a victim. For someone who decries PC culture, you are becoming really good at cry-bullying ;)
Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too. I don't really understand this perception that "women get away with everything". The legal department would have as much of an argument to fire a female Damore as they'd have a male Damore.
> Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too.
I seriously doubt that. The public would generally be conflicted about crucifying a woman in the name of women, it would have not arised easily to public knowledge.
To deepen the understanding of the situation, men and women withing google might have shown public agreement of some level with the essay and they havent been fire. People have done threats and attacks of many degrees on Damore because of that essay, which would have been a firable offense in any other circumstance.
And that's your prerogative. But it also makes the rest of your argument just conjecture. Making a huge deal about "inequality" based on conjecture is probably not the best way to spend your time.
There's also an equal or bigger amount of science proving that gender "interests" are driven in a large part by cultural background. As I linked elsewhere, Communist Russia used to have a huge participation of women in "STEM" fields, while Europe and the US were still moving from single-income families to the current standard of working professional women.
There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.
If I were to attribute malice, I'd say that you are actively avoiding the point I've been making to keep pushing your narrative.
The text you quote just says that some behavior might be driven by biological differences. Cool, nobody is arguing that. So what's the point you are trying to make?
The point I'm trying to make is that there's enough evidence that culture plays a major role in behavior and so we should maybe try to make the playing field fairer, so that if there are any biological traits dictating this or that behavior, they can be allowed. You know, work on what we know before we focus on what might be. It's pretty simple, really.
> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies.
Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right.
> Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant.
Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. The problem is lately a lot of people make claims based on nothing else than their "intuition" and they expect people to accept it as a "valid opinion".
>Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right.
I'd love a source on that, because as far as I remember most of the stuff he referenced wasn't very controversial. E.g. one of his biggest points was that men and women have statistically different five factor personality distributions.
>Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail.
Sure. The problem is I strongly disagree with you about what the "objective observable truth" is.
> Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies.
This is a factually incorrect. Please try to introspect whether you're saying this because you want Damore to be wrong, instead of attempting to ascertain whether he was actually wrong.
Oh, I introspected enough. I think you need to start doing some introspection on why Damore launches a pre-emptive attack on a non-existing problem, and why you are buying into his argument.
I keep bringing this up: if you applied the same standards in Communist Russia, you would've gotten completely different results. Turns out it's not just Nature that defines behavior, there's a lot of Nurture going on in there.
I dont hold argentina as the standard of free speech, its just how a short stay outside of the U.S. made cultural changes very noticeable for me, and for the worse.
----
If politicians in Argentina had to resign the way they do in the US for what they say, anarchist would get their way.
Can you explain your last paragraph further? Obviously saying you agree with something you never read is a bad idea. Since you haven't read it, you don't know how bad it is, right? For all you know it could be Mein Kampf. Or it could just say your boss is an idiot, or that working at your company is a waste of time, etc. Especially as a knowledge worker, ideas you espouse at work could affect your employability, so you should know what they are before espousing them. We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say.
A part of me is uninterested in reading it because I find other topics way more interesting. But a part of me also feels I can't read it. Because if I read it and I agree with it, I will have to balance honesty and integrity with oppression.
All my life I held all my controversial opinions quite openly, but this was the first time I actually fear being controversial.
I'm with Voltaire on this one: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". A coworker can say something I disagree terribly with, that even could impact my life personally, and would consider it just the way people relate to each other, sometimes its not nice and thats it.
"Moral outrage" on twitter is a ridiculous measure for progress or improvement over people's lifes. It does terrible damage in so many levels. And companies listening to that are just succumbing to their PR and legal department, not striving to an idealistic work environment. Google can be sued for not firing Damore!
Godwin's law exists because "something we both agree is wrong" is a useful north star in an argument.
Edit: If someone makes a general claim like "nobody should be fired for agreeing with any text x", it makes sense to test that claim by putting an extreme value in for x.
Im not criticizing, if there is one thing the nazis did right was being a never ending example of what not to be/do.
That said, I have not read Mein Kampf and its a similar situation. Is everything in that book ideological garbage? Maybe, maybe not. I actually dont know what its about!
But trying to find that out in public can get you beat and people will clap in encouragement if that happened.
Hell, I would be even afraid to google that book in amazon.
> We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say.
Indeed!
That's why it's so concerning to some of us that our colleagues are apparently children who blindly parrot misinterpretations of source material and call for blood over their own fabricated outrage.
With other westerners or with Chinese people? I think that is a crucial detail that was left out.
Anyway, some people are building a future that others do not want to live in, so it is no wonder that some ideas are going to be received harshly. Nonetheless I understand that we cannot predict the future, so maybe, what people think will happen, won't. But people are fearful of a possible Pandora Box event.
I personally do not like those who are so excited, by the business or technology they are building, that they never stop and think about the consequences. I also do not like those who think, "my intentions for the use of this technology are wholesome, therefore I am not responsible for any harm that can be caused by others using this technology maliciously".
imo Sam could have been almost anywhere outside of San Francisco (and Berkeley), even still within the SF Bay Area metro, and still have had the same conversation he had in Beijing. Places like SF and Alabama tend to be in the extreme left or right instead of the center. It's hard talking to or even around zealots
Your comment exemplifies what the OP is criticizing. By writing off the people in SF and Alabama as "zealots," you've closed the door to reasoned debate and to educating them on their miscues. I don't disagree that people occasionally take unjustifiable stances, but that doesn't make them unreasonable people. You have to understand their reasons and convince them of yours.
