Interesting how moral fashion trends in the U.S. have changed since 2004. As I recall, in 2004, it was morally unfashionable to criticize the war effort. In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement. Although I was much less afraid of being a heretic in 2004 than I am in 2018; I'm curious if others have similar or different experiences/opinions?
It’s already peaked and has started to decline. There’s a definite sense that questioning the radical left is less transgressive than it used to be. We’re currently coming out of a period which will be looked back upon as being very left, and how the culture shifted so far in such short a time will be a topic of much debate.
However, when the pendulum swings it rarely stops in the center. I fear an over-reaction to the right. Really what we need is for people to stop being crazy ideological zealots, regardless of inclination.
>Really what we need is for people to stop being crazy ideological zealots, regardless of inclination.
I notice two things worth commenting on here; firstly it seems as though you've assumed a position of being unideological, that is to say, you don't have an ideology, but those crazy people to my left and right do. Almost everyone believes certain ideologies, and most people aren't aware of which ones they believe in. Zizek says somewhere that the most successful ideologies are those which do not appear ideological, which are accepted because they do not appear ideological. Liberal democracy, the conception of rights, the separation of church and state, the precedence of the individual who owns property is built on ideology. In fact, I would say this: your ideology is believing that you live in a post-ideological world.
The second point I'd like to make is that denying "crazy ideological zealots" also denies qualitative change. It means you're excluding their ideas because they are extreme and "ideological". Because they seem irrational. But what is rational and irrational changes in time and place. This is roughly the golden middle fallacy at best, and a strong endorsement of the status quo (whatever it is) at worst.
Zizek is a purveyor of nonsense. I think it’s obvious to most readers that I have a belief system, and that I am advocating for that belief system, and that belief system is roughly described as centrist. You’ve written rather a lot of words to state the obvious. And to name drop Zizek.
Edit: If you disagree with the Zizek statement and have never listened to him speak, you may wish to look him up.
You say that Zizek purveys nonsense, then say that what I've said is obvious. So either you're referring to some writings of Zizek which are irrelevant to this discussion (and implying my point is worth less consideration because Zizek is wrong in some areas which are irrelevant to this discussion), or you're saying that Zizek is wrong here (but without explaining how or rebutting his point).
Your advocation of your belief system lies entirely in characterising any other position as "crazy ideological zealotry". I omitted the "crazy zealotry" part because they don't have very much substance (other than appealing to what you consider to be rational and reasonable), so I focused on the "ideology" part.
>Edit: If you disagree with the Zizek statement and have never listened to him speak, you may wish to look him up.
This is extremely uncharitable. Zizek is a serious philosopher, and people take him seriously. Just because you don't understand the points he's making (or don't agree with them), it doesn't mean he's purveying nonsense. Very few (if any) of his critics and fellow philosophers accuse him of being nonsensical. He frequently talks about topics I can't even attempt to understand, but I'm sure high-level physics can sound like nonsense to people too. He has 164,015[0] citations counted by Google Scholar, and along with Althusser considered important in the philosophy of ideology and socialism. He's by no means a hack.
Thanks for that. I really did want readers of my comment to look him up. There’s a reason Chomsky describes his work as being without value, but now we’ve just got two appeals to authority going. I’d rather people look up some Zizek on YouTube and judge for themselves.
In a way, Zizek and his forebears represent the problem with the modern left: they left reality behind in favour of nonsensical “theory” that intimidates most people because it sounds authoritative, despite being empty.
For balance, I’m entirely certain that you could make similar claims of being out of touch with reality of the right, but they do not, for example, try to couch their ideas in an impenetrable fog of deconstructivism and psychoanalysis.
I wonder to what degree that relates to our subjective submersion for so long into the collective percolated ideas of Hume and Hobbes and Kant and Locke and (with the extent latter-day capitalism has adopted some variant of 'the end of history) Hegel. That is to say, were any of these works being actively purveyed to the public now, rather that forming a sort constituent background radiation in which even the prenatal are bathed, whether the foundation works of what is called western-enlightenment wouldn't be viewed in the same light. (In fact, I would wager one could start publicly reading from any of the above mentioned [excepting Hegel, for obvious reasons] and be sure of getting at least a few denouncements along the lines of 'postmodern trash'.
