80 ms·

E Pur Si Muove

• DonbunEf7 9y ago
  Don't be so dramatic. Baylife has always been terrible, but it was affordable in the past, so people put up with it. If you care too much about what other people think of you, then you possibly aren't spending enough time thinking about things that aren't people.
  • shifter 9y ago
    In general, that makes sense. However, achieving big things requires working with people, ergo their opinions do matter in that regard...
• hprotagonist 9y ago
  Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though. It was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about _anything_. So on the Night in Question the night-- of Avi's fateful call -- Randy had done what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes. -- Cryptonomicon, 1999.
  • teekert 9y ago
    But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one. --- Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy. --- Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
    • todd8 9y ago
      Written in 1943! This really resonates with me. One reason I like working in software is that many of the limitations of other engineering disciplines (the strength of materials, the weight of concrete, etc) don’t limit our creations. Our limits are our own ability to manage complexity and the limits of what we can dream to do.
      • teekert 9y ago
• eanzenberg 9y ago
  I've noticed similar, that a lot of people here in SF live in a fairly-well-intentioned bubble and are super vocal sometimes to the point of socially castrating when you don't agree with them.
• rb808 9y ago
  Next time he's in China maybe he should think about donating some money to a local union and see how free the speech is there. I'm no fan of the Bay Area but comparing to China freedom of speech is a bit weird.
  • ch4s3 9y ago
    That struck me as ridiculous. If you piss off the mayor of SF you don't get disappeared, but that very much does happen in China.
    • pavlov 9y ago
      In China, you can even get disappeared in your own home. It’s called “residential surveillance at a designated location” — indefinite house arrest under police watch. It’s used routinely against both irrelevant dissidents and high-profile targets like artist Ai Weiwei and Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Maybe, in Altman’s Panglossian view, house arrest is just an opportunity to think deeply about inconvenient truths.
      • creaghpatr 9y ago
        I'm giving Sam the benefit of the doubt that he's just trying to make a point and didn't think that line through.
        • ch4s3 9y ago
          I'd refer you to my response below. If he didn't think it through, then it points to how thin his argument is and how weak his thinking is on this issue.
    • colordrops 9y ago
      That's not what is being talked about here. The topic is about social ostracization based on opinions you hold, rather than the ability to challenge authority over public broadcast mediums.
• ealexhudson 9y ago
  I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science. Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous. Particularly when we start involving healthcare, a "move fast/break things" type approach can be extremely detrimental, for example.
  • mkagenius 9y ago
    > We need to accept that some of these ideas are inherently dangerous. We created atom bombs. Some say AI can destroy humanity (perhaps Sam himself) but here we are, I don’t think you can stop science.. it’s what makes us human.
    • ak_yo 9y ago
      You can definitely stop science. There's a reason we don't secretly infect populations with various diseases just to see what happens anymore.
      • LoSboccacc 9y ago
        > anymore and I'd also add "to the best of our armchair knowledge"
        • yesenadam 9y ago
          I thought yours a very interesting, worthwhile and thought-provoking comment. I'm puzzled why it's voted down. Maybe too succinct. 3^4 words good, 3^2 words baad?
          • LoSboccacc 9y ago
            it's because rule#324 subsection 20 of this site "usa did nothing wrong"
• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized? Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
  • BadassFractal 9y ago
    The problem isn't the critique of ideas, most people are happy to have an intellectually honest debate about their merits and shortcomings. The issue is instantly accusing someone of serious moral failings and painting them as a social pariah to be ostracized, the instant they put forward a locally unorthodox view. One group is constantly expanding the area of topics that are taboo, the other believes that having taboos is a bad long term plan for society.
    • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Maybe Sam just has serious moral failings? If everywhere he goes people have a visceral reaction to what he's saying maybe there is some ethical shortcoming there. He's the common denominator in all the situations.
      • BadassFractal 9y ago
        The point is that it's not everywhere, it's very much specific to the Bay area. The claim is that the Bay was a lot more open to controversial ideas in the past, and it's closing down as of today to only leave room for local ideological orthodoxy. Many of those ideas aren't controversial in most other parts of the world. The point, I'm assuming, is that Sam doesn't want to pack up his stuff and leave, he wants the Bay to become more open.
        • Gargoyle 9y ago
          The right control experiment here would be to do more business in other areas. Open a YC branch in another city. Sam and other partners can spend more time there and find out if it really is more conducive to new ideas. If the other location(s) really does turn out to be more conducive, ramp it up and close down the Bay Area operation. Maybe the Bay loses out, but other places and the wider world win.
• BadassFractal 9y ago
  Thank you Sam for speaking out about this. Every few months living in the Bay reminds me of the importance of Paul Graham's http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html . The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring.
  • andrenotgiant 9y ago
    > The constant pursuit of ideological purity in the Bay, the desire for diversity of skin tones and orientations, but not of ideas, taking offense as a viable way of establishing social hierarchies. It's all very tiring. Well said, so well said that I'd like to tweet it and share it, but I won't, because of the exact problem it describes.
    • ironjunkie 9y ago
      yep. It is getting that bad. I would love to tweet this and debate this with people but I know that if I do so there is a high chance it might impact my career and my overall life here in the bay. Sometimes I'm wondering how many people like me just pretend to blend in and go with the mainstream political correctness just because we don't have the guts//strength to fight this fight right now. My guess? a LOT from what I can see in my circle of friends over here.
  • robinsloan 9y ago
    This doesn't describe my experience of the Bay Area (2004-present) at all. Here's a sincere tip: start attending the Seminars About Long-term Thinking organized by the Long Now Foundation. Take a friend or two. Sitting in those (packed!) theaters, listening to big, bold, and really very challenging ideas -- not just presented and left at that, but also opened up and interrogated -- I really don't think you'll feel you're surrounded by people in "pursuit of ideological purity" who don't value interesting new ideas.
    • BadassFractal 9y ago
• Lxr 9y ago
  Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
• davidw 9y ago
  YC could open up an office in Padova, where Galileo spent the 'happiest years of his life'. Be happy to help, although we're pretty content here in Bend these days. Regarding Beijing: I think he may have been in something of an 'expat bubble'. Speaking with other entrepreneurs far from home, it's easy to focus on that. Try criticizing the political leadership, though.
• lumberjack 9y ago
  With other westerners or with Chinese people? I think that is a crucial detail that was left out. Anyway, some people are building a future that others do not want to live in, so it is no wonder that some ideas are going to be received harshly. Nonetheless I understand that we cannot predict the future, so maybe, what people think will happen, won't. But people are fearful of a possible Pandora Box event. I personally do not like those who are so excited, by the business or technology they are building, that they never stop and think about the consequences. I also do not like those who think, "my intentions for the use of this technology are wholesome, therefore I am not responsible for any harm that can be caused by others using this technology maliciously". New ideas should be explored, but with caution.
  • chaostheory 9y ago
    imo Sam could have been almost anywhere outside of San Francisco (and Berkeley), even still within the SF Bay Area metro, and still have had the same conversation he had in Beijing. Places like SF and Alabama tend to be in the extreme left or right instead of the center. It's hard talking to or even around zealots
    • dizzant 9y ago
      Your comment exemplifies what the OP is criticizing. By writing off the people in SF and Alabama as "zealots," you've closed the door to reasoned debate and to educating them on their miscues. I don't disagree that people occasionally take unjustifiable stances, but that doesn't make them unreasonable people. You have to understand their reasons and convince them of yours. As someone who has lived in Alabama, I assure you that long term economic uncertainty, lack of good public education, entrenched mistrust of the government, and familial loyalty signaling do more to shape opinions than a logically sound argument and upstanding ethical principles.
      • chaostheory 9y ago
        > Your comment exemplifies what the OP is criticizing. I'm not sure how writing about my opinion is the same as shutting down discourse > By writing off the people in SF and Alabama as "zealots," you've closed the door to reasoned debate and to educating them on their miscues. I have lived in both the South and SF for years and I'm posting based on my experience. Yes there are always exceptions. At the same time, I don't find it useful to ignore the culture or trends at large. Different places have specific, unique cultures. > people occasionally take unjustifiable stances, but that doesn't make them unreasonable people. I could be wrong, but the point of Sam's post is that more people in places like SF and Alabama don't just occasionaly take strong stances. It happens a lot more often and these stances are so entrenched that they're more akin to religious beliefs, where it's just hard to even entertain alternative view points without offending people. It shuts down discourse and thought. In terms of having conversations, I'm not on a mission to change the status quo; I just want more freedom to think & speak especially when I'm trying to relax. Logically for me, it makes little sense to be in an environment where everyone will suffer due to the topic. I'm not saying that it's wrong or bad to 'educate people on their miscues'. I'm just saying that it's not for me.
• draw_down 9y ago
  > This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. I think you'd end up with a lot more of one than the other. Personally I don't think there is a pressing need to encourage people's homophobia in order to gain some speculative amount of "innovative thinking", or whatever.
• workthrowaway27 9y ago
  I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced. I don't mean this as a criticism of liberals or liberalism specifically here, since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers to.