As someone who has lived in Alabama, I assure you that long term economic uncertainty, lack of good public education, entrenched mistrust of the government, and familial loyalty signaling do more to shape opinions than a logically sound argument and upstanding ethical principles.
> Your comment exemplifies what the OP is criticizing.
I'm not sure how writing about my opinion is the same as shutting down discourse
> By writing off the people in SF and Alabama as "zealots," you've closed the door to reasoned debate and to educating them on their miscues.
I have lived in both the South and SF for years and I'm posting based on my experience. Yes there are always exceptions. At the same time, I don't find it useful to ignore the culture or trends at large. Different places have specific, unique cultures.
> people occasionally take unjustifiable stances, but that doesn't make them unreasonable people.
I could be wrong, but the point of Sam's post is that more people in places like SF and Alabama don't just occasionaly take strong stances. It happens a lot more often and these stances are so entrenched that they're more akin to religious beliefs, where it's just hard to even entertain alternative view points without offending people. It shuts down discourse and thought.
In terms of having conversations, I'm not on a mission to change the status quo; I just want more freedom to think & speak especially when I'm trying to relax. Logically for me, it makes little sense to be in an environment where everyone will suffer due to the topic. I'm not saying that it's wrong or bad to 'educate people on their miscues'. I'm just saying that it's not for me.
Tim Ferriss also mentioned this issue in his recent AMA [1] when discussing why he recently relocated to Austin. He describes it as "a peculiar form of McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness." The whole comment is worth reading.
A lot of comments make the argument that any extreme political correctness is exclusive to the bay area, not the US as a whole, or that Sam's experience is true in an "expat bubble" in China.
To which I submit as evidence "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World", an art exhibition currently on display at the Guggenheim in New York City.
This retrospective of Chinese art had 3(!) works of art removed (ie, censored) from the exhibition because the content was perceived as morally reprehensible by some groups of new york animal rights activists.
Proof that at least along some avenues of discourse (what is allowed in art? when is animal suffering allowed? when is representation of a disturbing act that occurred in the past allowed?) the NYC progressive contingent is more conservative than the Chinese.
Note: This does not mean that China is a paradise of free speech. There are other avenues of discourse (ex political discourse) where this is not the case.
Note 2: They sell hot dogs outside the Guggenheim.
> This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.
What about all the novel things about physics that we won't ever hear from the gay people who are forced out of physics because of a life-threatening climate of hate and bigotry?
I'm okay with comedians writing bad jokes or telling them during open mic. Our society is somewhat tolerant of that. Al Franken did get elected after his rape joke was published. Though in hindsight that is an awful example.
But the unreasonable people saying "gay people are evil" are not even pretending to be joking. They have killed.
So I think Sam lacks empathy. Try this thought exercise. Replace the word "gay" in Sam's essay with "white" or whatever group you belong to. How does that make you feel? Would you want to work with that person? How well do you think that will go over in SF, HN, or America?
| So I think Sam lacks empathy... But the unreasonable people saying "gay people are evil" are not even pretending to be joking. They have killed.
Sam is both gay and jewish...
| Replace the word "gay" in Sam's essay with "white" or whatever group you belong to. How does that make you feel? Would you want to work with that person?
I don't think "white people are evil" is a controversial statement is SF.
Just because a person uses the words "What about" does not make their argument whataboutism.
Their argument is 100% relevant to the sentiment that was expressed. If the stated benefit of excluding one group to allow for the free expression of the other is increased scientific discourse, how do we balance that against the loss of discourse from the excluded?
Sam is asking people to be more inclusive of different ideas, not excluding one group for the benefit of the other.
I don't quite get how one jumps from 'we have to tolerate different ideas' to 'people will be excluded'. How does tolerating different ideas excludes people ?
It's trivially easy to imagine this from the opposite perspective.
Imagine you worked in a 90% gay office, and it was tolerated to disparage you and remark on the vile nature of your heterosexuality on a daily basis.
Only an exceptionally strong willed person would stay very long and it still probably would reduce their output of novel ideas.
The argument is not, and should never be, that we should fire people for their thoughts. If someone is strongly socially conservative, that's their right. But is is perfectly reasonable to require people to leave those conversations at home when they head into the office.
YC could open up an office in Padova, where Galileo spent the 'happiest years of his life'. Be happy to help, although we're pretty content here in Bend these days.
Regarding Beijing: I think he may have been in something of an 'expat bubble'. Speaking with other entrepreneurs far from home, it's easy to focus on that. Try criticizing the political leadership, though.
The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring.
> The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring.
Well said, so well said that I'd like to tweet it and share it, but I won't, because of the exact problem it describes.
yep. It is getting that bad.
I would love to tweet this and debate this with people but I know that if I do so there is a high chance it might impact my career and my overall life here in the bay.
Sometimes I'm wondering how many people like me just pretend to blend in and go with the mainstream political correctness just because we don't have the guts//strength to fight this fight right now.