Also, I'm tempted to say that idea or only penetrable when they're not considered at all, that is, when they are merely that constituent background radiation of our lives. (Much like how we tend to know the answer to something right up until we're asked the question.) And upon the act of engagement, that is trying to understand any of this, we're left with Adam Smith being as seemingly impenetrable as Freud.
I didn't know that, so I stand corrected. But I wonder if there are any serious (published) responses calling his positions nonsensical or even incoherent rather than merely disagreeing.
>It’s already peaked and has started to decline. There’s a definite sense that questioning the radical left is less transgressive than it used to be.
It's interesting how asynchronous this kind of thing can be. To me, and I think many other people that have been overexposed to relentless criticism of the radical left for years now, it seems to be becoming unfashionable again. For me, that's because you can only deconstruct something so much before continued deconstruction becomes boring (and a convenient harbor for crypto-rightists) and before you start pining for some construction instead.
The pendulum swings (in a limited sense, that is; I feel more charity toward the radical left rather than some awakened sympathy for the right).
It was also morally unfashionable to criticize liberating the slaves in the Northern states. So, thankfully, "moral fashion" presided in that case.
In the Me Too social justice movement, for instance, Things You Can't Say come in two varieties: Just as men feel their nuanced opinions are misinterpreted and shamed, women too feel their experiences are doubted or ignored.
I think it's also important to note that exactly one of the two "sides" of this movement has historically been a marginalized group. That in of itself is not sufficient to make an opinion, so do your own research of course.
Interesting. So, for instance, you are aware that women did not have the fight to vote until 1920.
Is your belief that women have never been marginalized? Or that they used to be, but in quantitative terms this group by now in 2018 has attained an equal amount of power?
"Women are and have been marginalized in the US" is not a statement which is mutually exclusive with "Black people are and have been marginalized in the US", so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
And, just so that I make this clear: you've tried to imply several times with your argument that women aren't marginalized, but you've done this purely by bringing up other groups that are marginalized (Women couldn't vote? neither could I, until I immigrated. Women are marginalized? What about the poor black men who were lynched on nothing but the word of a white woman?) and at no point have you addressed the fact that marginalization isn't a binary thing; there's more than two levels of marginalization, and just because some other group was _also_ marginalized, that doesn't mean that it didn't happen to women too.
You've neatly sidestepped addressing this on the times that I've brought it up, which is why I keep on harping on this point. There are two possible reasons you're doing this: one is that you legitimately didn't realize that marginalization has multiple levels, in which case maybe you should take a moment to think about the history of the world and the various forms oppression has taken, and the other is that you're deliberately making a bad-faith argument. I'd certainly hope you're not arguing in bad faith, because that would be incredibly rude, but I wanted to make sure I called out what you were doing (and failing to do) to make it clear to anybody who wanders by and reads the argument.
No. My argument is that some women have used their privilege to falsely accuse men in the past and that assigning privilege based on social justice groupings is both stupid and immoral.
I literally cannot follow your reasoning at all. I’m the one saying privilege is both relative and context specific.
You seem to be trying to apply some strange kind of privilege averaging?
Some women, although the number is certainly an ongoing debate, make false rape accusations, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "social justice groupings", but "sometimes people lie" still isn't mutually exclusive with "women, on the whole, are and historically have been a marginalized population". You keep on saying things like they're some sort of gotcha, but you never actually argue against the point you're trying to argue against; you just constantly bring up other points and try to act smug.
> but you never actually argue against the point you're trying to argue against
Ok let’s back up a bit then:
Why exactly, in the context of the metoo movement, is it important to consider that on average women have been historically more marginalized than men?
What does historically lacking the right to vote have to do with the veracity of sexual assault allegations?
Do you know any examples of people being fired from their jobs for criticizing the Iraq war in 2004? There are many examples of people getting fired for questioning the tenets of social justice, including some fired for relatively minor violations.