  • api 9y ago
    At the meta level this is a symptom of the fact that the polarization of our culture is extremely deep. We are polarized on epistemology, metaphysics, and what it means to be human, with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology and a mutable model of human nature and the right favoring revelatory or traditionalist epistemology and an immutable model of human nature. The latter is true of the secular right as well. Just substitute "evolution" and "history" for God and mystical revelation. The secular right believes that human inborn characteristics are immutable and culture is a product of evolutionary processes that cannot or should not be rationally understood or modified. All the Neo-racists and HBD types are basically evolutionary-historical conservatives or reactionaries who see inequality as a revealed result of a process that is beyond human understanding. It's getting to the point that it is not even possible for the two sides to communicate because they do not agree on language, logic, or basic rules of discourse. The left and the right are cognitively inhabiting different universes. Humans subjectively experience extreme cognitive dissonance as actual discomfort. I think this explains the intolerance. People are emotionally reacting to the level of cognitive dissonance this divide generates as if ideas from the opposing side are physical attacks. I agree that the right is no different. Go into one of their bubbles and voice liberal ideas and you'll get the same reaction Milo gets on a Berkeley college campus.
    • alien_at_work 9y ago
      >with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology What is scientific or empirical about safe spaces and identity politics?
      • 9y ago
• dreamdu5t 9y ago
  Maybe in China Sam had less opportunity talking with people outside his bubble. If the purpose of the visit was to meet and see entrepreneurs then of course he’ll not run into people opposing these ideas. Especially when he doesn’t speak the native languages. Here in the Bay Area most people outside of tech are familiar with it and constantly interacting with “the techies” so it’s harder to exist undisturbed in your bubble.
• ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this, what you describe isn't "danger" in the bay area, it is just unnecessary opinions.
• shifter 9y ago
  Well said! Sam posted a great defense of what I view as the second leg of "freedom of speech". There's the legal sense of the term – which is limited to government suppression of speech – and then there's the idea of what private society allows of its own volition.
• CPLX 9y ago
  California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember. Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
  • slededit 9y ago
    "You know what I love about this place? Nobody here gives a fuck about you." - An Irish tourist I met in a bar.
  • lpa22 9y ago
    That is more or less exactly the reason i made the decision to live in NYC over SF. It’s a beautiful massive anti-ant colony
  • olympus 9y ago
    This is a pretty good point. People complain about Californian culture being too sensitive but choose to stay there. If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway. NYC has plenty of tech talent to work with. Altman is not staying in SV because he can't afford to move. He's staying in the area because he actually prefers working with the people he's complaining about.
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      "If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway." Do you actually genuinely believe these absolutist statements, or you make them just coz they make for good sound bites?
      • kbenson 9y ago
        You just classified a statement that includes "probably" as absolutist. Perhaps you should reexamine it and consider whether your own context is causing you to interpret it slightly differently than intended.
• lukeschlather 9y ago
  Nobody can possibly be as free to speak their mind as a wealthy American investor in a developing country. I suspect the lack of freedom the author is feeling is the fact that in San Francisco his disapproval doesn't represent an existential threat for the people around him.
  • psyc 9y ago
    I don’t see how this follows at all. Can’t a rich person value their reputation and good name?
    • lukeschlather 9y ago
      Of course, but people are less likely to speak their minds, so it's harder for the author to know what people actually think of him in China.
• freech 9y ago
  It's impossible to only question those ideas you personally really need to question, while ignoring other ideas you hear that seem wrong. You either develop a habit of questioning or not. Habits need to be simple, you can't have a habit of showering every day, except when the date is a prime number.
• junkscience2017 9y ago
  Tech liberals created this dictatorship, so enjoy sleeping in a bed of your own making Sam
  • amsheehan 9y ago
    Though it may be true that some liberals who work in technology argue about pronouns, that doesn't mean the entire set of liberals working in technology did anything.
    • nine_k 9y ago
      > did anything. ...except maybe tacitly agreeing with people who posited that talking about something was a bad thing, because, you know, in this particular case freedom of speech is trumped by more important considerations. This is, of course, not limited to liberals, or any other political affiliation.
      • amsheehan 9y ago
        Freedom of speech is part of a legal framework. It means you won't be arrested for something you say or express. Doesn't mean anyone has to have a positive response to everything anyone says.
• Analemma_ 9y ago
  I might have more sympathy for this post if I only knew about it in the abstract and wasn't familiar with specific cases. For example, lately among Bay Area types, and especially the Rationalist community, there's been a surge of interest in eugenics and scientific racism, now euphemistically rebranded as "human biodiversity". It tends to take the form of hand-wringing about how "people from certain regions" have lower IQs and just how dreadful that is. Just keep in mind that when Valley "thought leaders" complain about the lack of freedom to discuss ideas, those are the kinds of ideas they're talking about.
  • ianai 9y ago
    My reaction to that would be to tell them there’s exactly one correct way to treat people. As soon as you categorize someone not by what they reveal about their individual characteristics you’re being prejudicial. An individual will reveal that they’re more likely to commit crime in individualistic ways, for example. Ie pulling up a criminal background check is Ok (though you’ve got to read the contents), but segregation by skin color is very definitely not.
  • fundingshovel 9y ago
    In general people from certain regions do have lower IQs... What makes this bad thing to study? Is the cause culture? Genetics? Education? I think the entire point of article is that asking the question somehow makes you a bad person, instead of a person with a controversial idea.
    • tclancy 9y ago
      >In general people from certain regions do have lower IQs It's been 23 years since The Bell Curve and I am still waiting for someone who makes this statement and seems to have a solid grasp on the problem of general IQ scores across wildly different populations. I think there's a reason I never see it . . .
  • gadders 9y ago
    I don't think people from different regions or types have different IQs, but as a thought experiment, suppose it was proven that (to pick a random example) all Capricorns born on a Tuesday were below average intelligence. Should discussion of that fact be suppressed?
• cryptoz 9y ago
  > [1] I am not worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince any reasonable people that such a statement is true. Wait, but why not? Isn't this the crux issue of our time? The Russians and the RNC have spouted fake propaganda so loudly that ~40% of the US believe falsehoods already. And the main reason they believe things that aren't true is because they are said 1000x on the internet every day. I'm not saying we should restrict free speech or anything like that. No way. But how can you ignore the problems of the world? Many people are not 'reasonable' and they do believe false things. That the do so matters, because our collective society is interconnected. It doesn't matter if no "reasonable people" believe a false or bad statement is true. It matters that they believe it because they have and affect on everything. We all do. Now we have President Trump because so many educated people thought that "no reasonable person" would vote for him. But here we are.
  • ianai 9y ago
    I think the lies on the internet thing will have to defeat itself. I remember being led astray by internet “wisdom” back in the first dot com bubble. Then I went and tried to apply that knowledge IRL. I don’t remember any single particular example, but I remember feeling downright embarrassed for believing something off the internet. I then learned to always take anything from the internet with hefty doses of salt rocks.
    • cryptoz 9y ago
      Of course - we are all responsible for ourselves. The problem is that critical thinking is not taught in schools, and children grow up without it by the millions. A problem doesn't "defeat itself" and people who have trouble thinking critically cause problems for those who can do it naturally. Saying that there is nothing to worry about from having tens of millions of people believe lies, or saying "that problem will not receive a solution from ME or ANYONE I know!" (basically, "will have to defeat itself") is going backwards. The world, the whole world, has a problem with fake information on the internet right now. The answer is not "oh well, too bad" and the answer is not "I'm not worried".
• geofft 9y ago
  I feel like this article is trying to advocate for both "ideas don't matter" and "ideas matter a lot" without adequately distinguishing the cases. There's definitely an attempt at distinction, but I don't get the sense that it really works. For instance, both "radical life extension is worth working on" and "gay people are evil" are ideas that certain people consider toxic to society - not just ideas they disagree with, but ideas that, if they are considered and debated and experimented with, will result in harm even if they're defeated in the long term. (And yes, the responses to these ideas will be themselves "toxic;" you get rid of toxins by killing them.) What distinguishes one from the other? The article is clearly advocating for us not just to tolerate "radical life extension is worth working on," but to support an environment where an advocate of that idea can draw other people to that cause without public opposition and can publicly espouse that cause without social judgment. Someone who believes this should be able to be viewed as a great thinker, as someone doing worthwhile research, as someone who's not a "heretic". But then the article turns around and says, "I am not worried that letting some people on the internet say things like 'gay people are evil' is going to convince any reasonable people that such a statement is true." Why? Plenty of people both on the internet and off say that and do convince people of it. (I was one of the people convinced by this; if you haven't had the experience of growing up in an environment which isn't a cult by any means but enforces religious-cultural orthodoxy, I do strongly recommend talking to such people about how that environment operates and propagates its beliefs if you're going to have opinions about "heresy".) Why should we believe that nobody will be convinced by "gay people are evil" but people will be convinced by "radical life extension is worth working on"? And what about other ideas like "gay people aren't evil, we love gay people, but they're demon-possessed and conversion therapy will successfully fix them towards heterosexuality, which has been the norm throughout all of human society?" That idea is definitely going to get you a toxic response in SF culture. Should it not? If we're simply going to judge ideas by whether other people are likely to be convinced by the ideas, and nothing else, we're not going to drive society in a productive direction. We have to be willing to say that certain things are good and certain things are bad. C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man is somewhat relevant here (and is a worthwhile read) - either we have our standards, our things we value, or we will let ourselves be ruled by whatever ideas seem defensible, and those ideas will start controlling how we are open to new ideas. Of course this is not to say that we have no problem with discourse, that the way that we approach "this idea is bad actually" or "this idea is good actually" is not broken. But that's very different from saying that all such judgments should be banished. (Preemptive response: I do realize that the author is gay, and I don't think that invalidates this comment.)
• sebleon 9y ago
  As someone with many “heretic ideas”, I disagree with this article - people that execute on crazy ideas are thick-skinned. Hard to believe that smart people would actually leave SF because of PC culture (although it is annoying). Even from Altman’s examples, Newton stayed in England and did what he wanted, despite the social norms. It was also odd to see Altman use China as the bastion of freedom, a place with widespread internet censorship and where things like democracy are considered heretic.
