A good essay, and one that relates to a bigger idea, which I think you could summarize as: a major trait of modernity (or post-modernity?) is the insistence that identifying and labeling things that happened in the past prevents them from happening today.
You can see this play out with religious belief, politics, biology, on and on. We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I think studying the origins of popular contemporary ideas (in the way done by Nietzsche or Foucault) [1] is a good start.
You're exactly correct on the solution, but allow me to take it down to a more fundamental level; the traditional liberal arts education!
1. Grammar to understand language
2. Logic to construct arguments based on reason
3. Rhetoric to articulate those ideas and refine them based on communicating with others.
You're also correct in that it is post-modernism which is the root of much of this weird new orthodoxy. It has its place in academia, it's useful for deconstructing an idea or thing, but no place in running a society in which there must be standards of truth upon which we all agree.
Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback, but unfortunately it faces opposition from both the STEM set and contemporary liberal arts departments. Institutionally, I can't think of anyone doing this other than St. John's.
> Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback,
Being a better citizen does not result (directly) in a bigger economy and all educational institutions are under pressure to demonstrate how they are better at preparing students for the workforce. The liberal arts education suffers for this.
My engineering degree at my state school known for its liberal arts education required that a quarter of the classes I took weren't related to engineering or a classical liberal arts education - just random credits with no discernable cause other than to make the university money. If your theory was correct, then the vast majority of those classes would have been engineering-related, with the extras going to classical liberal arts.
At my school, it was the opposite - "classical liberal arts" were hijacked by radical progressives to rewrite history and spread misinformation about human biology. So I guess it goes both ways.
If you need the degree from an accredited institution, I suppose. But even then, it's not insurmountable to learn these concepts on your own and apply them in the real world.
> identifying and labeling things that happened in the past prevents them from happening today.
I think to a degree it does? To me it made me think of Freud. I don't think you need to dissect the complex origins of things. Real life is too complicated and it doesn't give you clear answers. Instead you distill human behavior to some rough raw patterns that repeat and build a vocabulary to describe them. You can then short circuit conversations by calling out patterns.
In order to establish an equivalence you have to develop a function that takes a modern situation and perfectly transposes it to a past situation. This way a person that believes that the past situation was bad will have to admit the present situation is also bad.
Problem 1: it’s difficult to construct such an equivalence
Problem 2: it’s difficult to communicate
Problem 3: humans are not logical robots and can easily handwave it and ignore you
Right, operating by straight analogy doesn't work. If you say "X and Y are acting like NAZIs" that's generally not effective. That's why it's critical to distill thing and create a new vocabulary.
If you take the Salem Witch trials in conjunction with other historical events and distill some general conclusions about human (group?) behavior and give it a label - then you can use history indirectly to improve discourse
To the Freud example .. "You're acting like John at the last birthday party" probably won't get through to someone. But saying "I think you're projecting right now" likely can - b/c you're using a term that describes a common phenomena that everyone is familiar with. Before Freud described the defense mechanisms, people probably had a much harder time "calling people out" on these patterns.
Took me a minute to catch that by "medievalists" you meant people living in the middle ages and not its contemporary meaning of people who study the middle ages.
Anyway though I don't think it's true even adjusting for that. Good vs evil is a model of causes, but not mechanism. Even if you orient in terms of it (which people still do!) you must identify causes and act on them, which also middle ages people did.
You don't call someone a nazi because you dislike them, you do it to circumvent having to address the merits of their argument. It's a brilliant tactical ploy: repurpose the atrocities of the holocaust (which thereby cheapens and lessens the event and its victims) to sling at your opponent.
Calling everyone who calls someone a Nazi a person who calls everything they don't like a Nazi doesn't prevent anything, either. A lot, but not all, of the people I don't like are Nazis. And I'm uncomfortable saying that because it's unorthodox. And you're comfortable calling me out for saying it because it's unorthodox.
A lot of the people you don't like are actual Nazis? Like, card-carrying members of the National Socialist party? Or neo-nazi skinheads? Or Illinois nazis blocking the bridge in front of you?
Or are you doing the exact thing we're talking about?
The equivalent today is something like the homelessness crisis or the war on drugs. We (the whole society) could easily give everyone a basic home by changing some regulations and with a little patience, but we don't do that because we want the kinds of people who are homeless to go away. And the war on drugs was explicitly about locking up the hippies.
Modern era was cannons and muskets starting with the taking of Constantinople and ending with WW1.
Postmodern era is machineguns, high explosives, tanks, planes, and now atomic bombs. Especially the last one plays a huge role in what wars even get started (think about the recent Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine + Iran, and how they would (not) have happened if the ownership of the atomic weapons was reversed) - so Atomic age seems fitting ?
But then I am not sure why you would want to separate them : for instance I don't think that the postmodern relativistic physics and the ideas of moral relativism common in postmodern thinking are unrelated...
I think that one issue is when people say "modern" to mean "current", rather than "more than a century old".
> I don't think that the postmodern relativistic physics and the ideas of moral relativism common in postmodern thinking are unrelated
(hopefully you read this) : they are unrelated, but I see where you came from. Postmodernism is really Postmarxism, but that wasn't sellable in the USA (nor in the USSR, that's why it was born in Europe). And it isn't really moral relativism either. It's peddled like that nowadays, but this recent and not at all a cornerstone from what I read. If anything, postmodernism is amoral (there is a lot from Nietzsch), or consequentialist, for a broad definition of consequentialism.
You have to think of postmodernism as a critique of Marxism. This critique led to the critique of everything, really, but fundamentally, postmodernists asked themselves 'where was Marx wrong'. Some responses (genealogy VS ideology especially) led to what might resemble to moral relativism, but if anything, for a postmodern, a very moral thing is to deepen your understanding of the world.
Well yes, Marx (& Engels), building on Hegel, were philosophically still extremely tied to Christianity, resulting in yet another moral absolutism.
Nietzsche has realized that the supremacy of that meta-morality was over, which, combined with the moral failures of Communist regimes, opened up the way to moral relativism (and to moral egalitarianism, which is the other extreme across from moral absolutism that we must be careful not to fall into).
I think this is a very creative and uncommon interpretation of Marx. Marx advocated that moral is completely dependent of society infra-structure. The moral of a capitalist society would be different than the moral of a feudal society. Moreover, Marxist critique of capitalism is not a moral critique, but an invite to see the existing contradictions that would point to where future changes and developments would happen influenced by such contradictions.
But *postmodernity* is a good term. Confusion arises because a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals from our age used this term and *postmodernism* itself to beat the straw-man and make an impression of profundity.
*Postmodern* thinkers didn't have that much in common, except for a fact that they made predictions about the trajectory of our culture. What they described in their writings was labeled as *postmodernism*. And if you take a look at those trajectories, we indeed live in a postmodern world, or at least we are entering it.