My guess? a LOT from what I can see in my circle of friends over here.
This doesn't describe my experience of the Bay Area (2004-present) at all. Here's a sincere tip: start attending the Seminars About Long-term Thinking organized by the Long Now Foundation. Take a friend or two. Sitting in those (packed!) theaters, listening to big, bold, and really very challenging ideas -- not just presented and left at that, but also opened up and interrogated -- I really don't think you'll feel you're surrounded by people in "pursuit of ideological purity" who don't value interesting new ideas.
If you're going to that sort of event, you're intentionally going out of your way to be around people who are interested in, as you said, big, bold, and challenging ideas.
The issue is that the next day, when you're back to your 9to5 at BigCo (or even a random startup in the area), you are not back among people who support authoritarianism and will shoot you down (possibly getting you fired) for not having the same viewpoint as they do.
Wait. What does the Long Now Foundation have to do with supporting authoritarianism? Or how do you get from "big, bold, and challenging ideas" to authoritarianism?
As someone with many “heretic ideas”, I disagree with this article - people that execute on crazy ideas are thick-skinned. Hard to believe that smart people would actually leave SF because of PC culture (although it is annoying). Even from Altman’s examples, Newton stayed in England and did what he wanted, despite the social norms.
It was also odd to see Altman use China as the bastion of freedom, a place with widespread internet censorship and where things like democracy are considered heretic.
I hardly see him presenting China as a bastion of freedom. But I do understand how one could feel safer voicing their mind on a certain subset of topics among a crowd of Beijingren versus a crowd of San Franciscans.
For those not in the know: "E pur si muove" means "And yet it moves", a phrase supposedly uttered under his breath by Galileo after he was coerced into admitting that the Earth does not move around the Sun.
"So what of China's billion-plus citizens who are not members of the free-speech elite? Although an average citizen could privately express sentiments similar to those published by Li Rui, if an average person had written and privately published what Li Rui wrote, or presented such sentiments in a speech to a large political gathering as he did, there is little doubt that Chinese authorities would prosecute them for subversion."
"In January 2003 the website of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of China's Communist Party, reported that a court in Hefei, Anhui province sentenced two men, identified only by the surnames He and Yu, to prison terms of nine and seven years respectively for "unlawful operation of a business." Their crime was publishing love poems without government authorization."
"Prior restraints are synonymous with censorship, and represent one of the most onerous infringements on freedom of expression. The term "prior restraint" refers to any system in which the government may deny a person the use of a forum for expression in advance of the actual expression. Chinese authorities employ several different types of prior restraints over the citizens of China in order to ensure that the Communist Party is able to silence critics and maintain direct editorial control over political information and news reporting..."
"The Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department sends out regular bulletins to editors informing them which topics are forbidden."
One of the things often overlooked is how our (American) culture is very much driven by religion. Note that the religion is not necessarily some version of Christianity. The overwhelming religious movement rarely named could be called "progressivism".
A religion, as opposed to other forms, usually has postulates you may not doubt, words you may not say, etc. That is, it constraints rational approaches in the area of what's sacred for that religion.
Well, I don't mind religious people. People are free to believe and practice what they believe — as long as they do it without pressing other people into compliance.
And this is exactly what happens. Faithful people who see something from the list of "progressive" sacred cows being discussed, especially at some critical / unorthodox angle (as opposed to praised in a canonical form), become furious: it's a sacrilege!
Now Mr. Altman notices that SF tech circles have turned into something of a Mecca (or Constantinople) of "progressivism", and raising a voice against the predominant religious views becomes unwelcome and downright dangerous. Well, yes. Sorry about that. Maybe you've been noticing signs of it for a few decades already.
The irony is, of course, is that "progressivism" often writes "reason" or "science" on its banners. I suspect the more ardent adepts will notice the discrepancy and suggest to remove them soon.
I would add to this by positing this is not just American culture. I think all people are religious by nature, even the most rational scientist has their inexplicable religious rituals.
My thought on this is that the world is simply too complicated to operate in, and everyone is looking for a system that has the answers. It is a form of compression. You don't have to handle the flow of complexity because someone else tells you the correct move.
Catholicism did this, it said that it had all the answers. Science wants to provide all the answers, and tries to advertise itself as such. However, as the post modernists identified science only gives you the facts, but there are infinite ways to interpret the facts. You need a value structure, a religion maybe, to interpret the facts. I think this is the religion that you have identified.
I do agree with the general point: people need answers, so they usually keep some postulates as true without further discussion, and build reasoning on top of them. This makes a lot of pragmatic sense.
Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable).
So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
Good catch, I did say it wants to provide all the answers, but I guess that wasn't exactly the idea I was trying to get at. I think the more fleshed out idea is that some people want science to provide all the answers. These people, like Sam Harris, advertise science as capable of providing the answers, but Sam Harris is not exactly a practicing scientist, although he does have a PhD.
It seems we are mostly in agreement. What I am trying to get is many people do look towards "science" and "reason" as sources of salvation. Regardless of whether or not science advertises itself that way.
> A religion, as opposed to other forms, usually has postulates you may not doubt, words you may not say, etc. That is, it constraints rational approaches in the area of what's sacred for that religion.