  • Cyberdog 9y ago
    I hardly see him presenting China as a bastion of freedom. But I do understand how one could feel safer voicing their mind on a certain subset of topics among a crowd of Beijingren versus a crowd of San Franciscans.
    • sebleon 9y ago
      Ah that’s fair, different cultures will have different heresies.
• zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Morality is always relative to culture. Sometimes cultures change though and it’s really hard to make them move back. Given enough resources you can find the morality that you want in any culture .
• staunch 9y ago
  This problem will resolve itself because there are brave people willing to weather the controversy caused by thinking in public. Long unedited podcasts are turning out to be the best platform, with people like Sam Harris, Dan Carlin, and even Joe Rogan becoming the most important public intellectuals alive today. All three have financial and editorial independence. They reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Carlin is in Oregon, from Los Angeles, where Rogan and Harris are. Sam Altman could obviously run a podcast where he discussed his controversial ideas. Many like minded people would rally around him. Some idiots would call him a monster. It would be great. If you have FU money and you're complaining about PC culture, you're being unnecessarily cowardly. Start a podcast and help change things.
  • ironjunkie 9y ago
    still. Even if you are wealthy, Fighting this is very taxing for your life. you are constantly under attack by every other person that wants to feel like they are bringing progress to society by agreeing to the latest PC trend from SF.
• WiseWeasel 9y ago
  Could this not simply be a reflection of cultural differences in the expression of disagreement? I have no personal experience with life in China, but a common observation others have made is that, similar to other societies in the region, and in contrast to cultures in many European and American countries, avoidance of shame, respect for authority and maintenance of social harmony are of significantly higher importance to people.
• agumonkey 9y ago
  It's a bit off. The context is complex. It's true that things are tense these days. But not only SF, everywhere: USA, Europe .. There are social tectonics at play and the stress causes people to overreact negatively on anything that doesn't solve the current issues. ps: augmenting intelligence is still weird to me, at least above a certain point, I'm all about balance these days; fix me but I don't need augmented abilities.
• throwaway8766 9y ago
  I'm extremely aware of this as someone who is socially conservative in terms of abortion, gay marriage, trans issues, etc (seriously not trying to start a flame war). It's weird knowing that a large portion of the country has similar values to me, but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable. It doesn't matter that these things have zero impact on my behavior at work; you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms.
  • CharlesMerriam2 9y ago
    One of things no one talks about: correlations. I have seen several of people lose their careers after become right wing spokespeople. These people work in difficult, ambiguous fields including patent prosecution (IP Law) and network security analysis. The fields are all about considering probable outcomes from ambiguous or untrustworthy data. They weren't pushed from their jobs; they stopped being able to juggle the ideas. Both employer and employee wanted them to leave by the time the left. They never succeeded again. This terrifies me.
    • amsheehan 9y ago
      Can you elaborate? I don't think I understand what you mean.
      • observation 9y ago
        He is claiming becoming more right wing makes somebody less likely to understand statistics. Personally I think leftists, rightists and centrists are terrible at grokking stats because the human brain can't handle multifaceted realities very well. It is possible for instance that all political positions are correct, even the apparently contradictory ones because they are part of the Elephant (the one with the blind men).
  • ak_yo 9y ago
    From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) gay marriage is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral? I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me. It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.
• kfcm 9y ago
  This isn't happening in only SF, or only in tech. It's happening all over, and across the spectrum of ideas. Is the argument that social media is tearing apart our society correct? I think it goes deeper than that, and that it's tech in general. We've grown impatient with right-swipe, immediate communication (whether through texting or calling on a cell phone; remember when you had to find a phone, or wait until you got to home/work?), immediate gratification. No time or desire to think things through, just react. The happiest time in the past 25 years was the first half of 2016, when I swore off almost all tech for 7 months, road tripped, and visited with people--strangers--and learned what made them tick. Guess what--not technology. And I was relaxed, happy, free. Technology isn't the cause of a toxic society, but it definitely is a/the catalyst.
  • eduren 9y ago
    The happiest you've been is taking a 7 month road trip vacation? That's not really surprising or novel. Most people feel relaxed, happy and free when they have nothing tying them down (whether or not technology is in the picture).
  • curun1r 9y ago
    The lack of patience seems right on to me. I get the feeling that a lot of these discussions where people feel afraid to speak their mind are issues where the orthodoxy feels it has resolved the issue and moved on to talking about something new. They're tired of having conversations they see as repetitive. And when someone questions some part of that perceived-resolved issue, there's a lack of patience to, as they see it, go back and discuss it in a rational and level-headed manner and, instead, a it's easier to apply a stigmatized label that connotes that the person is somehow behind the times and move on to talking about the subjects that interest them. With more patience could come calm and reasoned responses that could help move other people towards a more progressive outlook. But I agree that our society and the somewhat-recent trend towards immediacy of everything in our lives has led to a desire to have the same immediacy in conflict resolution. We don't tolerate as many diverging opinions because they'd take too long to integrate.
    • erik_seaberg 9y ago
• jordanpg 9y ago
  > This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. What about all the novel things about physics that we won't ever hear from the gay people who are forced out of physics because of a life-threatening climate of hate and bigotry?
  • amsheehan 9y ago
    What about whataboutism?
    • amdavidson 9y ago
      Just because a person uses the words "What about" does not make their argument whataboutism. Their argument is 100% relevant to the sentiment that was expressed. If the stated benefit of excluding one group to allow for the free expression of the other is increased scientific discourse, how do we balance that against the loss of discourse from the excluded?
      • fvdessen 9y ago
        Sam is asking people to be more inclusive of different ideas, not excluding one group for the benefit of the other. I don't quite get how one jumps from 'we have to tolerate different ideas' to 'people will be excluded'. How does tolerating different ideas excludes people ?
        • carapace 9y ago
          "allow people to say disparaging things about gay people" tolerating [this] different ideas excludes [gay] people
        • amdavidson 9y ago
          It's trivially easy to imagine this from the opposite perspective. Imagine you worked in a 90% gay office, and it was tolerated to disparage you and remark on the vile nature of your heterosexuality on a daily basis. Only an exceptionally strong willed person would stay very long and it still probably would reduce their output of novel ideas. The argument is not, and should never be, that we should fire people for their thoughts. If someone is strongly socially conservative, that's their right. But is is perfectly reasonable to require people to leave those conversations at home when they head into the office.
• jonny_eh 9y ago
  Uh oh, Sam has been "red pilled". Without providing more examples/specifics, it just reads as a tirade against the boogeyman of "political correctness". Is he upset that the SF crowd rejected Peter Thiel for endorsing Trump? Or is he upset that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla? Who knows? He's being so coy.
  • alehul 9y ago
    He provided examples, and judging by the response on HN, it's a common issue people feel. You should take the strongest form of the argument to debate, not the weakest. It would contribute more if you gave your response to why you disagree with the necessity of fully dispelling bad ideas through reasoned debate, or why you disagree that we have to accept the existence of bad or 'wacky' ideas without ostracizing the person altogether in order to have the good ideas.
  • olympus 9y ago
    Maybe he doesn't want to give the specific example that he's thinking of because he doesn't want to be ostracized by people that automatically assume that he's now a Trump lover. That was the entire point of his post.
• conanbatt 9y ago
  I remember being in argentina a couple of years back and seeing the "Political correctness" pro-trump slogan and thinking how dumb that sounded. Moved back to SF, and there is a HUGE difference of what it was for me 5 years ago. The people I know are way more cautious and the people I don't are even more afraid. The Damore essay is still one of the unspeakables. I know I fear getting fired if i publicly said i agreed with it, even though i never read it or did anything of the sort. That to me is a ridiculous state of things.
  • eanzenberg 9y ago
    Those people probably have more to lose now if they spoke freely of ideas that were antithetical to their surroundings.
  • xocyabencl 9y ago
    Can you explain your last paragraph further? Obviously saying you agree with something you never read is a bad idea. Since you haven't read it, you don't know how bad it is, right? For all you know it could be Mein Kampf. Or it could just say your boss is an idiot, or that working at your company is a waste of time, etc. Especially as a knowledge worker, ideas you espouse at work could affect your employability, so you should know what they are before espousing them. We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say.
    • angersock 9y ago
      > We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say. Indeed! That's why it's so concerning to some of us that our colleagues are apparently children who blindly parrot misinterpretations of source material and call for blood over their own fabricated outrage.
      • xocyabencl 9y ago
        I think we're on the same page here - you shouldn't claim to know the content of something you never read.
• collinvandyck76 9y ago
  Very much related to this, my brother is an assistant professor at LaFayette College and has co-founded a series of talks called "The Mill Series" on promoting viewpoint diversity. https://www.themillseries.org/ https://www.themillseries.org/
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• blfr 9y ago
  We need to accept that some of these ideas ... are inherently dangerous. Maybe but somehow we don't focus on dangerous ideas. Communism is by far the most dangerous idea devised in the west. It infected dozens of societies and led them to a century of poverty, slavery, and hundred million deaths. Yet someone who's open about being a communist won't really be ostracised in SF. Communist flags are available on Amazon. Communist subreddits are not banned. So no, I don't buy this new wave of censorship as a defence against dangerous ideas.
  • papaf 9y ago
    century of poverty, slavery, and hundred million deaths I am genuinely curious about where you get the figure of 100 million deaths from. I also believe that all the societes that had slaves were capitalist ones. But we can both agree that communism leads to poverty although the poorest countries in the world are failed states rather than communist: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-poorest-countries-in-the-world.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-poorest-countries-in...