We live in the future. (Of course, we will need a new word to call the time after the present shortly but that’s the best one I can think of).
Parenthetically, this whole idea of orthodox privilege is profoundly weak. The feature of our society should more aptly be called “normality incentive” and it’s profoundly valuable to the extent we don’t want a nation of hermits pulling in 340,000,000 different direction.
If you’d like an example to this idea taken a bit too far, see Leo Strauss.
Studying origins of our contemporary ideas is nothing new. Postmodernism is characterized by the cynicism in regard to those origins, and even more in regard to those ideas that came before.
> We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves
How many of those laughing know have seriously studied that event? I haven’t come across many who have who didn’t immediately see the parallels to Nazism, McCarthyism and modern scapegoating politics.
You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly.
For example, "The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism".
But there is a crucial difference between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Witches don't exist. Communists did exist.
And by Communists, I mean members of and supporters of the Communist Party USA in the US government. The CPUSA was dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic government in the US and its replacement with a dictatorship loyal to Stalin.
After the release of Venona documents and Soviet archives, we know now with certainty that those Communists did exist - they weren't imaginary. They existed in high positions in the US government, they spied for Stalin, gave nuclear and other military information to the Soviets, they made government policy that favored Stalin, the US government knew many of their names, and did nothing about it for years, in some cases over a decade. When people pointed this out, they were called paranoid.
I don't see the parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in that. I see gaslighting. I see blaming the messenger. I don't see a witch hunt.
> You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly.
There were also many other purges, notably in the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, with which parallels could be drawn. Purges incomparably larger and bloodier. Yet strikingly little media draw these parallels [1], essentially lying through omission. There's no better example than Handmaid's Tale, that invented a whole new sexist society to draw parallels with Christianity instead of Islam.
One must be aware that in the Plato's cave of media, those casting the shadows are not motivated solely by the pursuit of truth, nor are they a representative sample of the general population.
> Handmaid's Tale, that invented a whole new sexist society to draw parallels with Christianity instead of Islam.
The point of the book is that religious fanatics can take over even in the USA. It is a cautionary story. It "invented" new things because it is a fictional book, not one describing real events.
Atwood talked about how the Islamic revolution in Iran inspired her description of Gilead. If you don't understand the concept of taking something which happened "far away", to "other people", "a long time ago" and bringing it closer and making it more personal to the audience then you must be very new to this literature thing.
> The point of the book is that religious fanatics can take over even in the USA
That's her point. My point are the gymnastics done to substitute Islam with Christianity. If her work was the exception, with lots of other made-into-Netflix-miniseries works warning of Sharia, I would share your opinion.
It gets even more skewed than Handmaid's Tale: The Woman King was perfectly fine depicting things that happened "far away", to "other people", "a long time ago". What the films was not fine with was accurately depicting the African kingdom of Dahomey as slavers, and the French as (belatedly) fighting against slavery. So the film simply reversed their roles [1].
For a more topical example, look at how the Apollo affair [2] made it into popular media: Israel stole plutonium from the US for their weapons program. It inspired the book Sum of All Fears, in which the plutonium was instead stolen by Palestinians. By the time it was made into a star-studded movie, the villains became Neo-Nazis.
There is always some artistic excuse to justify these politically useful alterations.
> My point are the gymnastics done to substitute Islam with Christianity.
Clearly here we disagree. I see no gymnastics. Christian religious fanatics are are actively meddling with woman's reproductive rights as we are discussing this.
> It gets even more skewed than Handmaid's Tale
The difference is that those two stories you mention are purporting to describe something which happened. Because of that you can ask if they are accurate or not. With something completely fictional that is not a valid question.
Are you implying we should not critique or contextualize works in a way their authors would disapprove of?
> The difference is that those two stories you mention are purporting to describe something which happened
Only the Woman King - The Sum of All Fears is openly fiction. In fact, most media are works of fiction grown around a grain of truth. Or they should be. When that grain is changed to a lie, over and over again, it is prudent to notice.
Or we can stubbornly find a different excuse for each case, and miss the forest for the trees.
> Are you implying we should not critique or contextualize works in a way their authors would disapprove of?
No. You made it sound like you have a problem with her book showcasing her opinion. As if that is somehow dirty.
> When that grain is changed to a lie, over and over again, it is prudent to notice.
Sure. You still failed to elaborate on the lie inherent in the The Handmaid's Tale. Must not be that great of an example if when I asked about it you rather started talking about two other unrelated stories.
> Or we can stubbornly find a different excuse for each case
Islam is external (to America, mostly), Christianity is internal.
If you make it about Islam instead of Christianity, the solution becomes "bomb more arabs", rather than "watch out and don't accidentally become this".
As I said, there's always some excuse, different every time, but with the same result: defame your enemy. The issues in the Apollo affair or A Time to Kill [1] were internal, yet the villains and/or victims were still changed.
The only gymnastics going on are your gymnastics to make out that any criticism or warnings about fundamentalist Christianity are gymnastics because they should be about Islam instead.
Wow, so because a considerable minority of the CPUSA leaders and loudmouthes wanted to violently overthrow the US government, all their political overt allies needed to be removed from public jobs, the party was disbanded and all the leaders, even those not advocating for violence had to be put in prison.
Imagine if they successfully stormed the Capitol, they would have been put to death.
Yes, of course. Democracy is very important, so in order to protect it, even such extreme measures can be morally justified. And before you try to mirror this argument with what was happening in the USSR: the USSR was not democratic, it was totalitarian, and protecting totalitarism is never morally correct, period.
> you see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly
Have you read primary documents relating to the Salem Witch Trials?
It is difficult to read them and believe key actors truly thought they’d found witches. Instead, a frustrated population was led to scapegoat their situation on social misfits. Yes, some people probably believed they were genuine witches. But more crucially, the way they were pursued mirrors the way false accusations are levelled at marginalised groups across history.
> there is a crucial difference between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Witches don't exist. Communists did exist… When people pointed this out, they were called paranoid.
I agree completely. That said, there are parallels, and their construction is a recurring theme.
I mentioned the Nazis, but was specifically thinking of the Éparation sauvage. Nazi collaborators in France existed. But the way they were “pursued” was farcical. McCarthyism is similar—Communist collaborators existed in America. But McCarthy was not considered paranoid, and he did not conduct pointed investigations; he was given broad powers to pursue and punish those he simply suspected.
The lesson of these periods isn’t solely that marginalised groups get punished. It’s also that false accusations give real perpetrators cover. McCarthyism isn’t solely a story of a breach of the rule of law and civil rights. It’s also one of demagoguery facilitating actual breaches of our security.
I would point that witches, if you think of them as people who follow pagan doctrines and knowledge not sanctioned by church also existed. What did not exist was old women flying in brooms. The medieval witch hunt existed to hunt ideology dangerous to the medieval status quo. If these real witches did not exist, the myth created by propaganda involving evil women flying in brooms also would not exist.