Ashleigh Banfield's career was derailed at NBC news and her profile lowered. They didn't fire her but what they did was truly shitty. She said:
> I was office-less for ten months ... No phone, no computer. For ten months I had to report to work every day and ask where I could sit. ... I will never forgive him for his cruelty and the manner in which he decided to dispose of me.
She eventually quit and joined CourtTV(?) because of it.
And Chris Hedges at NYT maybe. Wiki:
> Hedges was an early critic of the Iraq War. In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security."[24] His speech was received with boos and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking.[25]
> The New York Times, his employer, criticized his statements and issued him a formal reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality".[26] Shortly after the incident, Hedges left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and a columnist at Truthdig, in addition to writing books and teaching inmates at a New Jersey correctional institution.
I'm sure there are other journalists I'm forgetting who were fired or had some level of career destruction because of their criticism. 2004 was a truly bad time to have interesting opinions plus a career on the line. And it feels like that again to be honest, though in very different areas.
> I am aware of a handful of examples of people being fired (or pushed out) for violating progressive mores.
Care to name any examples? The only ones I can think of are well deserved (e.g. someone making racist comments and/or descriminating based on race, gender, etc)..
The Christakises, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, James Damore, and Lindsey Shepherd (actually not sure if she was pushed out; she had the good sense to record her abuse which may have ultimately protected her). These are a few of the more egregious examples off the top of my head.
EDIT: Brandan Eich and Lawrence Summers popped into my head as well.
Not the OP, but Brian McCall J.D was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at a law school in Oklahoma. He had to resign because of a book he wrote on Catholicism, even though his track record was impeccable by any standard.
He had to resign because he believes that women are not equal to men in society.
For example: “Women must veil their form to obscure its contours out of charity towards men...To know that women in pants have this effect on men and to wear them is thus a sin against charity as well as modesty.”
He calls a woman’s leaving the home to work “another false promise of the devil come to pass.”
So no he did not resign because of a book he wrote on Catholicism, rather the beliefs he espoused in that book made his job untenable. How could any female student be judged fairly by an administrator who doesn't feel like they are meant to be in the workplace, or even wear pants?
Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna was forced out by an angry mob for writing an email to a Latina student in which she thanked the student for writing about her experience and expressed how she wants to further engage her. However, she apparently included a "microagression" when saying that the student didn't "fit the mold" of their traditional student.
I know two people who have been fired for saying things that are offensive but were innocently said. Meaning, they genuinely didn't understand that what they were saying was offensive to someone.
In one case, that person was upset and ashamed of themselves for having possibly caused distress of people they respected.
In another case, it caused them to dig their heels in to the opposite side of the debate.
In both cases, I can't help but think those were great opportunities to educate those people. Pull them to the side and patiently say, "Hey, what you said was offensive and hurtful and here is why...". I'm certain that the one who dug in their heels would've received that conversation in a more constructive way. As it was, firing that person for such a relatively minor offense created a new Republican.
i understand sometimes people make mistakes, but sometimes those mistakes could've been avoided if they spent any time learning about current issues. in not spending time learning about these things they are putting themselves up to say some dumb shit.
obviously its hard to say what should happen in these cases, and i do think we should try and educate people when they want, but its also not the job of marginalized people to educate others on how what they said was offensive.
And that's fine. People should be held responsible for their actions. But my point is this; when the default is to use a machete when a scalpel would have sufficed then the net result is not going to pleasant.
The Christakises were driven out of Yale for politely suggesting that the university shouldn't police Halloween costumes. I'm not trivializing the offense either, the letter which caused the outrage is publicly available.
This doesn't change the fact much. Moreover, later it turned out she misunderstood the part about forking. Which leads to the question: do we accept the world in which someone can be fired because of a false accusation? Can we really call it “progressive”?
It changes the narrative of "liberal bullies are ruining our dongle jokes". The fact that a woman was fired for trying to make our industry more inclusive shows we're not a leftie monoculture. The fact that she was subjected to rape and death threats shows there's a lot of toxic misogyny in our industry.