    • blfr 9y ago
      Black Book of Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
      • bjl 9y ago
        In other words, one of the least respected books in modern historical scholarship.
        • barry-cotter 9y ago
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communis... The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.
• Jaruzel 9y ago
  He describes the Echo Chamber in full effect. You can't have good debate if everyone is on the same side of the argument. War may be bad, but without it, we'd never have the advancements in quality of life we now enjoy. Once the whole planet becomes a single-hive-minded social-media entity, innovation will stagnate, and the human race will slowly die off.
• cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Ever notice how all mad scientists live in some secluded island or in the arctics? Mad scientists are born not entirely because they're mad, but because the world doesn't appreciate their intention and brand them as villains. Once you're branded as a villain, you have no other way to go but than deeper into villainism.
• addicted 9y ago
  ---It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system. Wait can people not say these things in SF? If not then what's the point of this post. If so, then wow SF, Thats messed up.
  • kevlar1818 9y ago
    It's an analogy to "heretical" ideas from history.
    • fvdessen 9y ago
      I would guess that a major part of "On The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin is still heretical in San Francisco.
• orthoganol 9y ago
  You know Sam, if you stopped censoring controversial positions or posts from hacker news I might take you seriously. Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.
  • Gargoyle 9y ago
    I do think this is one place he could put his money where his mouth is. Completely revamp the culture here, on this board that represents his company.
    • dang 9y ago
      IMO YC could legitimately respond to that one like Odetta did when Joan Baez said "you taught me how to sing": "Oh baby, don't you blame me for that".
      • Gargoyle 9y ago
        That the paid moderator of this site would respond like this is unsurprising. And yet the position of moderator is one that could do wonders for setting a better culture.
        • dang 9y ago
          Maybe someday I can persuade you that it's a harder problem than it seems. But my point was that the things people post on HN no more represent YC, let alone Sam, than YouTube comments represent Larry and Sergey.
          • Gargoyle 9y ago
            I understand taking leadership to change a culture is a difficult task. But when you have the actual means and influence to do it and choose not to do so, you do hold some responsibility for the results. HN does in fact reflect on YC and Sam, whether you want it to or not. It's their site. And in a different way than Youtube is Larry and Sergey's site (something I at least hope you understand), though even they don't escape responsibility for what shows up there.
• sampl 9y ago
  > You can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right A good philosophy for personal projects and starting companies too, IMO. Seems to be a pattern among indie hacker types.
• btilly 9y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html is very relevant about how we got here. As Paul Graham said then, the biggest threats to free thought and speech come from people who have just enough power to enforce taboos, and not enough to be confident in their power. In this case the political ideology that is stifling thought is one that has nationwide lost Congress, the Senate and the Presidency. Which naturally results in a strong "us vs them" mentality, and stronger incentives to require that everyone prove that they are part of "us". The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative. This is not, of course, one-sided. If you lived in a deeply religious part of the country you'd find similar levels of intolerance towards liberal ideas as a result of feeling like they are on the receiving end of years of losing the culture war. That won't be the problem that you experience in the Bay area. But it is two sides of the same mentality that you are either with us or against us.
  • CPLX 9y ago
    > The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative. That's a clever slogan. But the logical response to that would be to say that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance. Which as a factual statement is of course arguable, but as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
    • btilly 9y ago
      The problem with that "logical response" is that it is wrong. Here is a simple demonstration. Consider the conservative argument that when you raise the minimum wage, elementary economics of supply and demand results in fewer jobs for poor people. I guarantee you that if you present this argument to 10 liberal friends, more than half will have a strong emotional response against it. While responding, some are likely to turn an interesting shade of red. Yet there is no intolerance in that argument. Furthermore the argument is fairly well grounded in reality. Supply-demand curves are well-established basic microeconomics. And furthermore if you play around with https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#pa... you will find that Republican policies (which include low minimum wages) are consistently better for creating jobs. Just as Democratic ones are better for increasing GDP.
• throwaway34689 9y ago
  Of the places I've lived (not necessarily in order): - Deep South (18 years - born + raised) - Boston MA (5 years @ college then job) - NYC (6+ years) - Los Angeles (1yr @ startup) - San Diego (1yr @ startup) - Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company) I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never encountered such a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest (where I grew up). Someone literally told me once that "people from the South eat their children" in a half joking tone. I don't think you can call it "racism" per se, but definitely the most oppressive form of prejudice I've ever encountered, by far, was found among people I worked and came in contact with in the SF Bay Area. EDIT: Of course, I met (and stayed friends) with really amazing people in SF Bay Area. People with different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes. And the raw intelligence of most people I interacted with - technical and otherwise - is off the charts. But the attitudes I mentioned above were expressed frequently enough to leave an impression on me.
  • guelo 9y ago
    As if southerners aren't constantly cursing or making fun of "San Francisco values".
    • throwaway34689 9y ago
      Honestly - in my experience, they are not. I didn't know anything about SF before I moved there. No one around me in the South ever talked about it. Now that I go back home and I mention I lived in SF I may hear people say something along the lines of "wow they are really liberal out there aren't they?". Nothing along the lines of the vitriol I hear in the Bay Area.
    • SnacksOnAPlane 9y ago
      We're really not.
      • CalChris 9y ago
• robertwalsh0 9y ago
  As a minority, this ‘let all the ideas run free in the marketplace of ideas’ sounds fun until the ideas are about your inferiority and suggested extermination.
• LukaAl 9y ago
  The argument is interesting but flawed. He points to a problem he sees, an increasingly high focus on being politically correct. And I agree it is a problem. But he doesn't ask himself why. He doesn't try to understand why PC is so important right now, to the point to risk missing out on important and revolutionary ideas. And that made me think: where the best idea come from? Not from being free to be jerks but from questioning the status quo in constructive ways. Why there's so much focus on Political Correctness right now? One possible answer is because the status quo has provided a windfall for White Educated Middle-Class Males with good connections at the expense of people further away from this description. Example? Are you a woman? You have to cope with molestation from entitled men. etc etc... I'm crazy thinking that if we solve these problems we could then start again being open to crazy shit ideas, criticize each other ideas and keep things moving. Or yes, we could be expats in China, where for now this problem hasn't emerged yet. But it sounds to me like just swiping the dirt under the rug. Is it innovative? Just asking...
• jggonz 9y ago
  "I would advice Mr. Sam Altman to not write such an insulting article. He should take it down immediately. Many of us reading it live in San Francisco."
• gadders 9y ago
  “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” CS Lewis
• davebryand 9y ago
  Sam, your point is incredibly valid, and you'll be able to lead the charge if you reframe some of your concepts and let go of paragraphs like this. "To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture." Like I tell my son, "anytime your minds says something is 'weird or wacky', what it is really telling you is that you should seek understanding'. [Updated] To be clear, what I mean is that you confessed your limits of acceptable thought by declaring alchemy and decoding of the Bible as being bad and wacky. If a genius like Newton was willing to believe these were worthy of his attention, and the British authorities were worried enough to ban it, maybe it's time to challenge the scripting you have that won't let YOU go there.
• el_nahual 9y ago
  A lot of comments make the argument that any extreme political correctness is exclusive to the bay area, not the US as a whole, or that Sam's experience is true in an "expat bubble" in China. To which I submit as evidence "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World", an art exhibition currently on display at the Guggenheim in New York City. This retrospective of Chinese art had 3(!) works of art removed (ie, censored) from the exhibition because the content was perceived as morally reprehensible by some groups of new york animal rights activists. Proof that at least along some avenues of discourse (what is allowed in art? when is animal suffering allowed? when is representation of a disturbing act that occurred in the past allowed?) the NYC progressive contingent is more conservative than the Chinese. Note: This does not mean that China is a paradise of free speech. There are other avenues of discourse (ex political discourse) where this is not the case. Note 2: They sell hot dogs outside the Guggenheim. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/26/guggenheim-museum-artworks-animals-threats-violence https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/26/guggenh...
• kneath 9y ago
  The most powerful man on earth, Pope Paul V demanded Galileo silence his thoughts on heliocentrism. He was then submitted to the Roman Inquisition, found guilty, and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Somehow this is seen as comparable in Sam's mind to a reasonable debate about ethics (“If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical”). Quite frankly, if you can't find the courage to have a reasonable debate about your ideas, you shouldn't be the one working on those ideas. If your ideas run contrary to public thoughts around ethics, perhaps you should move to a culture where your ethics more closely mirror theirs. Or more radically — listen to why people disagree! This whole post comes off as someone who's realizing their ethics are mismatched with the culture they're living in, and instead of questioning themselves, demand that the rest of the culture shift to their views. In other words: let me be this asshole, because I deserve it!
  • dgudkov 9y ago
    >if you can't find the courage to have a reasonable debate about your ideas.. The problem is that because of growing social polarization reasonable debates are becoming increasingly rare. Hoping to have a reasonable debate with people who are not looking to have a reasonable debate is silly and has nothing to do with courage.
  • 50CNT 9y ago
    You're assuming that the values of the culture you're living in are necessarily better or more ethical than those held by an individual. But even assuming that is true, the inability to voice ones opinions without ostracism doesn't solve disagreement, it just hides it. Whilst there may be a tremendously pleasing and unproductive perceived homogeneity of opinion around you, that facade is pulled with the curtain of the voting booth.