"Religion" is a confusing, misleading term that has a lot of baggage that isn't helpful in discussions like this. Most religions also have supernatural beliefs and a literal definition of sacrilege such that certain things are bad in the eyes of God/the universe itself. Progressivism (whatever you mean by that) doesn't.
A better word for what you're describing is "culture". A culture is ready-made collection of best practices and anti-patterns for human behavior. You don't need a religion to have forbidden practices. A cultural more says "Don't do this." but doesn't follow that with "because God hates it as attested to in this book".
The benefit of culture is that it's efficient. You don't have to figure out every single action you perform from first principles. If the people who came before you did it, it becomes part of a culture and you do it too. That's why when you're hungry, you don't go out into the woods and start sampling plants one at a time to see which are edible. You pick one of the many known-good plants that you were brought up eating.
The risk is that, like all technology, it can become outdated when the constraints that led to it change. For example, many in the US have a cultural idea that pork should always be cooked well-done, even though it doesn't taste very good. That was a good rule back when trichinosis was common. Now that it isn't, that cultural norm is technical debt.
If that was a religious belief, it would be unchangeable. Pork would be cooked well done because Important Old Book says it must. That constraint never changes (unless you revise the text of the Old Book, which does happen), so the rule never changes.
In a culture, it can change. We both absorb and affect the culture we live in. That's why I think it's important to not call things like "progressivism" a "religion" even though it makes for a fun, provocative claim. It obscures the very different mechanisms around how those belief systems respond to change.
One of the fundamental beliefs of progressivism — the thing that gives it its name! — is that change is good.
Good thing if it's so! I mean, I wish it was so; what I called by "progressivism" (note the quotes; I don't know a universally accepted name) is very much about identity politics, unequality issues of all kinds, and many other things related to "social progress" as seen as a motion towards a certain kind of utopia.
Nobody can possibly be as free to speak their mind as a wealthy American investor in a developing country. I suspect the lack of freedom the author is feeling is the fact that in San Francisco his disapproval doesn't represent an existential threat for the people around him.
I get that this is incidental to the point, but since he leads with China as an example, I wonder if it's possible that the topics he thinks will be controversial are simply ones that people are less passionate about in China. Every culture has its own "hot-button" topics.
Try pointing out that Taiwan is a separate country sometime and you'd be absolutely shocked at the reaction you get from some people, even though they have different passports and a separate government. A Chinese engineer at Google once threatened to resign and started a a major firestorm over a dessert called "Free Tibet Goji Chocolate Creme Pie":
This problem will resolve itself because there are brave people willing to weather the controversy caused by thinking in public.
Long unedited podcasts are turning out to be the best platform, with people like Sam Harris, Dan Carlin, and even Joe Rogan becoming the most important public intellectuals alive today. All three have financial and editorial independence. They reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Carlin is in Oregon, from Los Angeles, where Rogan and Harris are.
Sam Altman could obviously run a podcast where he discussed his controversial ideas. Many like minded people would rally around him. Some idiots would call him a monster. It would be great.
If you have FU money and you're complaining about PC culture, you're being unnecessarily cowardly. Start a podcast and help change things.
still. Even if you are wealthy, Fighting this is very taxing for your life. you are constantly under attack by every other person that wants to feel like they are bringing progress to society by agreeing to the latest PC trend from SF.
As someone who doesn't live in the States, I can't follow the article. It's strangely abstract. What are the controversial ideas he is discussing in China but not in the States? Did I miss those examples in the text? I think that would help a lot to understand problem.
As a minority, this ‘let all the ideas run free in the marketplace of ideas’ sounds fun until the ideas are about your inferiority and suggested extermination.
It looks like there are very different opinions about whether Silicon Valley culture is more or less tolerant than other places.
However I think those differences can be resolved by viewing tolerance of background and tolerance of opinion on two different axes. In my mind SV scores very high on tolerance of background but low on tolerance of opinion (as in "we don't care how you look like, as long as you agree with our opinions"), whereas NY scores high on both, and places like Japan are the reverse (scoring low on tolerance of background but high on tolerance of opinion -- hope I haven't offended any Japanese readers but that was my impression when I lived there for a short while).
Thanks for writing this, as a Chinese Developer, I can get many great and unique opinions on my own country on Hacker News which I would never get on the Internet in China.
I have been watching Sam Altman's sayings for a long time, I believe his judgment is at least reasonable for some reason we cannot see from the article.
Actually as an ordinary Chinese citizen and IT worker, I have always seen SF as the best place in the world to work and create something. However, in recent years, the atmosphere has subtly changed, between Silicon Valley and Beijing, between China and USA.
Such different ideas are always good for understanding the world better.
For long decades, the Protestants and Catholics did bloody battle for dominance of Europe. It seems silly to those now who think religion is a trivial lifestyle choice, but the lesson is to be learned by viewing this from their perspective. To them, each saw the other as putting the immortal souls of the masses in grave danger. The stakes could not possibly be higher, which is why the solution was so hard to see.
Freedom of religion is a very, very counterintuitive idea if you think religion is deadly important.