Likewise, communists are also people with ideology anathema and dangerous to the current capitalist status quo. I also would point that while real communist exist, the propaganda of children-eater communists do not exist. But the exaggerated propaganda would not exist if the real thing did not exist.
Anyway, communists always would be persecuted and vilified in a capitalist world because they are against private property, a central principle for capitalist societies. It does not matter if they try to advocate their ideas democratically via elections or not (Salvador Allende was violently overthrow anyway). This would change only if the ideology somehow become harmless to the status quo. Likewise, a medieval society never would allow pagan ideologies not aligned with the church, because this is against the core principle of medieval societies.
I don't think what you call "witch hunt" is what the majority of people call "witch hunt".
For example, when Trump says "they are accusing me of fraud but it is just a witch hunt", he does not say "fraudster don't exist", he says "those people have found someone they don't like, or have an interest to get rid of, or are super paranoiac, so they will jump on accusations and see 'proofs' that these accusations are real everywhere even when it's not the case".
(I take Trump as an example where "witch hunt" was used. But in the case of Trump, I call BS: the reason he is so often accused is because he simply has done a lot of shady things)
The historical witch hunt is a good example of that: people were trialed and found guilty, but we now know that witches don't exist, so it demonstrates that they did not really have any proofs, they were just so biased that every little thing was a proof to their eyes.
This is the reason the McCarthyism is associated to the concept of witch hunt: during this time, any single element could have been overblown into the proof the person was anti-democracy communist ready to kill their neighbourgs even if it turned out this person had done absolutely nothing wrong and was innocent. And if there are arguments to justify very stringent background checks in some sector (military, politics, ...), this was extended to sectors where it was not at all needed, such as art and cinema (the worst they could have done was to put very hidden propaganda messages that would have had no effect on 99.9% of the viewers).
And this is also why people talked about paranoia: it is ok to be careful and do a lot of background checks, but if you find a red socks in the bottom of the drawer and scream "ahAh, this is the proof this person is a commie", then, yes, you are paranoiac even if communists really exist.
> they were just so biased that every little thing was a proof to their eyes.
While all the accusations were indeed false [1], they actually had surprisingly high standards of proof, and the modern perception of witch hunts is largely an ahistoric lie [2]. If there's one thing to learn from this, it's to question the stories we're told - both their content and their selection.
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-malleus-malefic... - Quoting at length because it's too funny: How do you prove an accusation? Kramer’s preferred method is with at least three witnesses (although judges are permitted to occasionally convict with fewer). Who may serve as a witness? [..] It would seem that maybe the suspect’s enemies should not be allowed to testify against her, because they might be motivated by grudges. On the contrary side, most witches are people of bad reputation who have alienated their whole village [..] So Kramer compromises again: enemies may testify, but not mortal enemies. A person is considered a mortal enemy of a suspect if one of them has tried to kill the other, or their families have a blood feud, or something of that nature. [..]
witch hunters are nomadic types. They don’t know who is mortal enemies with whom in every little village. [..] Kramer’s proposed solution is to ask the suspect to list off all her mortal enemies; if she names the witness, something is afoot.
(Some of you may have already noticed a loophole here. A History Of The Inquisition In Spain describes the case of one Gaspar Torralba, accused in 1531: “There were thirty-five witnesses against him, for he was generally hated and feared. In his defence he enumerated no less than a hundred and fifty-two persons, including his wife and daughter, as his mortal enemies, and he gave the reason in each case which amply justified their enmity . . . The tribunal evidently recognized the nature of the accusation; he was admitted to bail, July 1, 1532, and finally escaped with a moderate penance.”)
By "was a proof to their eyes", I mean "was a demonstration to their eyes", in the "mathematical" sense of the term.
You can have "legal" proofs that 2+2=5, for example by having a lot of witnesses testifying it's the case, but you still don't have any "mathematical" proof and you will never have any, because if the hypothesis is fundamentally incorrect, it is impossible to have a correct demonstration that the hypothesis is correct. (and I hope no one will react to that with Gödel, it will just show that they totally missed the point)
In both MacCarthyism and a witch hunt, even if the processes were super complicated, people were too easily accepting conclusions that are incorrect because they were too happy with these conclusions.
This is for me the point of the expression "witch hunt", while the message I've reacted to explain that a witch hunt makes sense only if it concerns something that does not really exist.
Indeed, on one hand you have a convoluted modern caste system which can irrationally change form at any given time - and on the other hand, you have philosophical ideas that have matured over hundreds or even thousands of years.
My point was more that the "irrational modern ideas" aren't just conjured from the ether, but can be traced through history back centuries, and that understanding this helps one recognize the issue.
I’ve always found it interesting how if you know someone’s strong opinion on issue X, you can typically predict their views on issues Y and Z even though there is no inherently fundamental relation between X, Y, and Z. All you need to know is the country and the time period they live in.
The fact that views are so tightly correlated on the basis of party has always fascinated me, and I wonder if there is a way you can measure the amount of “in-groupism” someone exhibits. This is probably just another term for conformity or a lack of independent thinking, as Paul mentions.
I was speaking with a relative recently who claimed he was very independent-minded and that his views didn’t match the mainstream. I replied that his views seemed to exactly match the opposite of the views of party X in the U.S. in 2023 and said this doesn’t make you independent, but rather a contrarian. You are still in fact letting party X determine what you think. What is the chance that if born elsewhere your morality would just so happen to match up with the views directly opposite to those of some specific social group in another time period in another part of the world?
For someone who is truly an independent thinker, one would expect their views to sometimes match party A, to sometimes match party B, and to sometimes match neither. This isn’t to say that merely being a nonconformist makes someone more likely to be correct; there are bound to be plenty of mistakes even among independent thinkers.
Paul has written quite a few essays on this subject, so by now I’m really curious what viewpoint(s) he has that he can’t say aloud (and whether I agree). I’ve noticed in Silicon Valley there are quite a few people who—after deeper conversation with them—seem to be independent thinkers, but they pretend to follow the in-group for the purpose of maintaining social harmony; this seems especially common among people born outside the U.S. living in the Bay Area.
> Paul has written quite a few essays on this subject, so by now I’m really curious what viewpoint(s) he has that he can’t say aloud (and whether I agree).
Discussing them here (in a public forum) isn't really an option. Because they are generally outside the Overton window, they are likely also outside the Overton window here on HN. Which means one would get voted down or flagged if one talked about it here.
The safe place to talk about such heretical opinions is between good friends you know wouldn't ostracize you for saying something blasphemous, or when talking to a person you know has a very low tendency for conformity.
There’s a simple litmus test for independent-mindedness: does the person in question do the continuous work of collating “news” and narratives from all across the spectrum? If not, they’re likely going with “the current thing” of their preferred echo chamber, which may or may not be real.