• JulianRaphael 9y ago
  Solid post and long due. However, judging from a recent Y Combinator post (https://blog.ycombinator.com/13-startup-ideas/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/13-startup-ideas/) on 13 startup ideas from YC alumni and staff for startup ideas that they wish would exist, Sam should start right in front of his own door regarding "working on less ideas for the 1%".
• nine_k 9y ago
  One of the things often overlooked is how our (American) culture is very much driven by religion. Note that the religion is not necessarily some version of Christianity. The overwhelming religious movement rarely named could be called "progressivism". A religion, as opposed to other forms, usually has postulates you may not doubt, words you may not say, etc. That is, it constraints rational approaches in the area of what's sacred for that religion. Well, I don't mind religious people. People are free to believe and practice what they believe — as long as they do it without pressing other people into compliance. And this is exactly what happens. Faithful people who see something from the list of "progressive" sacred cows being discussed, especially at some critical / unorthodox angle (as opposed to praised in a canonical form), become furious: it's a sacrilege! Now Mr. Altman notices that SF tech circles have turned into something of a Mecca (or Constantinople) of "progressivism", and raising a voice against the predominant religious views becomes unwelcome and downright dangerous. Well, yes. Sorry about that. Maybe you've been noticing signs of it for a few decades already. The irony is, of course, is that "progressivism" often writes "reason" or "science" on its banners. I suspect the more ardent adepts will notice the discrepancy and suggest to remove them soon.
  • ravar 9y ago
    I would add to this by positing this is not just American culture. I think all people are religious by nature, even the most rational scientist has their inexplicable religious rituals. My thought on this is that the world is simply too complicated to operate in, and everyone is looking for a system that has the answers. It is a form of compression. You don't have to handle the flow of complexity because someone else tells you the correct move. Catholicism did this, it said that it had all the answers. Science wants to provide all the answers, and tries to advertise itself as such. However, as the post modernists identified science only gives you the facts, but there are infinite ways to interpret the facts. You need a value structure, a religion maybe, to interpret the facts. I think this is the religion that you have identified.
    • nine_k 9y ago
      I do agree with the general point: people need answers, so they usually keep some postulates as true without further discussion, and build reasoning on top of them. This makes a lot of pragmatic sense. Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable). So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
• jmtame 9y ago
  While I'm not trying to pick apart small pieces of the essay, I agree with some of the high-level points. Culturally in SV, we are increasingly afraid of discussing anything that is controversial. Ad hominems are increasingly popular for any dissenting opinion or difference of view. It wasn't always like this, and it has definitely gotten worse IMO. Based on conversations I've had with some friends, they also agree. We've all been living in the bay area for over 6 years and we're now entertaining the idea of moving away. I also know some smart people who have left naming this as one of the reasons.
• tsjackson 9y ago
  I'm naturally sympathetic to the sentiment, but this post fails to acknowledge, much less address, the major societal changes that have precipitated our current situation. Censorship is a reaction to our society's increasing inability to combat misinformation. Over the last 20 years, a huge, extremely influential right wing media establishment has sprung up. It has clearly demonstrated its ability to convince millions of people of things that are factually untrue, with less logic than repetition. (Ask Barack Obama, the Kenyan Muslim, about the utility of reasoning). I am worried about someone who makes an argument that gay people are evil, because it probably now means that a group of commentators have adopted that simple statement as a talking point. Furthermore, they've tacked on preposterous arguments, logical fallacies, and agreed to engage in Ad Hominem warfare against anyone who argues differently. It's been an extremely effective formula for persuading a huge portion, if not most of our society, into believing falsehoods. Unfortunately, the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas is failing to distribute value as obviously as our economic marketplaces. The openness of communication made possible via technology has turned us all into Sophists. Efforts to confront and address this reality is peripheral at best. As long as this is true, censorship will be an appealing option to keep bad ideas from spreading. Is censorship worth the cost? I don't know, but I'd lean toward saying yes, while fully acknowledging that the cost is huge.
  • jerf 9y ago
    You're not refuting his point... you're demonstrating it.
    • tsjackson 9y ago
      The main thrust of the argument seems to be that we should do our best to stop censorship. I'm arguing that we probably shouldn't. Our society is not really equipped to handle the free exchange of ideas at this point.
      • staunch 9y ago
        Because some large percentage of people are filled with cynicism and pessimism? Every objective measure of society is better today than at any time in the past, and yet we have people calling for curtailing a core American value due to a supposed social emergency. These demoralized people need a hard reality check because there's nothing fact-based about the way they think or behave. There are orders of magnitude more educated people in the world today than ever before. Development of technology is rapidly accelerating. The idea that we can't solve our problems without sacrificing our souls is just pathetic and historically un-American.
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Vibe I'm getting off this post is that it's ok to be PC and woke until that starts interfering with money getting absolutely everything it wants. I am not surprised that he felt more comfortable in China...
• alexanderstears 9y ago
  This was shockingly charitable. So many leftists hate the tenants of science, western culture, and wealth that they want to crush it under their heel. The same people who oppose life extension on the grounds of the environmental cost probably applaud uneducated africans having 7 kids. The people who oppose understanding a genetic basis of intelligence would tell you that each human is blank slate with equal potential to every other human. The people who oppose wealth are the ones who advocate for full luxury socialism/communism. Frankly, the only reason we have so many voices opposed to these good things is because our welfare state is too generous - people can survive on food stamps and ruminate about the moral evils of capitalism. If they had to get a job, their idle hands would do less of the devil's work. It's good to see people waking up to the intolerance in San Francisco. I used to enjoy going there, now whenever I visit I have to change my phone background (away from a picture of a greek sculpture and the quote "tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire") so no one tries to accuse me of being a n*zi and derails the business at hand. The world is worse for the intolerance but hard times make stronger people - what the world needs is titans and if we make a crucible for the titans then mission accomplished.
• bungie4 9y ago
  Personal opinion from first hand observance: Tolerance died approximately 3 years ago.
• DenisM 9y ago
  For those not in the know: "E pur si muove" means "And yet it moves", a phrase supposedly uttered under his breath by Galileo after he was coerced into admitting that the Earth does not move around the Sun.
• decentralised 9y ago
  This is the best article I've ever read from Sam Altman. Seen from abroad, SV and the US in general is becoming less appealing every day and it's not really Trump's fault.
• rndmize 9y ago
  I don't think controversial ideas are the problem, or changing cultural standards of what is acceptable to do or discuss. I think at the core, discussion itself is less valued. To have an useful discussion with someone, there needs to be an assumption of good faith on both sides - that each person will make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other, will set aside semantics and minor errors that don't matter, will directly confront key points that are brought up and will admit errors or spaces where they lack knowledge or clarity. This assumption of good faith, in my view, has been the major casualty of modern politics and the new means of communication tech has provided to us in the last decades. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with views that match your own, to gorge on straw-men and memes and bad faith arguments that then result in pattern-matching responses when dealing with someone of opposing views. --- That said, I suspect there might be something else at play here in Sam's case. In the last decade we've seen tech grow up, and much of this has shattered the "tech is the way to a better future" idea. Google has gone from "do no evil" to the biggest marketing and personal information gathering force on the planet, with intentions that now seem ambiguous at best. Facebook has gone from a convenient way to stay in contact with people or make new connections to a machine optimized to capture human attention to such a degree that notable former Facebook folk are coming out of the woodwork to say they don't use it and forbid their kids. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the capability to have massive impact on politics, seemingly in negative ways, and seem to avoid interest in taking responsibility for the impacts of their platforms. All of this leads to people being less optimistic about tech and startups. Sure, Uber sounded like a great idea at the start, but now? All those people working below the API seem to be in the same spot as the taxi drivers before - making minimal money, in debt over a car instead of a medallion, etc. And above it, a valuation of billions. It feels like a resource extraction project, where the average people are squeezed for the wealth growth of investors and techies. Capitalism has a warping effect on tech. The successful startups aren't about saving the world, or making things better - they're about making money. If that coincides with doing good for the world, great - and if it doesn't, oh well, because making things better isn't actually the name of the game. It's a feel-good thing to put SV above finance or resource extraction or energy - and less people are believing it. China probably just hasn't gotten there yet. They're still in their tech honeymoon phase, where everything is great - easier ways to pay, communicate, etc. Given that they're used to restrictions on communication and what they're allowed to know and think, maybe they'll never leave it.
• dmode 9y ago
  I have no idea what this article was about. As someone who grew up in India, lived extensively in Europe and Arizona before settling down in the Bay Area, and travel to China 2-3 times a year, I find Bay Area by far to be the most open, tolerant, accepting places I have ever lived. And it is not even comparable. And it is borne out by simple stats. People vote with their feet. Bay Area is almost a majority minority area, with equal representations of white folks, south asians, east asians, hispanics (although smaller African American population). This is not a coincidence. This is because people here are naturally accepting of other cultures, view points etc. And comparing this to Beijing is laughable. When I travel to China, my life is put on hold as you cannot access Gmail, Facebook, Whatsapp and myriad of other mundane websites. I dare not write anything negative about the Chinese government when I am there. India is also becoming intolerant by the day, where even the though of eating beef can lead of mob lynching or ending up in jail. Even benign things such as a Bollywood movie (Padmavati) is in trouble for imagined cultural threats. I have lived extensively in Netherlands and Denmark. I love those countries as they are progressive in many ways. Except for the acceptance of a brown man. I don't hold any grudge, it is what it is and it is difficult for such a small country to be open about cultural integration. I have found Bay Area to be an open community, where no matter you background you just seamlessly integrate. You go to work without thinking how you have to tweak your accent or deep dive in cultural norms to progress through corporate hierarchy (I have done that a lot as a consultant). All it matters is your work and output. Sure, we have yet to figure out how to approach "tolerance of intolerance", but it will evolve over time and we will arrive at a sweet spot. Many countries have taken a extreme free speech stance on "tolerance of intolerance" - for example, UK allowed one Egyptian preacher to openly preach hatred and violence from the streets of London. Is that a good thing for society ? I am not so convinced.