The churches agreed to live together in peace, not because they concluded their cause was unimportant, but because they could see resolving their disputes with blows was error-prone and cruel. The best way forward, the best chance truth had, the most just and practical way to live, is to commit to resolving these conflicts with wordsonly.
The idea was so successful that today we would not think even of dragging someone out of a cult against their will. Even if a religious idea is obviously bad, we are committed to opposing it with wordsonly because the lesson of history is that the alternative is so much worse.
It's a lesson we need to learn in politics.
We are not at the point where opposing political views generate open warfare, but I wonder more and more if we might be heading in that direction. But we do oppose each other in ways we wouldn't tolerate in a religious context: we ostracize and chase away people with unpopular views from various societies, either virtual or physical. We organize campaigns of legal or personal harassment. We organize economic pressure to attack the livelihoods of individuals whose views we find offensive.
All of these tactics run the same moral risk that physical warfare does: if you turn out to be wrong, you have done a grave injustice. And someone is wrong. You can't be sure it isn't you. Therefore, to prevent society being an awful place to pursue your conscience, none of us should do these things.
Worse, a campaign against an idea that consist of anything other than criticizing the idea runs the risk of being wrong. Strenuous debate is the arena in which truth has the best chance, so it is where we should all agree to fight.
We need to learn the lesson the church learned centuries ago. We need to commit to fighting our political battles with wordsonly, not because they are so unimportant that we can tolerate error, but because they are too important to let the strong and popular hold sway.
> I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
> Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones
There's quite a difference between 'I feel uncomfortable discussing topic X in location Y' and 'location Y is restricting speech'. The only concrete example in the article of the former is a 'toxic reaction' to work in 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension'.
What exactly does a 'toxic reaction' mean? Is there a meaningful distinction between it and 'strenuous debate about ideas'?
Based on the examples given, this article seems to hold 'mainstream' and 'heterodox' ideas to different standards. Criticism of mainstream ideas is (rightly) described as 'necessary to get the really good ideas', 'what drives the world forward', etc. Criticism of heterodox ideas, on the other hand, is a 'restriction of speech' and a 'toxic reaction'.
I wish that Altman had provided more a single example (the reaction to 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension') instead of vague references to 'controversial ideas', 'casting the people behind the ideas as heretics', and 'heresy.
"I would advice Mr. Sam Altman to not write such an insulting article. He should take it down immediately. Many of us reading it live in San Francisco."
The most powerful man on earth, Pope Paul V demanded Galileo silence his thoughts on heliocentrism. He was then submitted to the Roman Inquisition, found guilty, and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Somehow this is seen as comparable in Sam's mind to a reasonable debate about ethics (“If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical”).
Quite frankly, if you can't find the courage to have a reasonable debate about your ideas, you shouldn't be the one working on those ideas. If your ideas run contrary to public thoughts around ethics, perhaps you should move to a culture where your ethics more closely mirror theirs. Or more radically — listen to why people disagree!
This whole post comes off as someone who's realizing their ethics are mismatched with the culture they're living in, and instead of questioning themselves, demand that the rest of the culture shift to their views. In other words: let me be this asshole, because I deserve it!
>if you can't find the courage to have a reasonable debate about your ideas..
The problem is that because of growing social polarization reasonable debates are becoming increasingly rare. Hoping to have a reasonable debate with people who are not looking to have a reasonable debate is silly and has nothing to do with courage.
You're assuming that the values of the culture you're living in are necessarily better or more ethical than those held by an individual. But even assuming that is true, the inability to voice ones opinions without ostracism doesn't solve disagreement, it just hides it. Whilst there may be a tremendously pleasing and unproductive perceived homogeneity of opinion around you, that facade is pulled with the curtain of the voting booth.
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
There are many more unsayable things in Beijing than San Francisco, and the penalties for saying them are much harsher (though of course not for Sam, as a very wealthy foreigner most rules simply don't apply). People are regularly beaten, harassed and murdered for reporting the truth about the government in China. Journalism is a very dangerous profession there in ways it is not in the US.
In contrast, the dangers Sam runs from being open are that people will be mean to him on the internet.
I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true
This is a really odd statement of a non-problem which dismisses real world life-threatening problems a lot of marginalised people live with. First, reasonable people are not the problem, violent, irrational people who are influenced by bad ideas are. Second, this is not an academic debate over people with naughty ideas, real lives are ruined by the normalisation of bigotry and hatred (in ways that Sam in his privileged bubble has never and will never experience, and apparently can't even imagine). People are murdered, spat on and denigrated even at their funerals when hate like 'gay people are evil' is allowed to spread. Sometimes, to remain human, you have to choose a side.
This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.
Why would those two things ever be related? Why can't we let people say novel things about physics, and call them out when they (for example) harass gay people, sexually assault people who work for them, or do other bad things. Why would we possibly want to excuse bad behaviour because someone comes up with novel physics ideas?
What sort of confusion of ideas could lead to linking these two topics?
What if it were hypothesized on the basis of some controversial observations say in optics, not proven mind you, but supposed based on related work, that we might be able to hit melanin molecules with certain types of radiation to allow people to change their skin color to those indistinguishable from another racial group? Would physicists be allowed to discuss and publish proposals for this? I'm not even talking IRB issues of human experimentation, just pursuing the work in vitro.