> There’s a simple litmus test for independent-mindedness: does the person in question do the continuous work of collating “news” and narratives from all across the spectrum?
Simple? What if they think the entire range to care about are “my conservative grandfather” and “my liberal in-laws”? In other words this isn’t a litmus test unless the person even knows what the spectrum is.
Which is the point at which you return to Orthodoxy Privilege, or rather Ideology as people other than Paul “Not Invented Here” Graham has been calling it for over a century.
This heuristic would essentially lead one to believe that independent-mindedness is largely not possible would it not (the explicit "probabilistic" claim in the conclusion)?
I meant it in a more technical sense, as in “I start my morning by checking 4-5 news outlets from different corners of the political field and try to figure out what’s really going on by comparing the narratives”. That of course is not sufficient; one has to do their homework on prior history of whatever the contentious issue is.
And yes, probably it’s not an activity most people engage in.
That is certainly a fine practice, but my disagreement is with the claim that doing this is necessary for open-mindedness, and that those who do not are "probably" doing something highly silly.
There was a website aimed at something similar called “the factual” but they never really got the algorithm off the ground before they were bought - by yahoo news by all things.
Hello! I work in local politics as a side-hustle/volunteer effort. This litmus test is absolute bullshit because it ignores the massive swaths of issues that are party orthogonal and don't make headlines. When actually pressed the liberalest liberal who's ever liberaled with a car bumper full of stickers will actually have a unique set of political views once you move past the like six wedge issues and vice versa. And the more interesting one is the reasons behind a view vary wildly. I was taken aback when I talked to a very conservative gay veteran who said that trans people shouldn't be in the military because, "they won't get the care they need" and that people should all have guns to shoot crooked cops.
And the other problem is that those "unrelated" views on both sides of the spectrum are actually way more related than people assume and those common threads define the group so it's not at all surprising that you can see a theme and make predictions based on it.
An easy one for liberals, asymmetric power dynamics are bad. You can follow this theme to lgbt rights, blm, general anti-corporation, defund the police, drug decriminalization, generally anti-prison, supporting Ukraine, supporting Palestine against Israel, but also supporting Jewish populations at home, reducing the size of the American military, strong labor laws, unions, immigration, defunding ICE, civil rights, anti-insurance/single-payer healthcare, breaking up monopolies, taxing billionaires they all stem from this. You show me a sympathetic underdog and I'll tell you who the liberals will support lol.
Leaving aside your focus on political views (even though the test I proposed is more about getting better informed than diversifying one’s beliefs and prejudices), what’s the typical case you’re getting at: do people have unique sets of political views or are those views more clustered “than people assume”? You sort of started arguing for the former and then pivoted.
There are two groups of issues, ones that stem from the core defining beliefs of the groups that cause individuals to self-label as members in the first place and everything else. You'll see a lot of unity on the former and surprisingly little unity on the latter outside of transient political coalitions of convenience. Once you stray from things that are rooted in the core values of a group you'll find huge amounts of disagreement and that individuals have extremely varied views taken holistically.
> Paul has written quite a few essays on this subject, so by now I’m really curious what viewpoint(s) he has that he can’t say aloud (and whether I agree). I’ve noticed in Silicon Valley there are quite a few people who—after deeper conversation with them—seem to be independent thinkers, but they pretend to follow the in-group for the purpose of maintaining social harmony; this seems especially common among people born outside the U.S. living in the Bay Area.
Think about this a little more. When you see people being very opinionated against or for something it is most likely in public in broad daylight. They “toe the line” and rally the wagons. But maybe in private—when among friends and they don’t have to put up a front—they can be more nuanced.
It's less likely that those people are truly independent, and more likely that they simply brought the orthodox beliefs of their countries of origin to the Bay Area.
That’s a good point, although I would still maintain that they constitute a different “type” of person than those that reside in their country of origin, because most people don’t uproot their lives to move between countries. Whether or not that correlates with being more of an independent thinker, I don’t know.
There are millions and millions of people streaming across our border as you read this. Perhaps people moving between countries (or at least, from certain countries to certain other countries) is more common than you think.
We also use Motivated Reasoning to convince ourselves that the opinions we hold for tribal reasons are in fact good moral ones we came up with ourselves.
> Paul has written quite a few essays on this subject, so by now I’m really curious what viewpoint(s) he has that he can’t say aloud
One approach would be to list issues that can't be said aloud today...
Many sensitive topics are simply partisan: you can be pro-life or pro-choice, as well as pro- or anti- guns, death penalty, socialism, capitalism, science, war, even democracy! You can say anything on any of those topics without fear of being shunned by everybody. You will upset some people, but not all of them.
The only opinions that will get one instantly banned from pretty much everywhere, that I can think of, are sexism and racism. (And rightly so, may I add.)
So when someone says "there are things that are true that can't be said", I wonder if they're entertaining thoughts that I would find... unpalatable.
Some things could be true but still taboo. You may believe (with the orthodoxy) that they are false, but this doesn't change the possibility that they are true. And if they are, believing them can't be immoral.
(Arguably, even believing falsities can't be immoral, because beliefs aren't the type of thing that are morally right or wrong. It's rather intentions for actions than can be so.)
Well yes, that's the whole discussion. It's possible that some things that are taboo, are true.
It's even likely! because why else would there be a taboo? Society doesn't need to put a taboo on things that are obviously, totally wrong, like "the earth is flat". Arguably, a taboo is only needed to hide a possible truth.
The question is: what are those things? Or if not the things themselves, the domains, the general topic?
I can't think of any subject that cannot even be alluded to, like Voldemort.
You just admitted you know of two things that will get you banned everywhere. Then you said that taboos (such as against the things that will get you banned everywhere) are only needed to hide possible truths. Connect the dots.
Insofar as orthodox privilege is a real phenomenon, one of its greatest strengths is its ability to cast a smokescreen around wealth, power, and influence.
Paul Graham is an obscenely wealthy and powerful man; he benefits disproportionately from controlling the public discourse around what is or isn’t “orthodox.” This is worth remembering when he (or any other phenomenally wealthy and powerful person) attempts to lay out these kinds of oblique culture war positions.
I don’t think that the underlying observation (wealthy, powerful people stand to benefit disproportionately from confusion about how society allocates privilege) is ad hominem. Unless being characterized accurately as wealthy and powerful is an insult.
It’s a culture war position in the sense that it’s a response to one.
It is ad hominem. Thing is, ad hominem is often a valid way of arguing, as long as a property or trait in question is relevant to the issue. Yet, as many other things in the internet discussion, it ended up as an easy way to label and disregard arguments of others without putting any effort into discussion.
I think that's naive. Class consciousness is being aware that those with wealth are the ones who set the orthodoxy to begin with. Paul Graham writing a blogspot is irrelevant, he is barely exercising his position while doing so.
