6 ms·

Sam Altman complains political correctness (gay) “Free Speech is dead in SF”

18 points by gamechangr 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago
> “I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco.” I don't follow Sam's life, but has he lived there for at least a few months to be able to say that? Or he just went to a conference or two there? Even so, it may be easier for an American or other foreigner to "speak their minds" in China, especially if they are known to have a lot of money. But if he was a Chinese, I think there's a much higher chance something like this would happen instead: https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed-for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007 https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl... The only thing you may have to fear for in SF may be your reputation, but not that you will go to prison for saying the "wrong thing". Not yet, at least.
- gamechangr 9y ago
  I think he is just using an extreme example (China) to point to the fact that SF should be much - much -much easier to for "discussing controversial ideas". I think your link connects the dots of using China as an extreme example.
austincheney 9y ago
As an outsider looking in people in the bay area can be way too damn sensitive. With all the social justice warriors running around I am really put off in moving to that area (even if it weren't so damn expensive).
- gamechangr 9y ago
  What specifically are you referencing? Or which social justice issues?
  - austincheney 9y ago
    Anything with the word Berkeley comes to mind. Honestly, outside of tech and the Giants (baseball team), the only times the bay area tends to make the national news has to do with people protesting something. Here are some examples I found searching the interwebs: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/11/sjws-tech-conference-political-diversity/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/11/sjws-tech-conferenc... I remember the incident about Douglas Crockford as a big WTF that confused the hell out of people.
- wumpus 9y ago
  Well, if you want to refuse to refer to married gay people as married, or call transgender people by their pre-transition pronouns, AT WORK, you're going to get fired. If that's a problem, you probably shouldn't work at a company where the HR manual says you should treat co-workers with respect. On the other hand, if you're OK with being respectful to people even if you disagree with their very existence, you're pretty much good to go in the Bay Area. As an example of this in action, I have a gay friend who eventually moved to New York City with his husband. He works in a big bank in a mid-level job, you'd recognize the name. His manager constantly refers to my friend's husband as his "partner". My friend thought he was going out on a limb when he corrected his manager with "Actually, he's my husband." It's fine to be forgetful; it's not fine to be disrespectful. So far nothing bad has happened, but who knows how it will turn out.
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    I'm sure I must be exhibiting some form of hetero-privilege here, but I never got offended by any of the people who referred to my wife as "my partner".
    - wumpus 9y ago
      That's nice for you. I suppose you didn't notice that for a while gay people were only allowed to become "domestic partners", not married? I hope that now you don't now refer to your gay co-workers who are married as having "partners". Because it's not about you. The Golden Rule is not "call people by the name you are ok with if you were them", it's "call people by the name they want to be called by". If you like, I can pull out my Miss Manners book and quote that rule to you, from the 1950s.
      - refurb 9y ago
        I was going to say something like "is everyone taking crazy pills?", but I'll aim for a more serious response. The problem is that people read way too much into what other people say. It sounds like you hear "partner? this person is clearly insensitive to the history of discrimination again LGBT people." Instead try "I don't like the word partner, but it is a pretty standard term for not only the unmarried, but also married people. This guy probably doesn't understand it bothers me, but I'll give him the benefit that he meant no harm."
- RickS 9y ago