To address what I hope is your point (not really about skin colour, I assume that was simply an example of a no-go zone for your imagined liberal interlocutor), there are not many areas of research out of bounds because of social mores - there are always some at any given point in time in any given society (for example cloning or using fetal tissue in the US), and there are valid discussions to be had about whether research is ethical or not (which shifts over time).
Those hard ethical issues on the edge of science and what it means to be human are unrelated however to: novel physics ideas, almost all startup ideas, ideas for a new currency like bitcoin, spacex etc. Of course to have good ideas you need to preserve some innocence, ignore all the naysayers (of which the internet has plenty, a never-ending horde we all participate in at times), you may need to stand apart from your society (as in the case of bitcoin) or reject its tenets but that is entirely unrelated to tolerance for intolerance, to tolerance for hatred, to a happy ignorance of ethics or moral boundaries.
The writer mixes up simple cynicism and societal pressure which he experiences (which are as old as the world and easy to ignore), and real hatred leading to violence and seems to think they are somehow equivalent. Those are different categories of objection, different qualities of harm. Paul Graham or Sam feeling bad because people are dismissive, petty and wrong about good ideas he has, is simply incomparable to the real harm caused by the normalisation of the ideas in this essay (e.g. a given class of people are evil and subhuman - be that gays, jews, rich white men or something else). By giving those ideas credence, he's lending a hand to evil in the world.
In short, you don't need to allow hatred of [insert your hated group here] to allow good science.
Well said! Sam posted a great defense of what I view as the second leg of "freedom of speech". There's the legal sense of the term – which is limited to government suppression of speech – and then there's the idea of what private society allows of its own volition.
> "If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment"
This one has been around FOREVER but he was surprised to hear it this year? doubtful. I think Sam actually picked safe examples for his contrarian essay. e.g Notably absent Damore.
While I'm not trying to pick apart small pieces of the essay, I agree with some of the high-level points. Culturally in SV, we are increasingly afraid of discussing anything that is controversial. Ad hominems are increasingly popular for any dissenting opinion or difference of view.
It wasn't always like this, and it has definitely gotten worse IMO. Based on conversations I've had with some friends, they also agree. We've all been living in the bay area for over 6 years and we're now entertaining the idea of moving away. I also know some smart people who have left naming this as one of the reasons.
I'm naturally sympathetic to the sentiment, but this post fails to acknowledge, much less address, the major societal changes that have precipitated our current situation. Censorship is a reaction to our society's increasing inability to combat misinformation. Over the last 20 years, a huge, extremely influential right wing media establishment has sprung up. It has clearly demonstrated its ability to convince millions of people of things that are factually untrue, with less logic than repetition. (Ask Barack Obama, the Kenyan Muslim, about the utility of reasoning). I am worried about someone who makes an argument that gay people are evil, because it probably now means that a group of commentators have adopted that simple statement as a talking point. Furthermore, they've tacked on preposterous arguments, logical fallacies, and agreed to engage in Ad Hominem warfare against anyone who argues differently. It's been an extremely effective formula for persuading a huge portion, if not most of our society, into believing falsehoods.
Unfortunately, the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas is failing to distribute value as obviously as our economic marketplaces. The openness of communication made possible via technology has turned us all into Sophists. Efforts to confront and address this reality is peripheral at best. As long as this is true, censorship will be an appealing option to keep bad ideas from spreading. Is censorship worth the cost? I don't know, but I'd lean toward saying yes, while fully acknowledging that the cost is huge.
The main thrust of the argument seems to be that we should do our best to stop censorship. I'm arguing that we probably shouldn't. Our society is not really equipped to handle the free exchange of ideas at this point.
Because some large percentage of people are filled with cynicism and pessimism?
Every objective measure of society is better today than at any time in the past, and yet we have people calling for curtailing a core American value due to a supposed social emergency. These demoralized people need a hard reality check because there's nothing fact-based about the way they think or behave.
There are orders of magnitude more educated people in the world today than ever before. Development of technology is rapidly accelerating. The idea that we can't solve our problems without sacrificing our souls is just pathetic and historically un-American.
Techno-optimist drivel is at least as unsavory as the overly sensitive, anti-technological kneejerk reactions that this article is lamenting. It's absurd to write off real problems with technology because tech does good things as well.
I am having trouble following your jump from shutting down trolls to sacrificing our souls. If you think the loudest person should get a platform, I encourage you to spend some more time in (non-HN) comment sections.
You say you want to shutdown "trolls" but you surely also want to modify the definition of troll on an on-going basis.
The pessimists think they can't win on ideas alone so they resort to using force against the "trolls" to ensure victory. Harassing, deplatforming, doxing, getting them fired, boycotting, etc.
The optimists (see: MLK Jr.) know humans are pretty great and, given sufficient time and information, the good ideas will win eventually.
If you actually care about your society you should be engaging "trolls" and trying to understand them. And you should be trying to convince them they're wrong, if you can. And if you can't, you should look to others that can.
Let me be blunt: I don't trust you enough to make that decision.
Let me be even more blunt: I suspect what you really mean is simply that people who disagree with you should be shut up.