  • MrJagil 9y ago
    Can you expand on your experience as a brown man in Denmark? Where did you live? I would like your take on it.
    • dmode 9y ago
      I used to live in Frederiksberg, which is practically Copenhagen. I loved Denmark, but as with most European countries, there is a specific definition of what "Dane" means. Foreigners will always be an outsider(vastly different than living in the Bay Area). I also sensed some discomfort with "white collar" brown folks. As most of Danish interactions with brown people is limited to Doner Kebab restaurants and Afghani run grocery stores. There were very few non-white white collar workers. I also faced outright racial hostility, but thankfully those instances were very few. If you are considering a move to Denmark, think about this is an European moving to India and China. It is like expat living as chances of integrating to a Danish society will be minimal.
• baxtr 9y ago
  As someone who doesn't live in the States, I can't follow the article. It's strangely abstract. What are the controversial ideas he is discussing in China but not in the States? Did I miss those examples in the text? I think that would help a lot to understand problem.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• unityByFreedom 9y ago
  > I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. Ideas about what? Did you try discussing free speech or democracy? Did you try to show a flag of Tibet or Taiwan? It's true that a lot of people in China are free from the same political concerns of Americans, yet, how has that turned out for them in the long term? Per capita GDP?
• letsbehonest 9y ago
  If you meant a single word of this essay, HN would not be a place where people are routinely banned for being critical of your portfolio companies, or for expressing any political idea that is even moderately leftist. You're a vile hypocrite. And there's nothing to debate, there. It's just fucking true.
  • dang 9y ago
    > routinely banned for being critical of your portfolio companies When people say this always I try to point out that the opposite is the truth. Maybe I can't convince you, but I want to reassure any silent readers who might worry about this. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is what we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved. Plenty more on this at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20moderate%20less https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants it. > You're a vile hypocrite. And there's nothing to debate, there. It's just fucking true. Even though this breaks the HN guideline in bannable ways, it feels like more of a cri de coeur to me, so I'm going to leave it up for now. But really, you're just making things worse both for the community and for said coeur. It would be better to speak more directly about what you feel, and if possible to connect it with what others are saying. I mean really connect it, as opposed to throwing something in opposition. You don't have to reduce any of your views to do this.
    • letsbehonest 9y ago
      Sam Altman tried to destroy a Pando writer for writing an article critical of a portfolio company's valuation. He then made spurious accusations and moved the goalposts when they proved he was straight-up lying about his "evidence". Sam Altman has threatened other people's entire livelihoods as well, threatening to use his connections to blackball them from all of SV because he was unhappy with their decisions. I get it: you're paid to be the PR guy for him, so you make your money by pretending he's a good dude. But he isn't. He's a rich bully who is comparing himself (and other bigoted trash) to galileo. I wouldn't really give a shit if he just embraced the fact that he's a rich evil bully who does whatever the fuck he wants... but now he wants us to pretend that he's flawless as well? Screw that. Dude is fucking evil. He should just admit it and own it. And if you had a single ounce of courage, you'd just admit that you're a fucking proto-fascist who despises freedom; and whose major contribution to the world is that fewer people hear mean things about Paul Graham and Sam Altman because they pay you to silence the voices of critics.
• Aron 9y ago
  > "If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment" This one has been around FOREVER but he was surprised to hear it this year? doubtful. I think Sam actually picked safe examples for his contrarian essay. e.g Notably absent Damore.
• tdeck 9y ago
  I get that this is incidental to the point, but since he leads with China as an example, I wonder if it's possible that the topics he thinks will be controversial are simply ones that people are less passionate about in China. Every culture has its own "hot-button" topics. Try pointing out that Taiwan is a separate country sometime and you'd be absolutely shocked at the reaction you get from some people, even though they have different passports and a separate government. A Chinese engineer at Google once threatened to resign and started a a major firestorm over a dessert called "Free Tibet Goji Chocolate Creme Pie": https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2015/04/the-biggest-firestorm-in-googles-history-the-name-of-a-pie https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2015/04/...
• Diederich 9y ago
  Shortly prior to the recent US presidential election, I worked next to a nice, smart young man from California who went to a well-known progressive university in the bay area. Politics was very rarely discussed at work, but in the weeks before the election, there was some cross talk in the isles. He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious about the thought of a Trump presidency, but I'm pretty far along the open-minded scale, so we chatted about it privately a bit. My co-worker asked me to not speak about his position and to not let anyone else know about it, because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.' Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice. You know what? I agreed with his concern at the time, and I still agree with it. Consciously and otherwise, I think that quite a few of the fine progressive folk that we find ourselves surrounded by here in the bay area would hold such an opinion against him in important ways. I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives. At this point, I can't imagine a path forward that has much of a chance of bearing fruit.
  • abraae 9y ago
    Leaning in from outside the US, the path forward is obvious. "Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion. That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power. Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing, and that climate change will kill us all if we don't act.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats, because their party preference is rooted in tribalism rather than in policy, and you'd scare off lots of lefties who don't think the state should be outlawing important medical procedures.
• mooe 9y ago
  The title of your essay is the very height of arrogance. Your assertion is that it is very important to human progress that people who despise homosexuals (or others) be allowed to spread their hatred without any social or professional repercussions. This is, at best, a questionable assertion, and it is one that you give no evidence for. However, you are so insanely fucking arrogant that you're comparing yourself to Gallileo? As you fight for the right of powerful oppressors to demonize minorities? Go fuck yourself, sam. Go fuck yourself. I know that you're a fucking coward, so you won't respond. You'll probably just have dang delete the post (because you do not actually believe in open speech).... but man... fuck you, and fuck your shitty fucking parents for raising you to believe that it's somehow more important to protect bigotry and hatred than it is to protect actual goddamned people.
• bambax 9y ago
  Disappointing salad of ideas. Apparently I should be allowed to say that gay people are evil, but not that radical life extension is a really really bad and yes, in my opinion, truly evil and selfish idea. Should I be allowed to profess that humanity would be happier and less taxing on the planet if there were less of us? And should I be able to research methods to sterilize most people, and seek funding to experiment, without ever discussing the moral and practical consequences? What about radical life reduction (for others, of course)? The consequences of radical life extension should be discussed prior to implementation; I can't see what's so frustrating about that.
  • mundo 9y ago
    The essay was not so much against "life extension is bad" as against "people who think life extension is good are bad."
    • bambax 9y ago
      Fair point, but some ideas reflect on who expresses them. If you think gay people are evil, it says something about you (usually, not good). I think the same is true about life extension.
      • mundo 9y ago
        See, that sounds innocuous enough. Yet, this essay strikes a chord with me as delineating a real and serious problem. Best way I can explain why is an anecdote. The other day, someone asked if anyone could recommend a book on JS, and someone else suggested "Javascript: the good parts" by Douglas Crockford. The following exchange occurred: A: Oh, not Crockford, he's a sexist. B: Really? I hadn't heard, what'd he do? A: Ah, I forget. Turns out, the accusations against Crockford were (as far as I can tell) pretty weak and largely abandoned, but most people never read about that, they just saw the initial salvo and took it as gospel. That's where we are right now - we have gotten to the point where we take accusations of bias seriously, but not yet the point where we always make them that way. We have the power to destroy the careers of bad people, but not yet the responsibility to use it wisely or sparingly. Right now, the result of that is an understandable reticence to speak frankly about controversial topics and to hash out ideas in public, which is what the essay is describing.
• cortesoft 9y ago
  I get really frustrated with this constant refrain that every idea needs to be responded to on its merits, and you aren't allowed to EVER just dismiss an idea. While this sounds good in theory, in practice you have to draw the line somewhere. Do I need to engage in a debate about whether the earth is flat or not every time someone says it is flat? Am I not allowed to just dismiss the idea and say 'this is not something that is up to debate'? Not all ideas are worthy of discussion, and someties you have to tell the people constantly proposing ideas that we have addressed before to knock it off.
• BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  This thread is pretty much useless. It's just hundreds of "my anecdotal point beats your anecdotal point". Scrolling through at least 95% of everything I saw is either "I've lived in the following 5+ places and the Bay Area is the worst" or the exact inverse of that. I don't even entirely understand the blog post. Did Sam see mean comments on the internet then write up something about how we can't talk about things because of said mean comments? Something everyone, including Sam, is missing is this: everyone has different experiences than you and, more importantly, in an anonymous setting such as the internet you're going to get extreme views not necessarily representing the majority far more frequently (and more loudly) than anything that could be considered moderate. Stop giving so much of a shit what other people think.
• Houshalter 9y ago
  Most of the comments here are about culture war and missing the more interesting point of the essay. We knew political tribalism was getting bad in SF. But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political. These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this. Another very important point was missed here. The smartest people can have the absolute weirdest political beliefs. They are the least likely to conform. And the most likely to not shut up about their weird ideas even when the consequences are obvious.
  • GuiA 9y ago
    > These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this. That's just like, your opinion man. If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare) These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism. If someone's feelings are hurt because there is a backlash against their technoscientism, that's on no one else but them.
    • Houshalter 9y ago
      >If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare) Why not? People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago. But this is beside the point. These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.