It can be simultaneously true that people are afraid to talk because of SJWs criticizing them, and also they can be afraid to talk because right wing trolls will target them for harassment. Who in their right mind would want to risk being the next Zoë Quinn?
Clearly it wasn't just saying "build the wall," from your own link:
> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
> I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
> I could give a shit less about your respect for me or anyone else's. Build the wall is exactly what the fuck it means: build the wall.
At almost any office job in America this is not an acceptable way to talk to your colleagues. At what programming job am I allowed to call people cucks for disagreeing with my politics?
1. The same principle applies, unless you want to argue that YC should have lower standards than the average tech job.
2. I don't know much about this person, but I'm going to need something more than his word on this one. The much more obvious explanation that it was his behavior towards other founders.
“The main thing I want to get across here is: we believe that everyone is entitled to their political beliefs and they are welcome to support the political candidates of their choosing. Having an honest, rational dialogue between all parts of the political spectrum is going to be important for us as a country moving forward. But under no circumstances do we tolerate harassing or threatening other founders (or anyone for that matter). Regardless of what you believe, if you act in a hostile way that makes the community feel unsafe, you will be ejected from the YC community.”
Specifically, he resigned due to protest/pressure relating to his 1000 dollar donation in support of prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage in CA).
It seems inconceivable to me that his resignation was unrelated to this. An excerpt from his resignation announcement:
> I have decided to resign as CEO effective today, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of u, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader.
> In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement.
It seems like there are many social circles where this is expected, not unfashionable. In the world we live in, all these “norms” are context dependent.
Here in the Texas hill country, there is this funny fashion where folks complain about how they can't complain about the excesses of "the social justice movement". It's a very meta kind of fashion to see in action.
It's neat though... it's always funny to hear some duder talking about how he can't even say something that he's saying.
Okay. I feel like it's time for experiment ! Or, one might say, "reproducing the behavior of which is spoken".
"I think the immigration flows into Europe are over the top, the EU population cannot seriously be expected to cope with them, or with the economic consequences of said flows, without massive protests"
This is not even a racist statement, at least not in my opinion. But it is definitely "something you can't say". Let's see how quickly this post gets downvoted.
One might argue "but surely nobody would be baited out that easily and transparently", right ? Let's see.
I leave myself fully open to being shown to be very wrong here. I'm making it real easy. All that has to be done is that such a statement must be left alone when it's an obvious bait, and in facts repeats 3 times that it is bait.
Yeah the post-9/11 years were definitely pretty weird in the US, from people claiming you couldn’t morally criticize the president to the ubiquitousness of “SUPPORT THE TROOPS” bumper stickers and signs (which meant what exactly? I still have no idea)
There are honest uses of "SUPPORT THE TROOPS", like promoting improved healthcare for veterans.
Of course, it's also a way to phrase something like "support the war" while being hard to argue with. Like "pro life" and "pro choice". Both deliberate naming schemes to make a position seem hard to argue with.
"Support the troops" was always "Support the war" and it was designed that way. In my view the best that could be done to support the troops would be to bring them home and think twice about foreign adventures.
One of my favorite stand-up routines talks about the infamous bumper sticker philosophy, and what happened when the person moved from a left-leaning location to a right-leaning one.
https://youtu.be/pKBKLeTZbM4
There's a NYtimes opinion column every few weeks decrying campus culture social justice. Forget about conservative news where decrying it is a routine daily schedule item.
There were large anti-war protests in 2003-2004, supported and propped up by most media organizations. It was hardly "morally unfashionable to criticize the war effort".
Dunno. This is just my recollection. It's likely flawed to some degree and biased by my locale. Like I said, I didn't recall it being nearly as severe as the current moral regime.
I can't comment on topics such as rioting, but just to clarify, are you talking about bill C-16, or something else?
From what I've read, C-16 wouldn't likely result in sentencing jail time for something such as pronoun usage. The Canadian Human Rights Act's central focus has to do with topics such as employment, services, and housing. [1]
This is such an unoriginal and unexceptional thread. You try to illicit a veneer of servitude towards reason and logic, but then you can't help but be disingenuous about the subject you're discussing. You're virtue signaling in the worst way possible; you're not as smart as you want to make yourself out to be.