Let me be a bit philosophical: Unless you are so arrogant as to believe that you are right about everything right now, the set of people you believe should shut up includes both your future and past self.
Perhaps you should accord to others the rights you are so anxious to claim for yourself.
There is nothing in my statement that suggests that every viewpoint that disagrees with my own should be censored. What I'm arguing is that the world has gotten a WHOLE lot more complex when it comes to mapping peoples' understanding of the world. The signal to noise ratio has turned upside down, and society as a whole has become more volatile as a result. We have to take the threats of this new reality very seriously and avoid broad generalizations.
I think that we can collectively come to a reasonable agreement about what should and should not pass as discourse vs. plain trollery. If someone is parroting "facts" about Barack Obama's secret Kenyan birth and closed door Muslim religion, all of which have been refuted, and cannot offer a standard of evidence that would be sufficient to change their mind, they aren't engaging in a debate, they are simply spreading a lie. That lie, and many others like it, have recently shown the ability to propagate propelled solely by regular repetition. Is censorship the only way to provide a pattern interrupt? I don't really know, but I do know that it is TERRIBLE for a democratic and free society to have huge portions of the population very certain about opinions that are totally, demonstrable false, not to mention that these same opinions also incline these people to be less tolerant, less trusting, and more aggressive. I don't think we should rule out some level of censorship, at least at the interpersonal level, for thoroughly refuted ideas. I'm not saying we should have government intervention, I'm just arguing that you should have every right to tell your angry, misinformed uncle to stop spreading lies at the dinner table.
On a personal level, my own standard is that you earn the right to have a discourse by being willing to let go of your viewpoint if it's refuted, in fact that's part of why you are entering into a conversation - to learn what you are wrong about. Strong beliefs, lightly held. The right to speak comes with a responsibility to engage honestly.
If your startup idea is actually offensive to people, maybe take a step back and think about that, or just do it anyway, who cares? Since when are entrepreneurs afraid of "speaking heresies" or "toxic reactions"... from whom? Investors? Friends at dinner parties? Are the reactions of San Franciscans really so unique? Somehow blaming a city for your idea's reception sounds suspect. Also, playing the victim. Getting called out on political incorrectness is not akin to being bludgeoned with a "club."
If you tend towards "constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted," congratulations, you're neurotic, like me. It's just something you have to overcome enough to be comfortable expressing your own unique opinions. When you do this, you may find your controversial opinions are merely out of touch. Like you have an IQ of 180 and you've been reading scientific papers and you can prove there are only two genders... and now if you can't express this view over a beer in SOMA without getting some looks, you can't invent the self-driving car or something...?
> - Gays are about 3% of the US population. Higher in a few big cities, lower in rural areas. Transgenders, maybe 0.4%.
I don't get it. Assuming this demographic fact is correct, what's your point? That they shouldn't be entitled to the same rights as the other 96.6%?
> - About half the US population supported Trump. His supporters have legitimate complaints.
About 63 million Americans voted for Trump. This is not half the US population. Whether half the US population supports Trump or not is pure speculation.
> - Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US white IQ: 100. Average US black IQ: 85.
Even granted that this is true. Do you have any evidence that this is nature not nurture?
> "Medical marijuana" is a joke.
Possible. But is it any worse than the current opioid epidemic? And why is tobacco legal anyway? Seems like I should be able to choose my poison.
>About 63 million Americans voted for Trump. This is not half the US population. Whether half the US population supports Trump or not is pure speculation.
135.4 million people voted in the presidential election, 46% of them for Trump.
135.4 million isn't everyone in the US, but discussing if children should be allowed to vote is an entirely different argument.
Sam, your point is incredibly valid, and you'll be able to lead the charge if you reframe some of your concepts and let go of paragraphs like this.
"To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture."
Like I tell my son, "anytime your minds says something is 'weird or wacky', what it is really telling you is that you should seek understanding'.
[Updated] To be clear, what I mean is that you confessed your limits of acceptable thought by declaring alchemy and decoding of the Bible as being bad and wacky. If a genius like Newton was willing to believe these were worthy of his attention, and the British authorities were worried enough to ban it, maybe it's time to challenge the scripting you have that won't let YOU go there.
In fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think may be true and that I don’t like.
I think this is the most interesting section in the whole essay. Is Sam really suggesting that he wants to supress the truth because he doesn't like what the truth is telling us. Here is a totally novel idea - how about changing your mind when the evidence changes.
He describes the Echo Chamber in full effect. You can't have good debate if everyone is on the same side of the argument. War may be bad, but without it, we'd never have the advancements in quality of life we now enjoy.
Once the whole planet becomes a single-hive-minded social-media entity, innovation will stagnate, and the human race will slowly die off.
It's impossible to only question those ideas you personally really need to question, while ignoring other ideas you hear that seem wrong. You either develop a habit of questioning or not. Habits need to be simple, you can't have a habit of showering every day, except when the date is a prime number.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Very much related to this, my brother is an assistant professor at LaFayette College and has co-founded a series of talks called "The Mill Series" on promoting viewpoint diversity.
Actually I'm surprised this article hasn't been flagged yet. Many of us feel the same, but it's unusual to discuss these things openly. Last time I saw the discussion was triggered by Google sacking Damore - and almost all discussions were flagged as soon as SF woke up.