  This is mostly an online phenomenon, because you only read content from people who are up in arms about it. The milder views manifest themselves as silence, which is hard to measure. The social justice warriors aren't "running around". They're flagellating each other in mostly self-selecting circles. People who complain about social justice warriors as though they were commonplace are doing the same. Most of the less extreme views on this lead to good places - the are deficits in hiring certain classes of people that are worth fixing for the sake of both economics and decency. There are some pretty rampantly abusive environments born when you give a 20something millions of dollars and a building. I met probably a dozen people (coworkers, acquaintances, etc) in my years there that took this to an unhealthy, draconian extreme. But they're the overwhelming minority. And some of them got rightfully fired for their antics. If you can avoid being lazily bigoted and sexually offensive, you'll do just fine. The standards of conduct are very reasonable.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  My uncle in Texas had to deal with the transgender pronoun bit while doing IT contracting work (for an oil company I believe). It's not as-if these issues only pop up in California. There are plenty of people in the bay area that have more conservative values, if for no other reason than that tons of people move here. Nothing particularly bad seems to happen.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    I've had plenty of conservative colleagues in the Bay Area who've been able to treat all of their co-workers with respect.
    - jackaroe78 9y ago
      Sometimes even without monthy HR training
refurb 9y ago
I'm surprised Sam said this. However I do applaud him for it. The point being is you can argue against speech you disagree with. "Gay people are evil" can be met with "That's ridiculous, and most people find that incorrect and offensive." And leave it at that. Shutting down speech is the problem. Why? Because once you've made it acceptable to shutdown speech that is offensive, suddenly the definition of offensive gets expanded and it's used to bludgeon any ideas that don't align with current thinking. That's dangerous.
- gcatalfamo 9y ago
  Fahrenheit 451. That’s where we are getting into. I keep saying it.
- bbctol 9y ago
  At the point where you think China's doing better on an issue than California, you're not talking about free speech anymore. People getting mad at you for saying things they don't like is not "shutting down speech," it's... speech.
gamechangr 9y ago
It's funny how trying to stop closed mindedness towards anyone/anything aggressively, ends up over time creating another version of closed mindedness as a reaction.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  There's nothing new here. The same thing happened in the civil rights era; if you didn't like black people, you were expected to keep it to yourself at work.
putroce 9y ago
This article is disgustingly biased against him. Why does the author think it's alright to add these little snarky comments? I don't care for her opinion, just tell me what's going on.
- Retroity 9y ago
  Welcome to Journalism in 2017. Impartiality is dead.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  You'd better be careful with that. You disagreed with a woman in tech. That means you're wrong. How could you so openly hate all women!/s
- gamechangr 9y ago
  That would be amazing!!! Can you imagine going back to journalism 20-30 years ago, where they just tried to give you the facts? Sometimes I try to ignore the media and just read books for exactly this reason.
makecheck 9y ago
We have several “modern problems” that make completely-free speech potentially naïve. One, the sheer magnitude of easily accessible information is far greater than it has ever been, and this quantity not only overwhelms us in terms of how many headlines we will read but also how deeply we are willing to read. At some point, we are mostly reduced to headline-skimmers that trust far too much about the first few sentences of whatever is posted, and we place great trust in “something” to help us filter it out (and so far there aren’t a lot of great ways to determine what makes an online source valuable). It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now, which means that people can saturate their input with whatever they want to hear and leave it at that. People have shown that they’re clearly not responsible enough to intentionally diversify what they take in, which almost ensures a very skewed perception of reality, especially when combined with massive quantity and low quality. And, perhaps controversially, I believe that people are not being educated very well at all to recognize and adapt to these problems. (It’s learning about critical thinking, statistical significance of sample sizes, etc.) Indeed, young people are able to easily access online material from almost anywhere with no friction but all of the echo chamber.
- gamechangr 9y ago
  >It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now You nailed it. Look at the elections _ Hillary was winning in almost all online conversations (certainly in my limited social circles = echo chambers)...then the reality proved otherwise.
dragonwriter 9y ago
The title here is neither the original not even coherent. If the issue is space limitation, ”Sam Altman complains SF political correctness hurts innovation” would be a natural shortening of the source title.
vfulco 9y ago
You can only talk like this when you are wealthy since you can/will survive the beat-down from the SJWs and others who demand you only talk in their approved way. Sad...
gamechangr 9y ago
Tim Ferriss says that there is a "a peculiar form of McCarthyism" in Silicon Valley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836