Look for corporate meddling into politics and culture war if you want a smokescreen. The current culture wars being identity-based isn't an accident, for example, there won't be a worker's right month same as there won't be a worker's right parade, no corporation is putting money into that.
I'll assume that this was downvoted because the "culture war" dividing America is one of the preeminent expressions of class warfare in this country, and therefore acknowledging class _is_ inherently engaging in the "culture war". Which, fair point.
We are posting on a website that he created, and that he defined the original (and primary) scope of discourse for.
But more directly: at least two people have called my comment an ad hominem; 'pg is arguably the single person most responsible for popularizing the dismissal of critiques as "ad hominem" among technical people[1]. Note that even he doesn't make the ridiculous claim that personal observations are inherently irrelevant.
It's an observation; I don't think I've stated anything that isn't (1) public knowledge, or (2) common sense about how wealthy and powerful people maintain wealth and power.
Yes, all ad hominems are observations. The point is they are merely observations about the person making the argument, not the argument itself. They aren't necessarily false, and they may even be interesting to some people, but they fail to tackle the argument. An argument's validity doesn't depend on who spoke it, so if you think it is invalid, you might attempt to explain why.
I don't have an opinion about whether it's valid or invalid, and I don't think 'pg does either. I think this kind of argumentation is psychological dressage for ego-dystonic rich and powerful people.
Paul Graham is (was) a lonely nerd who felt different than other people. The smokescreen is maintaining this self- identity when his practical situation changed.
Reminds me of Kanye, who has been keeping his embattled underdog act up the entire time.
EDIT: not to criticize too heavily, the post is very good
On the one hand, I think this highlights an important "blind spot" in human thought. Our ideas and creativity are hugely influenced by our environment and prevailing social conventions. It's strange he doesn't use the term "Overton Window", because that's exactly what he's talking about and it seems useful to place his thoughts in context with the existing body.
On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with the implicit assertion that any truth should be acceptable to give power. It's easy to filter, twist, and reassemble the truth to deceive and manipulate. Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected. In fact, the ideology of "free speech absolutism" is itself an orthodoxy specific to a relatively small cultural bubble, and it's objectively quite extreme.
> Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected.
Honest question: When is it ever advantageous to reject truths? I always remind myself of the Litany of 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.
Of course it is. Trump is a living example of how advantageous it can be for someone to reject almost obvious, self evident truths.
That's an egregious example. Consider another example I saw raised by an anthropologist. It was a tribe that had only bows and spears being being overrun another tribe armed with modern weapons. They survived courtesy of their shaman convincing the young men some complicated ritual made them immune to the bullets. This gave them the courage to take the interlopers on, and a lot of them dying in the process. Obviously the young men who died weren't better off, but their relatives got to continue the young mens blood line as a consequence. The ritual was complicated enough to make it plausible the men killed got it wrong.
Sorry no link (it was here on HN). But if you google "origins of religion war immune to bullets" you will find numerous other examples, and of course the search term hints at a popular theory about why it's sometimes advantageous to reject truths.
Okay, the anthropology example is convincing, if far-fetched. It seems this couldn't realistically happen in a modern society.
The Trump example is arguably beside the point because the previous poster talked about a truth being harmful for the whole society, not for an individual.
I.e. It becomes problematic when it involves human behavior at a stereotypical level. This isn't to say that stereotypes don't sometimes exist for preexisting (non-self-fulfilling) reasons, but even some people prone to sociopathy can leave good lives if properly treated.
Sure. The key is whether a statement is a genuine truth, or a policy based on a genuine truth plus various moral priors. Moral priors aren't genuine truths, they're predilections or rules of thumb.
And even baldly stating a genuine truth enough times will have effects outside of its truthfulness. People respond to truths, they don't just hear them.
This works on a micro level in companies where groupthink has taken hold, but also at a macro level where our media exalts sycophancy. Privilege for mouthing orthodoxies describes "the banality of evil," well. It was a reference to people who thought in slogans and recieved clichés, which dulled them to the consequences of what they were actually doing.
Coining new phrases to respond to the present may shed some light for younger people who lack perspective, but it doesn't capture the gravity of what we're watching happen. There are precedents with strong predictive power for all of this.
> This works on a micro level in companies where groupthink has taken hold,
As someone who feels this daily, appealing to politeness as the essay suggests often does help. You're basically living in different versions reality, which is frustrating, but that doesn't mean you can't find some common ground and work together. After-all, it's just a job, and we shouldn't take it personally.
This is frequently talked about regarding the scientific disciplines - it's very hard to make progress with novel ideas; and this despite the fact that every leap in understanding has been due to the novel contributions of novel minds.
Lots of people happily surrender the cold unknown of self-determination for the warm embrace of conformity. Conformity simplifies, affirms, and diffuses accountability. It's easy to understand the temptation.
It's just being human. Everyone "surrenders" to conformity in some way, shape or form. In some aspects of life you will be part of an in-group, in others you may lean towards non-conformity. Nothing to do with "temptation" here.
And you have to conform in some aspects to be nonconformist. If you don't conform in every aspect of your life that's like getting all the answers wrong on a true/false test. Your behavior is just as rigidly defined by society's expectations of you.
Besides, it's not like the chances that you will self-determine yourself into a better person than if you went for conformity are that good: after all, it's your first time doing this while the society, on the other hand, has lots of past experience with that, right?
I found that it is really hard to go against the mainstream of the bubble you live in for two reasons: Let's take issue X as an example. One side says X is always true, the other that it is always false. But you think that actually "it depends". The two problems are then:
(1) When you don't fully agree with your bubble on X, the more extreme ones will assign you to the opposite bubble and shun you.
(2) There are people in the opposite bubble that will pretend to believe X "depends" in order to lure less extreme members over to their own bubble. And many in your bubble will believe that you are one of those.
We are so caught up in our tribal thinking that many will simply not believe that you genuinely think "it depends".
I believe that this is "by design", that someone is dividing and conquering the public. Many will agree with me here, and then they will finish with "but the other side is too brainwashed to notice"... Knowing that it is a trap, does not help you to avoid it ;)
> that someone is dividing and conquering the public.
Yea that someone is society.
Tribalism happens because the feverent supporters are the ones that actually give money, time, etc. Someone that sees the nuance, is more likely to be okay with either solution, or said another way, not likely to give money to one side because they don't want to fully endorse one side.
The people supported then go on to be politicans and media personalities that then force people to pick sides because it's more advantegous to them.
It's an oversimplification, and not always applicable but a decent enough explanation for lots of our problems.
I think there's a "the world is entirely grey" presumption here that prevents the full analysis. You're not treating "it depends" as the fully-fledged position that it is. If you did you would see that there are now three positions the originals X, Y, and a new one Z that are incompatible. They can't all be right. X and Y have lots of supporters, why do you presume your new position Z to be correct simply because it lies on one of many possible lines to draw between X and Y?