>These far left social justice warriors are literally trying to break windows to prevent some guy from talking about supporting freedom of speech at campuses.
The rally that you're referencing was pretty volatile because of attendees, mainly your dutiful patrons of Reason and Logic (TM) 2018, were shouting slurs and engaging in physical violence. See the following report:
* In one confrontation with BLC protesters, a man shouted, “We need more Michael Browns,” in reference to the 2014 fatal shooting of the 18-year old unarmed black man by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.
* One attendee brought three dogs to the event and was openly criticized by many people for what was interpreted as an aggressive move.
* Steven Ainneta wore a “Support Local 81” jacket — the Downtown Toronto chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club
* told The Varsity that he “was accosted by two separate older men with no affiliation to the university. One was wearing Hell’s Angel’s clothing, and the other, along with his wife, seemed to be identifying themselves as white supremacists. Both shoved me unprovoked, while my hands were up, and used racial, homophobic, and transphobic slurs and epithets with myself and other protestors on separate occasions
>This happened when the university was attempting to get the local politicians to pass a law making it a illegal to call someone the wrong pronoun, punishable by fines and jail time.
Out of all the things that have never happened online or in real life, this has never happened the most. How can you be so angry over something that isn't even happening? I don't understand the ilk that surrounds Peterson. It's a literal cult of personality.
>The law also adds "gender identity or expression" to section 718.2 of the Criminal Code.This section is part of the sentencing provisions and makes gender identity and gender expression an aggravating factor in sentencing, leading to increased sentences for individuals who commit crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression.
So no. No one is going to jail for using the wrong pronoun. Let me know when SJW's start running over people with their cars just because they don't like their existence.
Please refrain from such emotionally charged posts where you don't fully read the content of the parent, and you stoop low enough to start claiming you can read my mind and calling me a lier regarding an amendment for which you didn't even read beyond the Wikipedia summary.
http://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Bills/421/Government/C-16/C... it is literally an amendment that describes gender expression as literally anything you want to label yourself, than suggests misusing these labels is a crime and finally suggests increasing imprisonment and punishments as a result of not using these labels correct. Clause #4.
You are welcome to debate with me if you believe one of my interpretations are incorrect, but the way in which you chose to engage with me is very immature and makes it difficult to hold a discussion with you.
Please read the HN rules first before making future replies.
>Thanks for being an example of the type of behavior I was talking about.
Would you care to specifically point out what about my post is relatable to the behavior you were talking about? You yourself actually attacked an entire group of people with opposing view points and used straw man's to do so. I merely bluntly called this out.
>Please refrain from such emotionally charged posts where you don't fully read the content of the parent,
I read it. Please don't violate HN guidelines by insinuating I haven't read what was necessary. You provided no proof that this is even the case.
>than suggests misusing these labels is a crime and finally suggests increasing imprisonment and punishments as a result of not using these labels correct.
It says nothing of the sort.
>You are welcome to debate with me if you believe one of my interpretations are incorrect
This isn't a debate. You have not presented anything that is arguable. You lied about a very basic event that was recorded and has public records contrary to your "interpretation." You also lied about what the law says. It cannot be read even remotely close to the way you are "interpreting" it and indeed it is impossible to enforce it in any manner you are attempting to describe.
Notice your post got flagged by the community. Please take a moment to consider why.
1. I didn't attack an entire group. I never said "everyone" or "no one". I said "a lot of".
2. I did make an assumption about you being emotionally charged due to:
- "your dutiful patrons of Reason and Logic (TM) "
- "You try to illicit a veneer of servitude towards reason and logic"
- "you can't help but be disingenuous about the subject you're discussing"
You also brought in a number of points lacking citation that I could not find any evidence of occurring at the protest I was saying I saw footage of. I googled and found the source footage, the whole talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwdYpMS8s28
I did not see any dogs, or anyone screaming about Micheal Brown or any of the other key points you mentioned. The whole talk is recorded including the kids trying to break the windows.