18 points by gamechangr 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

> “I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco.” I don't follow Sam's life, but has he lived there for at least a few months to be able to say that? Or he just went to a conference or two there? Even so, it may be easier for an American or other foreigner to "speak their minds" in China, especially if they are known to have a lot of money. But if he was a Chinese, I think there's a much higher chance something like this would happen instead: https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed-for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007 https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl... The only thing you may have to fear for in SF may be your reputation, but not that you will go to prison for saying the "wrong thing". Not yet, at least.

gamechangr 9y ago
I think he is just using an extreme example (China) to point to the fact that SF should be much - much -much easier to for "discussing controversial ideas". I think your link connects the dots of using China as an extreme example.

austincheney 9y ago

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

gamechangr 9y ago
What specifically are you referencing? Or which social justice issues?
- austincheney 9y ago
  Anything with the word Berkeley comes to mind. Honestly, outside of tech and the Giants (baseball team), the only times the bay area tends to make the national news has to do with people protesting something. Here are some examples I found searching the interwebs: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/11/sjws-tech-conference-political-diversity/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/11/sjws-tech-conferenc... I remember the incident about Douglas Crockford as a big WTF that confused the hell out of people.
wumpus 9y ago
Well, if you want to refuse to refer to married gay people as married, or call transgender people by their pre-transition pronouns, AT WORK, you're going to get fired. If that's a problem, you probably shouldn't work at a company where the HR manual says you should treat co-workers with respect. On the other hand, if you're OK with being respectful to people even if you disagree with their very existence, you're pretty much good to go in the Bay Area. As an example of this in action, I have a gay friend who eventually moved to New York City with his husband. He works in a big bank in a mid-level job, you'd recognize the name. His manager constantly refers to my friend's husband as his "partner". My friend thought he was going out on a limb when he corrected his manager with "Actually, he's my husband." It's fine to be forgetful; it's not fine to be disrespectful. So far nothing bad has happened, but who knows how it will turn out.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  I'm sure I must be exhibiting some form of hetero-privilege here, but I never got offended by any of the people who referred to my wife as "my partner".
  - wumpus 9y ago
    That's nice for you. I suppose you didn't notice that for a while gay people were only allowed to become "domestic partners", not married? I hope that now you don't now refer to your gay co-workers who are married as having "partners". Because it's not about you. The Golden Rule is not "call people by the name you are ok with if you were them", it's "call people by the name they want to be called by". If you like, I can pull out my Miss Manners book and quote that rule to you, from the 1950s.
    - refurb 9y ago
      I was going to say something like "is everyone taking crazy pills?", but I'll aim for a more serious response. The problem is that people read way too much into what other people say. It sounds like you hear "partner? this person is clearly insensitive to the history of discrimination again LGBT people." Instead try "I don't like the word partner, but it is a pretty standard term for not only the unmarried, but also married people. This guy probably doesn't understand it bothers me, but I'll give him the benefit that he meant no harm."
RickS 9y ago
This is mostly an online phenomenon, because you only read content from people who are up in arms about it. The milder views manifest themselves as silence, which is hard to measure. The social justice warriors aren't "running around". They're flagellating each other in mostly self-selecting circles. People who complain about social justice warriors as though they were commonplace are doing the same. Most of the less extreme views on this lead to good places - the are deficits in hiring certain classes of people that are worth fixing for the sake of both economics and decency. There are some pretty rampantly abusive environments born when you give a 20something millions of dollars and a building. I met probably a dozen people (coworkers, acquaintances, etc) in my years there that took this to an unhealthy, draconian extreme. But they're the overwhelming minority. And some of them got rightfully fired for their antics. If you can avoid being lazily bigoted and sexually offensive, you'll do just fine. The standards of conduct are very reasonable.
nitwit005 9y ago
My uncle in Texas had to deal with the transgender pronoun bit while doing IT contracting work (for an oil company I believe). It's not as-if these issues only pop up in California. There are plenty of people in the bay area that have more conservative values, if for no other reason than that tons of people move here. Nothing particularly bad seems to happen.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  I've had plenty of conservative colleagues in the Bay Area who've been able to treat all of their co-workers with respect.
  - jackaroe78 9y ago
    Sometimes even without monthy HR training

refurb 9y ago

I'm surprised Sam said this. However I do applaud him for it. The point being is you can argue against speech you disagree with. "Gay people are evil" can be met with "That's ridiculous, and most people find that incorrect and offensive." And leave it at that. Shutting down speech is the problem. Why? Because once you've made it acceptable to shutdown speech that is offensive, suddenly the definition of offensive gets expanded and it's used to bludgeon any ideas that don't align with current thinking. That's dangerous.

gcatalfamo 9y ago
Fahrenheit 451. That’s where we are getting into. I keep saying it.
bbctol 9y ago
At the point where you think China's doing better on an issue than California, you're not talking about free speech anymore. People getting mad at you for saying things they don't like is not "shutting down speech," it's... speech.

gamechangr 9y ago

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

greglindahl 9y ago
There's nothing new here. The same thing happened in the civil rights era; if you didn't like black people, you were expected to keep it to yourself at work.

putroce 9y ago

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

Retroity 9y ago
Welcome to Journalism in 2017. Impartiality is dead.
cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
You'd better be careful with that. You disagreed with a woman in tech. That means you're wrong. How could you so openly hate all women!/s
gamechangr 9y ago
That would be amazing!!! Can you imagine going back to journalism 20-30 years ago, where they just tried to give you the facts? Sometimes I try to ignore the media and just read books for exactly this reason.

makecheck 9y ago

We have several “modern problems” that make completely-free speech potentially naïve. One, the sheer magnitude of easily accessible information is far greater than it has ever been, and this quantity not only overwhelms us in terms of how many headlines we will read but also how deeply we are willing to read. At some point, we are mostly reduced to headline-skimmers that trust far too much about the first few sentences of whatever is posted, and we place great trust in “something” to help us filter it out (and so far there aren’t a lot of great ways to determine what makes an online source valuable). It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now, which means that people can saturate their input with whatever they want to hear and leave it at that. People have shown that they’re clearly not responsible enough to intentionally diversify what they take in, which almost ensures a very skewed perception of reality, especially when combined with massive quantity and low quality. And, perhaps controversially, I believe that people are not being educated very well at all to recognize and adapt to these problems. (It’s learning about critical thinking, statistical significance of sample sizes, etc.) Indeed, young people are able to easily access online material from almost anywhere with no friction but all of the echo chamber.

gamechangr 9y ago
>It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now You nailed it. Look at the elections _ Hillary was winning in almost all online conversations (certainly in my limited social circles = echo chambers)...then the reality proved otherwise.

dragonwriter 9y ago

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

vfulco 9y ago

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

gamechangr 9y ago

Tim Ferriss says that there is a "a peculiar form of McCarthyism" in Silicon Valley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836