Surely for any real world issue the positions X and Y were the result of someone else's seeing the nuance but landed in a different place than you did.
I wonder whether this line of thought started with particular ideas of the writer that are currently taboo.
If so, given that the writer seems wealthy, influential, and connected, presumably those taboo ideas might see movement towards implementation or acceptance.
Yeah. I know nothing about the author, but do know that there are ideas out there that everyone knows you can't express sincere interest in. Even the orthodox know this, and would agree that it is unsafe to do so.
You don't praise the community organization ability of MS13 in a police bar shortly after a cop has been killed by a gang member. If non-black, you don't throw around the N word in certain company, under the philosophy that doing so will desensitize the word. Certain topics involving sex aren't mentioned. Etcetera.
Maybe it is just early in the morning for me, but I am not confident that I understand why Paul switched the roles in the concluding statement of the essay.
> Similarly, if someone says they can think of things that are true but that cannot be said, it's only polite to take them at their word, even if you can't think of any yourself.
That statement suggests to me that the responsibility of being polite should fall on those in the orthodox privileged demographic when challenged by those claiming that there are truths that cannot be safely spoken. It seems flipped around from the rolls expressed in the body of the essay, and that has me confused. How would they know to be polite? How is this actually a solution?
I understand that part of the essay. However; the essay argues that the orthodox privileged group is the one that cannot see that there are truths that cannot be safely expressed, but concludes that this same group should be polite to those that believe such truths exist. If my understanding is correct, how could they know to be polite to those outside of their demographic. For that, they would need to be sympathetic, or at the very least empathetic.
I guess my big problem with the concluding statement is that it places the responsibility of resolving the impasse on the demographic that is apparently incapable of imagining the world from the others perspective. That seems futile in the absence of empathy. Whose responsibility is it then, to establish a sense of empathy amongst the majority of the orthodox privileged group (empathy would be needed in the other group as well of course)?
Consider also that an obligation to be polite and silence ones voice from engaging in meaningful discourse, may very well be what ultimately leads to an orthodox privileged group in the first place, making the proposed solution a paradox.
I don't know how generalizable this is to people in the real world. That is to say not that I don't think that many people default to this about particular topics, but that at this point in time many people have heard anecdotes (if it hasn't happened to them) about authority figures or experts disbelieving something real, as in physicians saying it's "all in your head" to something that turns out to be stage 4 cancer, or whatever.
Thus it should be easy to at least make a crack in the armor of anyone with orthodox privilege in one area by reference to these modern-day events where people are disbelieved, and even abusively so (in the case of medicine).
Sure, politeness might work too, but only in creating a veneer of tolerance. An appeal to politeness does not crack the armor the way an example of modern orthodox being wrong would.
I think real-world examples are very dangerous to provide here, because they can easily derail the conversation into arguing about the validity of those examples, because if they are currently unconventional ideas, someone with orthodox privilege will see them as simply false, and bad examples. That's the blindness referred to.
The Zeitgeist around the date PG wrote this article is probably no coincidence; if you really want recent examples of divisive topics.
Historical examples are great for that reason, and there are plenty in the history of science. One typical example I love, is Wegener's theory of continental drift and how long it was ridiculed, hindering scientific progress, before it was finally accepted many decades later, in the form of the theory of plate tectonics.
The Zeitgeist of that time was an example of the reverse of orthodox privilege (as discussed in the article). Or so it seemed to me. As competing orthodoxies were actively fighting out in the open, each with their own powerful champions.
Meanwhile everyone who depends on a job to survive knows that there are opinions that you just don't bring up.
So it seems to me orthodox privilege, in the vein brought up by Graham, is really a subset of power privilege.
One of the "benefits" of traditional society is that there's a stronger gravitational pull towards the orthodox.
e.g. dealing with the majority case deals with 80% of all cases. VS in a more diverse group, the biggest pie slice might only be 20%
The system has a much higher burden of complexity to deal with edge cases.
An argument can be made that Dunbar's number sets a cap on the complexity a system can deal with. External scaffolding like a legal system increases system capacity which then reduces how necessary the orthodox gravity is.
> the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe
Is this a typo: whatever is currently...?
> If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce
Impossible how? That particular example would be extremely easy to test. It's so easy in fact that it's performed many times every day by audiologists. Raise your hand when you hear the sound.
People suffering from tinnitus constantly hear high-pitched sounds. For a minority of them the sound is really present (produced e.g. by the blood in the vessels near the ear), but for most of them it is an illusion produced by their brain. The latter category have no means to prove someone else they are really hearing the sound.
Ok, but the phrasing "If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't" really doesn't sound like the OP is referring to (constant) tinnitus, instead of an ability.
Impracticable would have been a better word. Audiologists typically aren't just around the corner, and even if they were, the high-pitched noise may no longer be audible in their office.
Very impressive essay, I have this feeling long time ago, but didn't interpret well.
I think the best way is to make people realize some of their sensor, mindset or feeling are set by others, especially those silence area we can't even mention. Like a mobile phone's default settings, we have to realize that some things are just set up to be this way and can be presented in other ways.
I see this as the yappy little dog that's only yappy when its owner is around to 'back em up'. We can't really blame the dog growing up in its environment and turning out the way it did. We should all avoid bubbles and have more intermingling of groups so we don't end up with default views for too many things.
In addition to being non-orthodox, you also have to be right AND it has to be about a topic that lends itself to having a good payoff. You can be unorthodox and right about something but since the thing is 80s era laptop stand color scheme design there simply isn't a lot of profit to be had. It is also easy to be unorthodox about an important (high-payoff) thing, but simply be wrong. An airline that makes its route planning based on the idea that the Earth is flat could make an absolute killing if it actually were flat, but it isn't so it can't.
Many, if not most, unorthodox truths can be very important, but don't offer an individual a large payoff when they believe them. For example, it is the middle ages, and you believe that witches don't exist. This is both an important truth and offers you approximately zero payoff.
Yeah, saying unorthodox opinions out loud results in social penalties. That's why examples can't be produced for people who believe unorthodox opinions don't exist.
I think "orthodox" here is not the best choice of words. After reading the article I think "mainstream privilege" better captures what PG tries to describe.
This because orthodox tend to refer to "wanting to stick to, or go back to, how it was"; which could be very much against the mainstream opinion of today.
That's not what _orthodox_ means to most people. It usually means something like "conforming to established doctrine" (especially in a religious context). The definition you posted would better fit the word _conservative_ in my view.
Literally means something like "correct opinionism" in greek. Which as a lifelong member of the eastern orthodox church I have always found hilarious. Out the gate starting an argument with the name.