Somewhat similarly, in Hutterite colonies only men voted (dunno about today.) So what they said was very strictly watched and proscribed since their opinions mattered. Males rarely dared to criticize anything in the colony. In contrast females could criticize whatever they cared too with few consequences. They didn't vote so their opinions weren't perceived as threatening order very much.
I think de Tocqueville made a similar report about America a very long time ago, that Americans had to self-censor, French peasants didn't - they didn't vote so the powers that be cared little about their opinions.
It's great to see Sam calling attention to this problem.
I'd argue that it's not really about ideas as much as it is about the public being much more accepting of authoritarianism.
The broader values of free speech and free expression come not from an aesthetic judgment of particular acts of speech, but from a desire to limit the power of authoritarian governments to suppress speech/expression.
We're seeing in both parties an amnesia about the downside of authoritarianism, and this filters down to things like office culture, university culture, and the perception of the trade-offs associated with various freedoms.
I get really frustrated with this constant refrain that every idea needs to be responded to on its merits, and you aren't allowed to EVER just dismiss an idea.
While this sounds good in theory, in practice you have to draw the line somewhere. Do I need to engage in a debate about whether the earth is flat or not every time someone says it is flat? Am I not allowed to just dismiss the idea and say 'this is not something that is up to debate'?
Not all ideas are worthy of discussion, and someties you have to tell the people constantly proposing ideas that we have addressed before to knock it off.
Not sure how appropriate, but my association with the title and topic is a song from a german metal band, which moved and influenced me a lot, when I discovered it, while also reading in school(and outside) about it...
And I remember being very upset, that I seemed to be the only one moved by the topic, while the rest of the class, including the teacher, found it booring and just learned about it, because they had to ... blasphemists!
I feel like this article is trying to advocate for both "ideas don't matter" and "ideas matter a lot" without adequately distinguishing the cases. There's definitely an attempt at distinction, but I don't get the sense that it really works.
For instance, both "radical life extension is worth working on" and "gay people are evil" are ideas that certain people consider toxic to society - not just ideas they disagree with, but ideas that, if they are considered and debated and experimented with, will result in harm even if they're defeated in the long term. (And yes, the responses to these ideas will be themselves "toxic;" you get rid of toxins by killing them.) What distinguishes one from the other?
The article is clearly advocating for us not just to tolerate "radical life extension is worth working on," but to support an environment where an advocate of that idea can draw other people to that cause without public opposition and can publicly espouse that cause without social judgment. Someone who believes this should be able to be viewed as a great thinker, as someone doing worthwhile research, as someone who's not a "heretic".
But then the article turns around and says, "I am not worried that letting some people on the internet say things like 'gay people are evil' is going to convince any reasonable people that such a statement is true." Why? Plenty of people both on the internet and off say that and do convince people of it. (I was one of the people convinced by this; if you haven't had the experience of growing up in an environment which isn't a cult by any means but enforces religious-cultural orthodoxy, I do strongly recommend talking to such people about how that environment operates and propagates its beliefs if you're going to have opinions about "heresy".) Why should we believe that nobody will be convinced by "gay people are evil" but people will be convinced by "radical life extension is worth working on"?
And what about other ideas like "gay people aren't evil, we love gay people, but they're demon-possessed and conversion therapy will successfully fix them towards heterosexuality, which has been the norm throughout all of human society?" That idea is definitely going to get you a toxic response in SF culture. Should it not?
If we're simply going to judge ideas by whether other people are likely to be convinced by the ideas, and nothing else, we're not going to drive society in a productive direction. We have to be willing to say that certain things are good and certain things are bad. C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man is somewhat relevant here (and is a worthwhile read) - either we have our standards, our things we value, or we will let ourselves be ruled by whatever ideas seem defensible, and those ideas will start controlling how we are open to new ideas. Of course this is not to say that we have no problem with discourse, that the way that we approach "this idea is bad actually" or "this idea is good actually" is not broken. But that's very different from saying that all such judgments should be banished.
(Preemptive response: I do realize that the author is gay, and I don't think that invalidates this comment.)
Could this not simply be a reflection of cultural differences in the expression of disagreement? I have no personal experience with life in China, but a common observation others have made is that, similar to other societies in the region, and in contrast to cultures in many European and American countries, avoidance of shame, respect for authority and maintenance of social harmony are of significantly higher importance to people.
It's a bit off. The context is complex. It's true that things are tense these days. But not only SF, everywhere: USA, Europe ..
There are social tectonics at play and the stress causes people to overreact negatively on anything that doesn't solve the current issues.
ps: augmenting intelligence is still weird to me, at least above a certain point, I'm all about balance these days; fix me but I don't need augmented abilities.
He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious about the thought of a Trump presidency, but I'm pretty far along the open-minded scale, so we chatted about it privately a bit.
My co-worker asked me to not speak about his position and to not let anyone else know about it, because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.'
Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.
You know what? I agreed with his concern at the time, and I still agree with it. Consciously and otherwise, I think that quite a few of the fine progressive folk that we find ourselves surrounded by here in the bay area would hold such an opinion against him in important ways.
I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
At this point, I can't imagine a path forward that has much of a chance of bearing fruit.