• Animats 9y ago
  Things you can't say in San Francisco: - Gays are about 3% of the US population. Higher in a few big cities, lower in rural areas. Transgenders, maybe 0.4%. - About half the US population supported Trump. His supporters have legitimate complaints. - Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US white IQ: 100. Average US black IQ: 85. - "Medical marijuana" is a joke.
  • AlexandrB 9y ago
    > - Gays are about 3% of the US population. Higher in a few big cities, lower in rural areas. Transgenders, maybe 0.4%. I don't get it. Assuming this demographic fact is correct, what's your point? That they shouldn't be entitled to the same rights as the other 96.6%? > - About half the US population supported Trump. His supporters have legitimate complaints. About 63 million Americans voted for Trump. This is not half the US population. Whether half the US population supports Trump or not is pure speculation. > - Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US white IQ: 100. Average US black IQ: 85. Even granted that this is true. Do you have any evidence that this is nature not nurture? > "Medical marijuana" is a joke. Possible. But is it any worse than the current opioid epidemic? And why is tobacco legal anyway? Seems like I should be able to choose my poison.
    • sbierwagen 9y ago
      >About 63 million Americans voted for Trump. This is not half the US population. Whether half the US population supports Trump or not is pure speculation. 135.4 million people voted in the presidential election, 46% of them for Trump. 135.4 million isn't everyone in the US, but discussing if children should be allowed to vote is an entirely different argument.
• simonbyrne 9y ago
  Of course he has to be careful what he says in the Bay Area: there he's a widely known and respected figure with a powerful public presence. Anyone, anywhere in such a position would be in the same boat.
• Aaron1011 9y ago
  > I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home. > Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones There's quite a difference between 'I feel uncomfortable discussing topic X in location Y' and 'location Y is restricting speech'. The only concrete example in the article of the former is a 'toxic reaction' to work in 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension'. What exactly does a 'toxic reaction' mean? Is there a meaningful distinction between it and 'strenuous debate about ideas'? Based on the examples given, this article seems to hold 'mainstream' and 'heterodox' ideas to different standards. Criticism of mainstream ideas is (rightly) described as 'necessary to get the really good ideas', 'what drives the world forward', etc. Criticism of heterodox ideas, on the other hand, is a 'restriction of speech' and a 'toxic reaction'. I wish that Altman had provided more a single example (the reaction to 'intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension') instead of vague references to 'controversial ideas', 'casting the people behind the ideas as heretics', and 'heresy.
• iceIX 9y ago
  Tim Ferriss also mentioned this issue in his recent AMA [1] when discussing why he recently relocated to Austin. He describes it as "a peculiar form of McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness." The whole comment is worth reading. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6va5f/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...
• danieltillett 9y ago
  In fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think may be true and that I don’t like. I think this is the most interesting section in the whole essay. Is Sam really suggesting that he wants to supress the truth because he doesn't like what the truth is telling us. Here is a totally novel idea - how about changing your mind when the evidence changes.
• groby_b 9y ago
  Sam Altman is an idiot. The tolerance for "gay people are evil" has, more than once, led to "gay people must die". In fact, it is an inescapable consequence - if you declare people evil, you do declare you want to rid the world of them. And coming from that point: You are still free to say this, of course. And everybody in the Bay Area is free to say it, too. But there are consequences to your speech. And the consequence to this particular speech is that most sane people will shun you. Tough luck, Sam. We've seen your colors when you desperately clung to Peter Thiel, you've just shown a little bit more of yourself. And yes, of course we must allow the free exchange of ideas. But speech that strips away the humanity of others is not "an idea". It's hate. And it cannot be accepted in a civil society, without undermining the very foundations of that society. I find it especially amusing that he thinks "gay people are evil" is perfectly fine, but "biotech work is unethical" is something that really shouldn't be said. He couldn't be much clearer about his actual intentions: he really wouldn't like criticism of the things that make him money, and to not annoy the existing "talent", bigotry should continue to be OK. Putting that half-baked kind of intellectual dreck under a Galileo quote is a truly Silicon Valley thing.
  • exolymph 9y ago
    You know that Altman himself is gay, right?
    • RodericDay 9y ago
      So is Peter Thiel. What's your point?
    • groby_b 9y ago
      Yes. And? That has nothing to do with the argument I just made.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • dulse 9y ago
    I'm genuinely conflicted on this perspective, because I feel very defensive of both gay people and free speech. It's a complex issue, I agree that intolerant speech can be more complicated than "it's just words." What do you think about the choice of the ACLU to defend the neo-nazis' right to protest in South Carolina? I abhor the content of their speech, but I think I agree it's important that it's defended. On the other hand, what about the restrictions on neo-nazi speech in Germany after WWII? I think I agree that this restriction of speech was a good idea, as it prevented the possibility of that thinking continuing to take root and spread. The difference between the two scenarios in my intuition is that one feels far removed from being "real" -- I don't sense that neo-nazis are close to taking over American government (Trump jokes aside) so I see it as important to protect it as minority speech; but in post WWII Germany, it was much closer to "real" that the hate speech would transform into hateful action, including restricting speech on the other side. So the probability of the outcome of speech matters (or the popularity of the speech) in my mind, and the more minority the speech, even if abhorrent, the more important it is to protect; but, as the speech approaches majority or becomes "action" then my intuition starts to flip. But it's always maximizing protection for minority speech, and draws a bright line between speech and risk of action.
• IamNotAtWork 9y ago
  > To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. part of the problem is demand for applications for theoretical research done at universities. You can't just do research on wacky ideas because the money you need to do the research have deliverables attached.
• shafyy 9y ago
  Funny, I experience exactly the opposite moving to SF from Zurich (Switzerland). I could write the same blog post but replace SF with Zurich and it would work for my experience. I would like to see data on this. This seems like a very anectodal post (and I think the controversial comments underline it).
  • GuiA 9y ago
    This is an extremely anecdotal post, and if it had been written by anyone but the CEO of YCombinator it'd have been either ignored, or derided.
• GuiA 9y ago
  Still trying to wrap my head around what he's trying to get at exactly (interesting that he never actually says what people in China accepted more than in the Bay Area - my bet is that it's not something about human rights in China) - but so far the only 2 things I'm getting are: 1) It somehow should be acceptable, in a dream society, to say that gay people are evil, but not to question the ethics of scientism. 2) A white dude who doesn't speak Chinese somehow finds China to be a better place for startups and freedom of speech, because there is some backlash against the technolibertarianism he peddles in his home city. Never mind that political activists routinely get executed in China and all that. Sam seems like he has gone far into the deep end. Not sure if this what happens to your brain when you are super rich and constantly surrounded with people as rich as you, but I am struggling to make sense of it any other way. If this had been posted by anyone else than the CEO of YCombinator, it'd have been dismissed like the drivel that it is.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• hutzlibu 9y ago
  Not sure how appropriate, but my association with the title and topic is a song from a german metal band, which moved and influenced me a lot, when I discovered it, while also reading in school(and outside) about it... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cE4YRnjrM1Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cE4YRnjrM1Q And I remember being very upset, that I seemed to be the only one moved by the topic, while the rest of the class, including the teacher, found it booring and just learned about it, because they had to ... blasphemists!
• rsp1984 9y ago
  It looks like there are very different opinions about whether Silicon Valley culture is more or less tolerant than other places. However I think those differences can be resolved by viewing tolerance of background and tolerance of opinion on two different axes. In my mind SV scores very high on tolerance of background but low on tolerance of opinion (as in "we don't care how you look like, as long as you agree with our opinions"), whereas NY scores high on both, and places like Japan are the reverse (scoring low on tolerance of background but high on tolerance of opinion -- hope I haven't offended any Japanese readers but that was my impression when I lived there for a short while).
• chasing 9y ago
  'More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.' That's toxic? First, sounds very straw-man. Second, okay, someone said they think something's unethical. Maybe it is? Maybe they have a point they didn't articulate well? Maybe they're straight-up wrong! If you're arguing for free speech, then you're arguing in favor of people being vocally critical of ideas you hold dear. Hiding under the pillow fort of "California is so intolerant" makes it seem like what you're actually complaining about is people disagreeing with you.
  • prepend 9y ago
    I’ve had similar experiences. And yeah, being told your work is unethical over something so arbitrary is depressing. It’s only one anecdote as part of an article so I don’t understand your complaint. I suppose a thorough study of attitudes would be better.
  • untog 9y ago
    Yeah, I think this gets to my core objection to the essay. It presents as being in favour of free speech, yet also implicitly says that anyone questioning progress (in more or less any form) is dangerous. The idea that you should be able to say or do whatever you want and also be shielded from criticism of those ideas is silly. Especially when you're some of the most rich and powerful people in the 21st century. No-one is stopping you from doing anything, they're just questioning you about it. If you can't (or don't want to) answer those questions then maybe you should consider why that is.
    • cirgue 9y ago
      Saying "you are unethical for doing this research" is very different from saying "I think there are serious problems with extending human life". One is a legitimate criticism and is vital to public debate. The other is name calling.
• kristianov 9y ago
  If you are afraid of hearing opposing opinions, maybe you have weak arguments.
• Buldak 9y ago
  The author says that it's safer to discuss "controversial" ideas in Beijing than America, but I wonder if that's partly because the ideas in question aren't actually controversial in Beijing. Presumably the ideas the author has in mind are those that might be interpreted to impugn certain disadvantaged groups. But if I found it more easy to say "gay people are degenerates" in Beijing, I don't think I would take that as evidence that free speech norms are more robust there--it might just mean that homophobia is the norm.