If you dont believe Orthodox Privelege exists, work in San Francisco for a few years. Provided you are a critical thinker, it will become obvious that the culture is akin to excommunication for declaring the universe is not geocentric.
Personal responsibility is hard. Responsibility for ones nation state, even harder.
When you live in a society which is murdering innocent people every twenty minutes, its hard to evaluate ones own privilege in that context - especially if you're ignoring the cost of that action and its effect on your personal life.
It doesn't matter how enlightened one is, or how woke - if you're still using streets that were paid for, in the blood of foreign innocents, you're not better than the totalitarian-authoritarian fellow citizen you despise so much because of their privilege. You're both members of a nation state that is abusing its privilege.
So its one thing to have an internal civil war on the subject of classes one finds offensive to ones world view - its another thing to ignore the impact of your nations' actions on those not privileged to have been born in it.
Tangent to this idea, is the idea that if you consume news from an extremely biased source, as long as their biases align with your biases, it seems like a "neutral" or unbiased source and you simply can't believe people who say that your news is biased.
In actuality, if you were actually consuming an unbiased news source, you would be exposed to ideas and arguments you disagree with, you would be exposed to all sides of issues. You would read things you like, and things you don't like. It would make arguments for things you believe in, and good faith arguments for things you don't.
In communist countries there was some sort of limited freedom of speech (there is a specific name to it, but I forgot) which allowed lively debate, but only within tight boundaries. The problem with this is that it creates an illusion that there is freedom of speech. Because after all, disagreement is allowed to exist. But only as long as the disagreement doesn't touch on topics that are forbidden by the censors.
Now the same arguably exists in democratic forums as well. Except here it mostly isn't a literal censor, but an invisible Overton window, that dictates what is in the realm of being debatable, and what must not be questioned by anyone.
Capitalist countries have this too. You can say "free Israel", but if you say "free Palestine" you get doxxed, fired from your job and maybe evicted from your home. It's more subtle, because instead of immediately getting taken and sent to a gulag for your speech, the path is somewhat indirect, but still just as clear.
I think realistically "free Palestine" wouldn't get you fired, just like "free Israel" wouldn't. I think a better example is this: Saying "black lives matter" is perfectly acceptable, but saying "white lives matter" would probably get you in massive trouble.
The problem with unorthodox thinkers, as Graham defines them, is that they are often not grounded in expertise. For example, I will take an unorthodox opinion of my own: Neither socialism nor capitalism are great economic systems and we need novel thought on new economic systems that are not based in industrial revolution assumptions.
(Another, to give a guttural rather than intellectual reaction from some: I believe we should change the culture that gender is not presented publicly until the child chooses a gender. They are also given provisional names that are unisex and are allowed to choose their own name at puberty.)
However, I have not spent the years of deep thought to truly develop the arguments. While I have a lot more invested into gender studies than the average human, I am not an expert. Expert goes far further than reading a few books and watching some YouTube videos. The burden on me is far higher than just saying, "this is what I believe" because they are unsubstantiated.
The truth is that if you have a plethora of unorthodox views, it is likely because you have not performed in-depth research to be an expert. You likely do not understand the landscape of the arguments, the historical context and critiques, and the nuances to the argument because understanding all of that can take months of study and interaction with the experts.
That doesn't mean that you need some sort of degree: An unorthodox opinion that is well-substantiated, for example, is Tim Ferriss's examination of psychedelics. He has obviously put in the work and has put money in experts' hands to validate those ideas. This is in stark contrast to the work that many put into their unorthodox opinions.
But ultimately, most people would do better if they acknowledged that their opinions in places outside their expertise are largely shallow.
Regarding your unorthodox opinion on gender, I think the net effect of such a parenting strategy will simply be more confusion and identity crises, and the increased likelihood of sterilizing the genetic line. The number of people who have suffered gender dysphoria is vanishingly small, especially in older generations, so this policy would benefit few children. Moreover, we can see that gender dysphoria rates increase depending on peer group and culture, suggesting it is not simply a genetic idiosyncrasy and can spread as a social contagion.
There is also a philosophical assumption that removing all social impositions frees someone to be their authentic self, but the question is what is authenticity? There are many branching paths our lives take that shape how we evolve. If you had parents that took great interest in instilling good values and education, you would end up authentically different than if they had taken a laissez-faire approach and told you to figure it out yourself. The left seems to take the contradictory perspective that humans are generally blank slates shaped by their environment, yet also pushes a kind of genetic determinism on gender and sexuality.
I think the examples you name aren't what pg has in mind. It's more like saying "God doesn't exist" in the year 1800. It was highly taboo to say something like this, and doing so would immediately damage your social standing.
The other point is: he doesn't argue one should ignore expert opinions in general. He just says that what is sayable in public likely has important blindspots, to which any expert is subject to as well.
This is a great point. Not the final answer, maybe, but an important observation: that paradox often stems from ignorance.
It could be argued (it is sometimes argued) that ignorance fuels creativity ("he did it because he didn't know it was impossible", etc.); but more often than not, creativity stems from a deep familiarity with a given topic, and the ability to detect / invent connections between different subject matters that are not obvious, or indeed visible to anyone else.
The problem with the idea that unorthodox ideas should only be adopted after deep thought, is that if it takes years of deep thought to convince yourself of the idea, you'll never convince anybody else of it.
What I've come to understand is that a good unorthodox thinker is not one that is a deep thinker. A good unorthodox thinker is one that puts their theories into practice, experiments, self-promotes, and plays politics. Sometimes their ideas work out, sometimes they don't, but heterodoxy is the engine of change, liberalism, and progress.
The problem with orthodoxy is that you can virtually always make a case that it's better to go with the tried and true. The orthodoxy is going to be correct more often than the heterodoxy, regardless of the subject. The problem is that setting all these high standards people must pass before challenging the status quo, like only having a new idea after thinking about it for years, results in society getting staid, stagnant, behind the times, and poorly adapted to changing circumstances.
Well, conservatism is about keeping what there is, or going back to what there was. About tradition, about preserving what's considered familiar, normal. So an unorthodox view is not compatible with conservatism.
It is easier than ever to live in a bubble with an uncontested worldview that you believe is more widely shared and worth protecting. It is familiar to you, normal. Not only that but it is the best, to you.
Sure, it’s sometimes easier, but not for everyone (e.g. gay people in deeply religious families). It’s not clear if it’s “the best, to you” either (this kind of valuation is subjective).
Conservatism has no coherence whatsoever, unless you want to argue Republicans aren't conservative. It's more about whatever the person calling themself a conservative happens to want at this particular moment.
It's odd because much of orthodox thinking today is increasingly labeled liberal or progressive. Self described conservatives are increasingly out of the main stream.
That’s funny because the left currently dominates all aspects of culture, academia, work, and society. The orthodox is solidly “progressive” right now.
The world isn't a binary choice between either left or right.