Maybe I was wrong in assuming you where emotionally charged, and maybe you just have a naturally hostile-seeming way of expressing yourself including calling names and quoting and claiming without citation. If so I apologize for suggesting it was emotionally charged.
3. It literally spells out those three things in the amendment. Could you read through the amendment and explain how it does not describe what I said above?
4. I don't care if my post is flagged. I went through the due process of actually watching the clip to see if anything you claimed happened occurred which I did not. I believe you should be capable of doing the same. Don't try to witch hunt or bring on a tribal mob just to win an argument. Win it with your facts and logical process you claim to have but haven't yet expressed.
1. That's just being pedantic. Just stick with what you said instead of trying worm out of it.
2. There's nothing emotionally charged about any of that. It's a pretty satirical take on the reality you attempted to present in your first post. IF that makes you uncomfortable then fix your statements being easily satirized.
3. That's not how arguments work, or even how law gets interpreted.
4. You can't really attempt to weaponize HN guidelines when the evidence that you in fact were not following them is visible for everyone to see. You were not respectful to me, to the community (by lying), and certainly not to anyone else who you don't agree with.
>Win it with your facts and logical process you claim to have but haven't yet expressed.
I did. This is the veneer I was referencing. You were in fact the person to reference having superior reasoning skills, but did nothing to demonstrate their presence or even mastery.
Huh, looks like nothing happened. What do you know? Turns out, white men have always been the most protected class of them all, and any change to that paradigm feels like an assault. The onus is on the formerly-protected class to think outside of themselves.
> So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
Has anyone actually collected a whole bunch of information on this?
In my head I'm imagining a table, with the columns being cultures (i.e. 1990s America, 1850s Britain, etc) and the rows being contentiously debated actions / ideas (i.e. age of consent being "low", male students having sex with female teachers, etc), and each cell representing a boolean "yes, this culture is OK with this" / "no, this culture is not ok with this"?
I'd be really interested to see something like that.
> In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge.
Or perhaps they thought there might be something there, considered it for a bit, and decided probably not. How often did their eyes pause at sites that turned out to be totally benign?
"So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong." -- is a litmus test that fails. It's okay for these kinds of terms to trigger you to double-check something, but it's not the case that, for example, every use of "racist" is indicative of faulty thought or misapplied labels.
> You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century."
> This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact.
> "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century."
I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label (socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of capitalism etc.)
So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic:
>I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.
This immediately jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government does, the more socialist the country is".
I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s, 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists.
On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they investigate its cause and name technological rationality. Unlike PG they provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a major demotivator, it seems to imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves. But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates.
PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques.
> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
It's been said before that if you're not risking downvotes, you're not contributing to the conversation.
It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions.
Times change, trends come and go, but humans are largely the same today as before we invented the Atlatl[∆].
I think the point was more that if you wander into a discussion where you already agree with everything being said, your contribution is comparatively less valuable than if you're in a discussion where you disagree.
It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions.
Assuming they already exhibit the behavior of respecting people for whom they strongly disagree. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble and no upside.
This seems like another description of the overton window.
The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.
The overton window is constantly shifting, and in regards to American politics it seems like it's shifting faster than ever. In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military, today such a law would be viewed as archaic. The timeline from when the first state legalized gay marriage to the supreme court decision is also very short in compared to other movements (abolishment of slavery, womens rights, etc.)
> In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military
No, it wasn't.
It was, when it was announced, seen as a betrayal of the gay community by the Clinton Administration.
At any rate, you are looking at policy changes, not dialogue changes, that tells you about something moving, but not the Overton Window, which need not move in the same direction as policy (though one would expect a sudden backlash if they moved in different directions long enough, but then that's not inconsistent with observations, either.)
This article is written with an implicit assumption that expressing opinions is useful. I'm skeptical about this. Sharing sources and stories of our personal experiences (our inputs) seems more useful than sharing unsourced summary outputs.
But that's more difficult, so all I'm giving you is yet another opinion.
A recap like this is more interesting for this article than most because each comments thread is a snapshot in time of the then-current discussion about what is and is not taboo. Absolutely fascinating to skim from a contemporary perspective.
I hope we can keep this trend up over the next decade too. It will provide a fascinating account of evolving taboos and the power shifts and power them.
This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling.
In Bruce Schneier's book Click Here to Kill Everyone[0] he mentions how it took him two years to write the book because of a false start.
In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs / strategic threats.
I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1]
I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic threats I can update my priors and partially relax.
But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this:
Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize, but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to it being around we're all convinced someone else surely has figured out how to mitigate the downsides.
(It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!)
[0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up. I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy a copy for every MP in Canada.
[1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class / domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves out of it.
You still can't talk about Unionizing in some of America's biggest employment venues, that span across every industry and every domain. Not only is it personally unpopular in private conversation a lot of the time, but it can also injure your livelihood. Everything from getting passed up for a promotion or straight up getting fired.
> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?
This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? The central idea is that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. Especially when it comes to different attitudes about gasp their intelligence, even in groups specifically selected (at least partly) for their intelligence.
Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.
> > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?
Kind of depends on who is judging the papers.
> This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ?
Nope.
It's not even a forbidden statement.
It's not even a statement.
Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error.
> The idea that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements.
This is not an uncommon idea in social justice circles, though each specific versions of it is controversial with different supporting and opposing groups.
Heck, the entire idea of group privilege as a basis for distrust frequently found in such circles is exactly a form of this idea.
> Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.
Since, on top of not being a statement, the implicit axis of differentiation (assuming an answer other than “neither” or “it depends”) in the hypothetical has nothing to do with race, that seems improbable, and may say as much about your thought processes as about theirs.
That would mostly be physics phds and professors versus literature phds and professors.
But if you want other examples, the group of people who keep failing to distinguish others' bullshit from "real science" thing are the social sciences [1][2][3]. And if you consider management "science" as a social science, there's roughly a century of this (most higher institutions do consider management science a social science) [4]
At least French literature is studying fiction, whereas the social sciences claim that they're a valid science studying real, repeating (non-fiction) phenomena.
> It's not even a statement.
Unless a statement is very different from what Google answers when I type in "define:statement" I'm going to go with that it is a statement
And judging by the downvotes, it's indeed not allowed.
> Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error.
This sentence does not parse. Could you perhaps rephrase it ?
I find the statement by Paul Graham obviously defines a "total order" [5], which means I could even translate that statement into logical symbols if you like.
Then yes, I supposed the English professors would be more concerned. They likely have less experience with physics than physicists have with English literature. I still doubt either group would actually write anything publishable, so it's a strange proxy for intelligence. Being able to write publishable academic works has much more to do with experience and domain specific knowledge than anything else.
Why not just ask which group would score higher on an IQ test? Because then I'd have no problem guessing that the physicists would, on average, have higher IQ scores. I don't think that's a controversial statement though - Stephen Hawking was often touted as the smartest man alive for his accomplishments in physics.
The problem with this reasoning is that some heretical ideas are perhaps correct, some are just nuts, and some are both nuts and very damaging. While it is true that moral fashions and taboos of discourse can exclude good ideas, the inverse does not follow. It does not follow that an excluded idea is therefore good.
I think this even works in previous ages. While medieval heretics did not deserve the punishments they received, the majority of them were probably nuts and believed things that were at least as irrational as the dominant paradigms of the time.
They called Einstein crazy. They also called Otis Eugene Ray crazy.
How about those heresies? Would you want him on your staff if he were outspoken about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Jews are responsible for all the evils of the world?
Seems to me that a great many of those being excluded from present discourse are being excluded for arguing for very strong forms of biological determinism coupled with a naturalistic fallacy (if it's natural, it's therefore good) argument for the legitimacy of racism and sexism. Those are dubious ideas with a demonstrated recent track record of motivating acts that cause tremendous harm to a lot of people. They're not heresies of the beneficial sort.
All of this, yes. The problems with ascribing value to ideas based on how controversial they are should be obvious. This is possibly the by-product of investment mentality: investing in bad companies is punished financially, but does not appear to pose any societal risk.