  • simonbyrne 9y ago
    Also, perhaps the authors status in San Francisco means that any comments he makes will be more likely to get attention (and hence criticism) than in China.
    • pavlov 9y ago
      In China, the author is a visiting foreign multimillionaire — the type of person whose conversation will be enthusiastically received no matter the content.
      • squarefoot 9y ago
        That would likely be the reaction in whatever country he was visiting. Being multimillionaire and foreign makes the difference. Contracts with government == money+jobs == votes -> power. Contracts with politician owned company == money -> power.
  • marme 9y ago
    this is exactly the case. Try saying "taiwan is an independent country" in beijing and see how well that statement is received
    • xster 9y ago
      Seems like a sensible theme to explore but is this data or conjecture? I'd make a similarly anecdotal conjecture that you'd be met with rigorous debate but your social character standing won't be affected by bringing this topic up, nor would it be socially acceptable for your opponent to use ad hominem at any point. This is the theme the author is addressing.
• dingosity 9y ago
  boo hoo. white boy gets dissed for his broken ideas.
• dingosity 9y ago
  boo hoo. white boy dissed for his chege ideas.
• Dove 9y ago
  We have something to learn from the church here. For long decades, the Protestants and Catholics did bloody battle for dominance of Europe. It seems silly to those now who think religion is a trivial lifestyle choice, but the lesson is to be learned by viewing this from their perspective. To them, each saw the other as putting the immortal souls of the masses in grave danger. The stakes could not possibly be higher, which is why the solution was so hard to see. Freedom of religion is a very, very counterintuitive idea if you think religion is deadly important. The churches agreed to live together in peace, not because they concluded their cause was unimportant, but because they could see resolving their disputes with blows was error-prone and cruel. The best way forward, the best chance truth had, the most just and practical way to live, is to commit to resolving these conflicts with words only. The idea was so successful that today we would not think even of dragging someone out of a cult against their will. Even if a religious idea is obviously bad, we are committed to opposing it with words only because the lesson of history is that the alternative is so much worse. It's a lesson we need to learn in politics. We are not at the point where opposing political views generate open warfare, but I wonder more and more if we might be heading in that direction. But we do oppose each other in ways we wouldn't tolerate in a religious context: we ostracize and chase away people with unpopular views from various societies, either virtual or physical. We organize campaigns of legal or personal harassment. We organize economic pressure to attack the livelihoods of individuals whose views we find offensive. All of these tactics run the same moral risk that physical warfare does: if you turn out to be wrong, you have done a grave injustice. And someone is wrong. You can't be sure it isn't you. Therefore, to prevent society being an awful place to pursue your conscience, none of us should do these things. Worse, a campaign against an idea that consist of anything other than criticizing the idea runs the risk of being wrong. Strenuous debate is the arena in which truth has the best chance, so it is where we should all agree to fight. We need to learn the lesson the church learned centuries ago. We need to commit to fighting our political battles with words only, not because they are so unimportant that we can tolerate error, but because they are too important to let the strong and popular hold sway.
• grey-area 9y ago
  This is dangerously wrong. Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home. There are many more unsayable things in Beijing than San Francisco, and the penalties for saying them are much harsher (though of course not for Sam, as a very wealthy foreigner most rules simply don't apply). People are regularly beaten, harassed and murdered for reporting the truth about the government in China. Journalism is a very dangerous profession there in ways it is not in the US. http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/14/asia/chinese-beat-korean-journalist-intl/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/14/asia/chinese-beat-korean-j... https://cpj.org/2016/04/chinese-journalist-sentenced-to-nearly-5-years-for.php https://cpj.org/2016/04/chinese-journalist-sentenced-to-near... In contrast, the dangers Sam runs from being open are that people will be mean to him on the internet. I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true This is a really odd statement of a non-problem which dismisses real world life-threatening problems a lot of marginalised people live with. First, reasonable people are not the problem, violent, irrational people who are influenced by bad ideas are. Second, this is not an academic debate over people with naughty ideas, real lives are ruined by the normalisation of bigotry and hatred (in ways that Sam in his privileged bubble has never and will never experience, and apparently can't even imagine). People are murdered, spat on and denigrated even at their funerals when hate like 'gay people are evil' is allowed to spread. Sometimes, to remain human, you have to choose a side. This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. Why would those two things ever be related? Why can't we let people say novel things about physics, and call them out when they (for example) harass gay people, sexually assault people who work for them, or do other bad things. Why would we possibly want to excuse bad behaviour because someone comes up with novel physics ideas? What sort of confusion of ideas could lead to linking these two topics?
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    What if it were hypothesized on the basis of some controversial observations say in optics, not proven mind you, but supposed based on related work, that we might be able to hit melanin molecules with certain types of radiation to allow people to change their skin color to those indistinguishable from another racial group? Would physicists be allowed to discuss and publish proposals for this? I'm not even talking IRB issues of human experimentation, just pursuing the work in vitro.
• ivankirigin 9y ago
  There is a difference between thoughtful disagreement and treating the speaker as an outcast. We should engage and attack ideas based on merits. One of my favorite ideas here recently is a "steel man" argument. It's putting the best version of an opposing argument forward before explaining why it's wrong. This charity to the people behind the ideas is missing when you're looking for a soundbite or worse looking to banish to an out group.
• du_bing 9y ago
  Thanks for writing this, as a Chinese Developer, I can get many great and unique opinions on my own country on Hacker News which I would never get on the Internet in China. I have been watching Sam Altman's sayings for a long time, I believe his judgment is at least reasonable for some reason we cannot see from the article. Actually as an ordinary Chinese citizen and IT worker, I have always seen SF as the best place in the world to work and create something. However, in recent years, the atmosphere has subtly changed, between Silicon Valley and Beijing, between China and USA. Such different ideas are always good for understanding the world better.
• Nomentatus 9y ago
  Somewhat similarly, in Hutterite colonies only men voted (dunno about today.) So what they said was very strictly watched and proscribed since their opinions mattered. Males rarely dared to criticize anything in the colony. In contrast females could criticize whatever they cared too with few consequences. They didn't vote so their opinions weren't perceived as threatening order very much. I think de Tocqueville made a similar report about America a very long time ago, that Americans had to self-censor, French peasants didn't - they didn't vote so the powers that be cared little about their opinions.
• chasing 9y ago
  "So what of China's billion-plus citizens who are not members of the free-speech elite? Although an average citizen could privately express sentiments similar to those published by Li Rui, if an average person had written and privately published what Li Rui wrote, or presented such sentiments in a speech to a large political gathering as he did, there is little doubt that Chinese authorities would prosecute them for subversion." "In January 2003 the website of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of China's Communist Party, reported that a court in Hefei, Anhui province sentenced two men, identified only by the surnames He and Yu, to prison terms of nine and seven years respectively for "unlawful operation of a business." Their crime was publishing love poems without government authorization." "Prior restraints are synonymous with censorship, and represent one of the most onerous infringements on freedom of expression. The term "prior restraint" refers to any system in which the government may deny a person the use of a forum for expression in advance of the actual expression. Chinese authorities employ several different types of prior restraints over the citizens of China in order to ensure that the Communist Party is able to silence critics and maintain direct editorial control over political information and news reporting..." "The Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department sends out regular bulletins to editors informing them which topics are forbidden." Etc. https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privilege-not-a-right https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privil...
• kisstheblade 9y ago
  " nearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out sounding like terrible ideas" Citation needed...
• shadowtree 9y ago
  In China no one laughs about your Juicero investment - as they make a killing producing it for you.
• dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  Actually I'm surprised this article hasn't been flagged yet. Many of us feel the same, but it's unusual to discuss these things openly. Last time I saw the discussion was triggered by Google sacking Damore - and almost all discussions were flagged as soon as SF woke up.
• thowar2 9y ago
  Things Americans living outside of America have known for awhile.
• gammarator 9y ago
  I can't get past the hubris of the title. Sam, you're not Galileo; nobody's putting you to death, just criticizing you. And whatever the unpopular "truth" you want to express is, if it's true (like "E Pur Si Muove") it should survive that criticism.
• WillyOnWheels 9y ago
  n-gate.com is going to have a wonderful time with the comments here.
• dgreensp 9y ago
  If your startup idea is actually offensive to people, maybe take a step back and think about that, or just do it anyway, who cares? Since when are entrepreneurs afraid of "speaking heresies" or "toxic reactions"... from whom? Investors? Friends at dinner parties? Are the reactions of San Franciscans really so unique? Somehow blaming a city for your idea's reception sounds suspect. Also, playing the victim. Getting called out on political incorrectness is not akin to being bludgeoned with a "club." If you tend towards "constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted," congratulations, you're neurotic, like me. It's just something you have to overcome enough to be comfortable expressing your own unique opinions. When you do this, you may find your controversial opinions are merely out of touch. Like you have an IQ of 180 and you've been reading scientific papers and you can prove there are only two genders... and now if you can't express this view over a beer in SOMA without getting some looks, you can't invent the self-driving car or something...?
• grandalf 9y ago
  It's great to see Sam calling attention to this problem. I'd argue that it's not really about ideas as much as it is about the public being much more accepting of authoritarianism. The broader values of free speech and free expression come not from an aesthetic judgment of particular acts of speech, but from a desire to limit the power of authoritarian governments to suppress speech/expression. We're seeing in both parties an amnesia about the downside of authoritarianism, and this filters down to things like office culture, university culture, and the perception of the trade-offs associated with various freedoms.
• IA21 9y ago
  Let's make it 800 comments.