The overwhelming majority of the world operates in the grey middle which is what is codified into policies, laws, precedents, standards, norms etc. And much of it is universal across the world e.g. the concept of professional conduct in companies.
There something true about it though. People see the world through “my tribe, not my tribe”. Left vs right. Islam vs non-Islam. West vs non-west. Sunni vs Shia. etc.
Because the self described left has de-emphasized economic and labor concerns, and prioritize intersectional identity as defining oppressor and oppressed categories.
Depends on which industries you are in and where you live. If you are in tech or finance this may be true to some extent. If you are in academia it’s definitely true unless you are at one of those far right religious colleges.
If you are in construction, energy, manufacturing, or countless other fields it’s either not true or only present to a “token” degree in the form of some sensitivity training seminar you have to listen to for HR onboarding.
>the left currently dominates all aspects of culture, academia, work, and society
What a weird statement. Dominates all of culture? Work? Society??!
The extremes on both ends do definitely dominate in the public debate which is frustrating (and, I think, dangerous). It makes it seem like the average person is much less reasonable than I believe they are.
The extremes dominate the public debate, because the media is outrage-driven for clicks. Thus insane voices get amplified, and our public discourse goes insane.
Jokes aside, the left wing has a reality bias. Left-wing people have a greater propensity than right-wing people to adapt their views to fit reality. Right-wing people have the propensity to make reality fit their views. IIRC this has been shown in scientific studies, but you'll probably say those are controlled by the left.
Or consider that certain laws passed by the government suppress alternative points of view that conflict with the mainstream, so that even if the views are true, they still are squashed.
Ah, but that isn't the only law that restricts speech. Many people already got fired for expressing support for Palestinians, because the law says you can get fired for that.
The question is, do truly "orthodox" (in the sense that the essay means: bearing no controversial beliefs) people exist in large numbers? Fully center of every possible overton window?
I'd wager these people are extremely rare. I'd guess the majority of people we consider to be fully "orthodox" and uncontroversial actually do have opinions it would be hard to express openly, but they're good at hiding that they have those opinions and "play the role" of an orthodox completely in any social context.
they're good at hiding that they have those opinions
I think the answer to this question is that most people simply don't have opinions on the vast majority of subjects, and that "having an opinion" is largely an identity marker of the intellectually-minded – and not a basic quality that everyone has. So it's not so much that such people are good at hiding their unorthodox opinions, but that they haven't really thought about it in the first place.
PG's other essay, "Keep Your Identity Small" is a good solution to this tendency of intellectually-minded people to want to have an opinion on everything.
There are a whole lot of people whose "strategy" for navigating life is to always pick the side of the strongest group. For them being part of the mainstream as a form of protection is of higher priority than being correct/truthful/just/moral.
I don't think pg was referring to this demographic, but there are certainly a whole lot of people who even take pride in being mainstream on every topic.
Who are the 'real ones™' on HN with the vision to see something that is most often inappropriate or hard to communicate here due to downvoting or lame rules? Take the opportunity to let us know here.
You don't own this website or the people that are here.
So you can post whatever you like but you can't demand that the moderators allow it to stay nor can you expect that everyone should upvote you. Your freedoms can't usurp the freedoms of others.
Technology is inherently about making things better. Whether it's just making a tool easier to use, or fundamentally changing how people behave - it's all about altering what we do now. It's not really possible to be a technologist and a (small c) conservative - the definition being "averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.". Being "progressive" - by the dictionary "an advocate of social reform" - is at least compatible with the technologist mindset (although you could still be a technologist without any desire for social reform).
Obviously the values held by "Conservative" political parties are not simply about being "conservative" - but it's not particularly surprising that people who like the idea of changing things aren't a big fan of a political movement which is based on doing things the way we always have.
of course, amusingly, it's also well-known as a right-leaning forum too
i used to think that the fact that both ideas were in currency indicated that it was probably unbiased. I now think that it probably means that the "right-wing"/"progressive" indicators are too simplistic a way to describe the actual underlying biases.
Good point. It's probably more accurate to say it is biased to whatever opinions benefit the YC business model (which is understandable. It's their forum, after all). For example, speaking out against anything other than very lax immigration policy is verboten because driving down American labor costs benefits VC's. Saying anything positive about the previous president will get you downvoted immediately.
(This isn't related to my personal political opinions, I'm just using it as an example.)
There are definitely strands of HN popular opinion that strongly align with YC'S business model (the idea that funding and scale are barometers for success and YC's selection heuristics are actually how you should run your business) but I certainly wouldn't have picked migration as one of the example. If anything, I get the opposite impression when the notion of the threat to devs' one percenter status posed by underpaid and exploited visa recipients willing to wrap text in javascript for a mere 100k per annum comes up, especially if that's compared and contrasted with the general enthusiasm for the idea automating away everyone else's job and replacing it with a UBI. It'd be difficult to find anywhere else quite as hostile to the ads so many YC companies and their acquirers depend on either.
They are good examples of the GP's comment about the idea of a position on a line between left and right wing orthodoxy being the wrong way to describe how HN coalesces around ideas though...
If the SVB debacle taught us anything, it is that even the most libertarian free-market aficionados love their “nanny state” when it’s them who’s in trouble.
This place (commenters) is majority hard-left. Any perception that it's 'right-leaning' is because the moderators are tolerant of non-leftist viewpoints. This, as you may know, constitutes heresy in leftist circles.
Moderation and votes are two different things. Moderators only concern themselves with spam and outstanding violations of rules, that are mostly politeness rules. It's not like there are rules against certain ideology.
Commenters and voters are the same thing and if we were all hard-left, any different viewpoint would be downvoted into oblivion, no matter what the moderators could think.
My guess is that the people around here is a motley crew. Average would be leaning left, but much less than Reddit, to compare with something else.
I don't think conventional minded people think there can't be things that you can't say that are true. I think they believe that you'd be aware of the things that would get you in trouble, and that those things were already explored and collectively rejected by society (or most of it), and there is no point in you pushing it with "...but I really do want to say it". They know some people think those things and they're fine with it. They're not fine with you chanting it. Basically, get your group if like minded people and talk about it in your closed walls.
Especially the things that are or might be true, it's important to understand that:
- They might be harmful to others, true or not
- Others may need to be harmed in order for society to find if some of those are true, but you might already have figured out that they are
- Those true things might be an obstacle for society to remain stable and cohesive
- Maybe those true things can bring some progress, but they might not be worth the cost
All in all, I think society has a mechanism to self censor and some are ok with it, some aren't. I however do not agree that unencumbered freedom of speech will lead to a better society. But yes, I do think some taboos today are excessive.
You can see this play out with religious belief, politics, biology, on and on. We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I think studying the origins of popular contemporary ideas (in the way done by Nietzsche or Foucault) [1] is a good start.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy)