10 ms·

Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

94 points by raleighm 8y ago

guelo 8y ago
It's ridiculous because they are incredibly powerful, have won the debate, and continue winning. I mean, social justice is now considered a bad thing. Your evil has won, congratulations.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  Social justice has been a "bad thing" for a few hundred years now. That's why our courts try every case on its individual merits, and sentencing is taken under consideration of the convicted's own past record. We no longer have a justice system wherein certain classes of citizens are de iure above the law by virtue of their class membership. That abhorrent idea has been willfully confused by many loudmouths who might otherwise have a few good points about systemic social problems into seeking a flat-out unacceptable violation of core principles of equal treatment under the law.
  - guelo 8y ago
    You speak as if the law is always neutral and just.
- FeepingCreature 8y ago
  > I mean, social justice is now considered a bad thing. Location, location, location!
rwbhn 8y ago
Favorite quote: "Really, what sort of moron wastes their time suppressing a leaderless movement that nobody believes in or cares about?"
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
montrose 8y ago
The word for the phenomenon he describes is "heresy." For example large numbers of fairly influential people in European history disagreed with official church doctrine, but had to keep quiet or risk persecution of various types. E.g. Newton had qualms about the Trinity, but he could not talk openly about them, or he would have lost his fellowship at Oxford. (Ironically, he was a fellow Trinity College.)
- oicie0uD 8y ago
  FTA: The thing that’s new and exciting enough to get New York Times articles written about it is that the anti-PC movement has spread to friendly coastal liberals. From the Democrats’ perspective, the IDW aren’t infidels, they’re heretics.
John_KZ 8y ago
I find it interesting that the ("alt")right-wingers that elected a president and rule the internet media and half of TV (have you head of a popular left-wing forum? I sure haven't) are still pretending to be underdogs. In one sense this is a classic tactic of the right-wing around the world. They can't get elected if the only ones that vote them is the financial elite. They need the vote of the common man. Nothing beats the illusion of solidarity created by empty nationalist trash-talk and creating fictional enemies to further intensify the mob mentality. While it's true that some platforms, like Twitter and Reddit and of course CNN, have shown political affiliations with the american democrats, the conservatives still hold a very large portion of the national media, including a vast network of local TV stations. And those democrat platforms didn't even censor their content, they just limited it's reach in a somewhat justified manner (the Trump campaign used countless bots and subcontractors to spam things all over the internet). There is a lot of censorship and silencing going on by mainstream media, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, but the only reason you hear the US Conservatives (And UK far-right, to some extend) complain about it, is because they already have a huge podium to use. The left, and especially the remnants of the Social Democrats around Europe have been decimated by the change in media. They didn't have the money or the morals required to use aggressive marketing tactics with ad campaigns and spambots, the traditional forms of communication of the left are torn down (connecting through permanent employment and unions), so their parties turned into a mutilated body of the surviving cancerous lobbies that existed within. That's one of the main reasons you see many "Social Democrats" and traditional left-wing parties in Europe applying neoliberal policies.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >I find it interesting that the ("alt")right-wingers that elected a president and rule the internet media and half of TV Couldn't help yourself eh? You had to throw in the 'alt' prefix.
  - John_KZ 8y ago
    The reason you're passive aggressive isn't clear to me. I used the "alt" prefix to reinforce the irony of the name "alternative" right being the mainstream right movement. Is this why you're angry?
Radim 8y ago
> “That other monkey has status that should be my status!” – nobody ever went broke peddling that. Well said. Who needs facts when you can fling shit at the opposing group? It feels our older biological subsystems don't know what to do with the latest evolutionary upstart: rationality. Some tension there. I like the distinction between "obviously true" and "common knowledge" the article draws: > My favorite Soviet joke involves a man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to everyone who passes by. Eventually, of course, the KGB arrests him—but they discover to their surprise that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper. “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand. “What is there to write?” replies the man. “It’s so obvious!” Coming from the former Soviet block, this is spot on. It's as if societies and social norms have inertia and strive for their own preservation, like an organism. Even at the cost of the individuals (people) who comprise them. In the extreme case, social norms can go against the interest of all individuals and still prevail, as the article points out. How weird! Or not weird? I guess humans themselves are just such conglomerate of trillions of "individuals" (cells). We can do shit that hurts all of them, and they'll still comply. It's just weird to think of societies as "doing their own thing", because we're so grounded in our human-level perspective.
js8 8y ago
Yes, they can be both popular and silenced. Steven Pinker mentions in the Better Angels of Our Nature (and possibly also elsewhere) that a group of people (even relatively small one) can be in a situation where everybody disagrees with some policy, yet everybody follows it, because they believe that everybody else agrees with it. That's why allowing dissent is important, to get out of such tricky situations.
- scandox 8y ago
  A lot of the debate is exactly informed by this: what we suspect some silent majority are really thinking. So if I have a lot of sympathy with left-leaning ideas, it's probably because in a certain part of my life I see a lot of quietly right-wing ideas.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Was he referring to the Abilene paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
wffurr 8y ago
> the people at Vox (highly-polished, Ivy-League-educated mutants grown in vats by a DARPA project to engineer the perfect thinkpiece writer) He left out "neoliberal corporate sponsored" but that really hits the nail on the head.
- croon 8y ago
  Either I'm unsure what you're trying to say, or I believe you misunderstood what he was saying.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 8y ago
  If by neoliberal you mean socialists, then sure.
21 8y ago
> These donations can add up. Mr. Rubin said his show makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon. And Mr. Peterson says he pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month. It won't be long until the censors find out and start demanding Patreon to no-platform them.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  They already did. https://www.change.org/p/ask-patreon-to-pull-the-plug-on-peterson https://www.change.org/p/ask-patreon-to-pull-the-plug-on-pet... Didn't go very far. I dimly remember a direct attempt to get Patreon to pull the plug, but that could have been somebody else.
  - jacobmoe 8y ago
    Ah a change.org petition. The PC left is out of control! This is a great example of what bugs me about this crowd. They seemlessly move from actual problematic behavior (like a few famous examples of deplatforming at a few elite college campuses) to Twitter mobs and not entirely supportive op-ed pieces, as if it's all of a kind. Every public person gets Twitter mobbed, but they talk about mean people on Twitter as if it's more evidence that the entire American left has become deranged.
    - guelo 8y ago
      In so many cases, including in this article, they refuse to look at data and just point to anecdotes on top of anecdotes to pretend they're uniquely aggrieved.
      - Presquare 8y ago
        What data are you referring to?
        jacobmoe 8y ago
        You could easily come up with data that might be interesting to look at when discussing this question: - are college liberals more or less likely to answer survey questions supportive of free speech than they were in the past - has the annual rate of incidents of college activist excesses (such as violence over unwelcome speech) been increasing over time, or has the media environment just made it seem that way? - are liberals more or less likely to support free speech than conservatives? and so on. All we hear about is the same few anecdotes over and over again. Don't get me wrong, if there has been backsliding on support for free speech on the left than it's something I think we should be concerned about. I'm just not convinced that the panic we're seeing is justified. Certainly not when you compare this problem to the other problems we're currently facing as a society. edit: formatting edit: ironic that I've found no other topic on the internet where people are more likely to downvote you without engaging in reasoned debate than on the question of whether _other people_ are willing enough to engage in reasoned debate.
coldtea 8y ago
>But shutting up is of course is the exact opposite of what the people involved are doing – as the Times points out, several IDW members have audiences in the millions, monthly Patreon revenue in the five to six figures, and (with a big enough security detail) regular college speaking engagements. That's beside the point though, as I don't think the complain/claim is that they are silenced from everywhere and have no audience. Rather it is that while their opinions are popular, they are still unrepresented and silenced in the mainstream media -- including the Times itself.
- cristianpascu 8y ago
  Misrepresentation is another way to silence someone, since you're not making that real person viewes visible, but some fictional, and obviously bad views. Happens a lot with Peterson, being called alt-right and all that. So many people believe this and take it from media misrepresentation.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  Twitter has a market cap of $24 billion to the New York Times’ $3.85 billion. The “mainstream media”, especially print journalism, is made up of underpaid people making sacrifices for a career they believe in. If you think they are doing such a terrible job, quit your high paid engineering job and try freelance journalism for a few years. The David and Goliath narrative the New Right Wing loves so much is wearing a little thin.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Is there really such a thing as "mainstream" anymore? What I think the Internet has done is allowed many, many microcosms to exist -- and exist in ways that are often unknown to the vast majority, even if they are extremely big in their own sphere. In music, I have heard "who?" reactions from folks reacting to news about artists as well known as Avicii and One Direction. And it's true: if you don't follow any of the worlds they represent (stadium-style EDM and teen pop), you wouldn't have a clue who they are. This, I feel, is more of how entertainment choice has expanded so rapidly. You are no longer limited to three channels of TV and a handful of radio programs. People thus gravitate to more specific niches that suite them. Therefore, you can both be enormously popular in your own niche and be quite unknown outside of it. I would argue that the "true mainstream media" of the Internet has nothing to do with politics at all (eg, it's funny memes, cute pics, music and other general entertainment, etc.), and even within this mainstream, there's a lot of microdivisions. So is it surprising that specific right-wing political commentary is just another niche? (Political commentary as a whole is a niche.) That's not really non-representation and silencing. It's more like we live in a world of niches, and increasingly you don't hear much of the niches beyond your sphere, because there's already an overwhelming amount of material in the niches you like already.
Nokinside 8y ago
As someone who reads and listen these people who are called "the intellectual dark web" I would not call them a group of intellectuals. Haidt and Pinker being exceptions. I like to listen Sam Harris and have read a little Mr. Peterson and even listen Joe Rogan who gets into the list somehow. If I criticize these guys it does not mean that I think their net contribution is net negative. Sam Harris is smart and nice to listen and read, but he identifies with his opinions very strongly. He has very clear tendency to "shut down intellectually" when challenged. His inability to see the other point of view cripples him. I have listened enough of his podcasts to realize the moment when he turns defensive. The rest of the podcast is just him repeating his point of view in different ways until the quest leaves it to be. He goes from rational to rationalizing (as in psychological defense) very fast and loses the ability to listen. Harris was always the weakest link among the "Four Horsemen". Dennet & Dawkins were the intellectuals, Hitchens was incredible writer and attack dog. Harris was just edgelord even then. I really appreciate what Jordan Peterson is doing. He actually concentrates on the positive for a group of people who are fed confrontation and anger. But his approach is motivational/charismatic, not scientific or highly intellectual even if he has the credentials. That's not a bad thing if he can reach people. Joe Rogan is the purest case of "manly bullshit". Why he gets mentions is a mystery. It's entertaining if you like the entertainment value. He is smart version of Alex Jones without negativity or ill intent. I think his net positive effect comes from attracting people who fall into every conspiracy theory away from the negative emotions. Conclusion: Opinionated or charismatic is not intellectual and critical thinking involves emotional control and checking your attitude. Intellectually these guys are punching below their weight class. As a group they are not challenging intellectually. They provide identification service.
- cristianpascu 8y ago
  If they discuss ideas, they are intellectuals. A group, if there's a common idea that unites them, at least for now. I think it's telling the fact that atheists and religious intellectuals are coming together for something.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    You are correct. I made an error for implying that they are not intellectuals. They are lightweight intellectuals. Ideologues and pundits mostly.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Some observations from somebody who both writes internet software and has been a member of HN since almost the beginning. 1. With a large enough audience, somebody will get upset about something. Sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I made my point poorly. Sometimes they just don't get it. Sometimes they've just had a bad day and whatever my point, they're not going to like it. Sometimes? Sometimes they feign having their feelings hurt as a way to control conversation. With a large enough audience, you get all of that. Tons of it. You can't say anything to a large enough crowd without in some way it being wrong for some consumers. 2. Every minority group will tell you how oppressed they are. Whether it's greybeard COBOL programmers or hipsters grooving on whatever the other cool kids are, they are all misunderstood, put down, and oppressed. It's a mantra. (That doesn't mean that it's not true. It means that you're going to hear it whether it's true or not) 3. The interests of providing a public forum and the interests of society to hear minority opinions and evolve are in conflict. They always have been. The minute the first city built the first city park there was some kind of Nazi-like group wanting to demonstrate there. Such is the nature of public spaces. (Long discussion here about bullshit internet sites pretending to be bulletin-boards when in fact they're publishers and seek to shape and control what appears on their sites) 4. Sharp contrast, conflict, and passion is what drives clicks. PG once said that he wished more folks would publish stuff about Erlang innards and less political/emotional stuff. It was a great sentiment. The problem is that nobody clicks on those stories or upvotes them. But if I run a school for earthworm jugglers, and a link comes up titled "Earthworm schools under attack again!" I'm going to vote that up before I even click on the link. What does that mean? For internet sites with any volume at all, owners focus on making the fewest people possible upset. Over time this always ends up with a site full of people who look, feel, and act just like the owners do. Good for the site, good for the readers (perhaps), terrible for society. No bad guys, evil plots, bigotry, or malice required. It's just a natural result of the system. So yes, you can be both popular and silenced. The mob always find a way to shut out what it doesn't want to hear. That's why open access and free speech for everybody to everybody is so important.
silveroriole 8y ago
I think the ludicrousness that people really MEAN to point out is not that they have viewership yet claim to be silenced - it’s that the views of these people are often exactly that of the mainstream, yet they claim to be silenced. For example, Peterson explicitly represents ‘common sense’ and a return to the supposedly natural values we’re all familiar with. And the (obviously somewhat generalised, here) views that monogamy is good, LGBT is bad, women should be homemakers and men are good at tech, political correctness has gone mad, and (in the case of Sam Harris) bombing the Middle East might be a good idea, aren’t exactly radical viewpoints, so claiming they’re being silenced is laughable. Their opinions are not really taboo, and are popular (especially with the more powerful groups in society) precisely because of it. The comparisons in this article to, say, transgender, workers rights, or peace activists therefore don’t really jibe with me.
- Density 8y ago
  I remember a certain Google employee who lost his job for having those non-taboo opinions.
  - silveroriole 8y ago
    Partly for openly and tactlessly disagreeing with company hiring policies! Still, he found rather widespread dissemination and some amount of support for his views. Is that silencing? And can “women are naturally uninterested in/poorer at science” really, over the recent course of human history, be regarded as NOT a common or mainstream opinion? I remember a Feynman quote where he was amazed that women could understand graphs in sewing patterns!
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      Eh, being fired seems to constitute silencing, at least to me.
roenxi 8y ago
It takes a bit of reading to get there, but the article resolves in the affirmative; yes things can be both popular and silenced. The absurdist scenario to show how at the end rather catches my fancy. That little gem captures quite a complicated interaction about how society orders itself: that the enforcement of conformity shouldn't be so strong that opposition cannot form against it. I suppose the flip side of this is that political groups have a responsibility to self-regulate their own more extreme elements so that external action is clearly not needed. It'd be lovely to see more of that on the left and right of politics.
- BlackFly 8y ago
  I like the distinction between silencing and censorship, since it just lets you focus on the reality of the situation instead of focusing on the legal meaning. Instead of "I don't care for what you are saying but I will fight to death for your right to say it," you really do have a lot of people behaving in the manner of "I don't care for what you are saying and I will go out of my way to stop you from saying it," while they may be legally consistent, they don't seem to be consistent in ideal.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

94 points by raleighm 8y ago

It's ridiculous because they are incredibly powerful, have won the debate, and continue winning. I mean, social justice is now considered a bad thing. Your evil has won, congratulations.

lr4444lr 8y ago
Social justice has been a "bad thing" for a few hundred years now. That's why our courts try every case on its individual merits, and sentencing is taken under consideration of the convicted's own past record. We no longer have a justice system wherein certain classes of citizens are de iure above the law by virtue of their class membership. That abhorrent idea has been willfully confused by many loudmouths who might otherwise have a few good points about systemic social problems into seeking a flat-out unacceptable violation of core principles of equal treatment under the law.
- guelo 8y ago
  You speak as if the law is always neutral and just.
FeepingCreature 8y ago
> I mean, social justice is now considered a bad thing. Location, location, location!

rwbhn 8y ago

Favorite quote: "Really, what sort of moron wastes their time suppressing a leaderless movement that nobody believes in or cares about?"

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

montrose 8y ago

The word for the phenomenon he describes is "heresy." For example large numbers of fairly influential people in European history disagreed with official church doctrine, but had to keep quiet or risk persecution of various types. E.g. Newton had qualms about the Trinity, but he could not talk openly about them, or he would have lost his fellowship at Oxford. (Ironically, he was a fellow Trinity College.)

oicie0uD 8y ago
FTA: The thing that’s new and exciting enough to get New York Times articles written about it is that the anti-PC movement has spread to friendly coastal liberals. From the Democrats’ perspective, the IDW aren’t infidels, they’re heretics.

John_KZ 8y ago

I find it interesting that the ("alt")right-wingers that elected a president and rule the internet media and half of TV (have you head of a popular left-wing forum? I sure haven't) are still pretending to be underdogs. In one sense this is a classic tactic of the right-wing around the world. They can't get elected if the only ones that vote them is the financial elite. They need the vote of the common man. Nothing beats the illusion of solidarity created by empty nationalist trash-talk and creating fictional enemies to further intensify the mob mentality. While it's true that some platforms, like Twitter and Reddit and of course CNN, have shown political affiliations with the american democrats, the conservatives still hold a very large portion of the national media, including a vast network of local TV stations. And those democrat platforms didn't even censor their content, they just limited it's reach in a somewhat justified manner (the Trump campaign used countless bots and subcontractors to spam things all over the internet). There is a lot of censorship and silencing going on by mainstream media, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, but the only reason you hear the US Conservatives (And UK far-right, to some extend) complain about it, is because they already have a huge podium to use. The left, and especially the remnants of the Social Democrats around Europe have been decimated by the change in media. They didn't have the money or the morals required to use aggressive marketing tactics with ad campaigns and spambots, the traditional forms of communication of the left are torn down (connecting through permanent employment and unions), so their parties turned into a mutilated body of the surviving cancerous lobbies that existed within. That's one of the main reasons you see many "Social Democrats" and traditional left-wing parties in Europe applying neoliberal policies.

macspoofing 8y ago
>I find it interesting that the ("alt")right-wingers that elected a president and rule the internet media and half of TV Couldn't help yourself eh? You had to throw in the 'alt' prefix.
- John_KZ 8y ago
  The reason you're passive aggressive isn't clear to me. I used the "alt" prefix to reinforce the irony of the name "alternative" right being the mainstream right movement. Is this why you're angry?

Radim 8y ago

> “That other monkey has status that should be my status!” – nobody ever went broke peddling that. Well said. Who needs facts when you can fling shit at the opposing group? It feels our older biological subsystems don't know what to do with the latest evolutionary upstart: rationality. Some tension there. I like the distinction between "obviously true" and "common knowledge" the article draws: > My favorite Soviet joke involves a man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to everyone who passes by. Eventually, of course, the KGB arrests him—but they discover to their surprise that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper. “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand. “What is there to write?” replies the man. “It’s so obvious!” Coming from the former Soviet block, this is spot on. It's as if societies and social norms have inertia and strive for their own preservation, like an organism. Even at the cost of the individuals (people) who comprise them. In the extreme case, social norms can go against the interest of all individuals and still prevail, as the article points out. How weird! Or not weird? I guess humans themselves are just such conglomerate of trillions of "individuals" (cells). We can do shit that hurts all of them, and they'll still comply. It's just weird to think of societies as "doing their own thing", because we're so grounded in our human-level perspective.

js8 8y ago

Yes, they can be both popular and silenced. Steven Pinker mentions in the Better Angels of Our Nature (and possibly also elsewhere) that a group of people (even relatively small one) can be in a situation where everybody disagrees with some policy, yet everybody follows it, because they believe that everybody else agrees with it. That's why allowing dissent is important, to get out of such tricky situations.

scandox 8y ago
A lot of the debate is exactly informed by this: what we suspect some silent majority are really thinking. So if I have a lot of sympathy with left-leaning ideas, it's probably because in a certain part of my life I see a lot of quietly right-wing ideas.
simonsarris 8y ago
Was he referring to the Abilene paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

wffurr 8y ago

> the people at Vox (highly-polished, Ivy-League-educated mutants grown in vats by a DARPA project to engineer the perfect thinkpiece writer) He left out "neoliberal corporate sponsored" but that really hits the nail on the head.

croon 8y ago
Either I'm unsure what you're trying to say, or I believe you misunderstood what he was saying.
WC3w6pXxgGd 8y ago
If by neoliberal you mean socialists, then sure.

21 8y ago

> These donations can add up. Mr. Rubin said his show makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon. And Mr. Peterson says he pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month. It won't be long until the censors find out and start demanding Patreon to no-platform them.

mpweiher 8y ago
They already did. https://www.change.org/p/ask-patreon-to-pull-the-plug-on-peterson https://www.change.org/p/ask-patreon-to-pull-the-plug-on-pet... Didn't go very far. I dimly remember a direct attempt to get Patreon to pull the plug, but that could have been somebody else.
- jacobmoe 8y ago
  Ah a change.org petition. The PC left is out of control! This is a great example of what bugs me about this crowd. They seemlessly move from actual problematic behavior (like a few famous examples of deplatforming at a few elite college campuses) to Twitter mobs and not entirely supportive op-ed pieces, as if it's all of a kind. Every public person gets Twitter mobbed, but they talk about mean people on Twitter as if it's more evidence that the entire American left has become deranged.
  - guelo 8y ago
    In so many cases, including in this article, they refuse to look at data and just point to anecdotes on top of anecdotes to pretend they're uniquely aggrieved.
    - Presquare 8y ago
      What data are you referring to?
      - jacobmoe 8y ago
        You could easily come up with data that might be interesting to look at when discussing this question: - are college liberals more or less likely to answer survey questions supportive of free speech than they were in the past - has the annual rate of incidents of college activist excesses (such as violence over unwelcome speech) been increasing over time, or has the media environment just made it seem that way? - are liberals more or less likely to support free speech than conservatives? and so on. All we hear about is the same few anecdotes over and over again. Don't get me wrong, if there has been backsliding on support for free speech on the left than it's something I think we should be concerned about. I'm just not convinced that the panic we're seeing is justified. Certainly not when you compare this problem to the other problems we're currently facing as a society. edit: formatting edit: ironic that I've found no other topic on the internet where people are more likely to downvote you without engaging in reasoned debate than on the question of whether _other people_ are willing enough to engage in reasoned debate.

coldtea 8y ago

>But shutting up is of course is the exact opposite of what the people involved are doing – as the Times points out, several IDW members have audiences in the millions, monthly Patreon revenue in the five to six figures, and (with a big enough security detail) regular college speaking engagements. That's beside the point though, as I don't think the complain/claim is that they are silenced from everywhere and have no audience. Rather it is that while their opinions are popular, they are still unrepresented and silenced in the mainstream media -- including the Times itself.

cristianpascu 8y ago
Misrepresentation is another way to silence someone, since you're not making that real person viewes visible, but some fictional, and obviously bad views. Happens a lot with Peterson, being called alt-right and all that. So many people believe this and take it from media misrepresentation.
bradleyjg 8y ago
Twitter has a market cap of $24 billion to the New York Times’ $3.85 billion. The “mainstream media”, especially print journalism, is made up of underpaid people making sacrifices for a career they believe in. If you think they are doing such a terrible job, quit your high paid engineering job and try freelance journalism for a few years. The David and Goliath narrative the New Right Wing loves so much is wearing a little thin.
soundwave106 8y ago
Is there really such a thing as "mainstream" anymore? What I think the Internet has done is allowed many, many microcosms to exist -- and exist in ways that are often unknown to the vast majority, even if they are extremely big in their own sphere. In music, I have heard "who?" reactions from folks reacting to news about artists as well known as Avicii and One Direction. And it's true: if you don't follow any of the worlds they represent (stadium-style EDM and teen pop), you wouldn't have a clue who they are. This, I feel, is more of how entertainment choice has expanded so rapidly. You are no longer limited to three channels of TV and a handful of radio programs. People thus gravitate to more specific niches that suite them. Therefore, you can both be enormously popular in your own niche and be quite unknown outside of it. I would argue that the "true mainstream media" of the Internet has nothing to do with politics at all (eg, it's funny memes, cute pics, music and other general entertainment, etc.), and even within this mainstream, there's a lot of microdivisions. So is it surprising that specific right-wing political commentary is just another niche? (Political commentary as a whole is a niche.) That's not really non-representation and silencing. It's more like we live in a world of niches, and increasingly you don't hear much of the niches beyond your sphere, because there's already an overwhelming amount of material in the niches you like already.

Nokinside 8y ago

As someone who reads and listen these people who are called "the intellectual dark web" I would not call them a group of intellectuals. Haidt and Pinker being exceptions. I like to listen Sam Harris and have read a little Mr. Peterson and even listen Joe Rogan who gets into the list somehow. If I criticize these guys it does not mean that I think their net contribution is net negative. Sam Harris is smart and nice to listen and read, but he identifies with his opinions very strongly. He has very clear tendency to "shut down intellectually" when challenged. His inability to see the other point of view cripples him. I have listened enough of his podcasts to realize the moment when he turns defensive. The rest of the podcast is just him repeating his point of view in different ways until the quest leaves it to be. He goes from rational to rationalizing (as in psychological defense) very fast and loses the ability to listen. Harris was always the weakest link among the "Four Horsemen". Dennet & Dawkins were the intellectuals, Hitchens was incredible writer and attack dog. Harris was just edgelord even then. I really appreciate what Jordan Peterson is doing. He actually concentrates on the positive for a group of people who are fed confrontation and anger. But his approach is motivational/charismatic, not scientific or highly intellectual even if he has the credentials. That's not a bad thing if he can reach people. Joe Rogan is the purest case of "manly bullshit". Why he gets mentions is a mystery. It's entertaining if you like the entertainment value. He is smart version of Alex Jones without negativity or ill intent. I think his net positive effect comes from attracting people who fall into every conspiracy theory away from the negative emotions. Conclusion: Opinionated or charismatic is not intellectual and critical thinking involves emotional control and checking your attitude. Intellectually these guys are punching below their weight class. As a group they are not challenging intellectually. They provide identification service.

cristianpascu 8y ago
If they discuss ideas, they are intellectuals. A group, if there's a common idea that unites them, at least for now. I think it's telling the fact that atheists and religious intellectuals are coming together for something.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  You are correct. I made an error for implying that they are not intellectuals. They are lightweight intellectuals. Ideologues and pundits mostly.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

Some observations from somebody who both writes internet software and has been a member of HN since almost the beginning. 1. With a large enough audience, somebody will get upset about something. Sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I made my point poorly. Sometimes they just don't get it. Sometimes they've just had a bad day and whatever my point, they're not going to like it. Sometimes? Sometimes they feign having their feelings hurt as a way to control conversation. With a large enough audience, you get all of that. Tons of it. You can't say anything to a large enough crowd without in some way it being wrong for some consumers. 2. Every minority group will tell you how oppressed they are. Whether it's greybeard COBOL programmers or hipsters grooving on whatever the other cool kids are, they are all misunderstood, put down, and oppressed. It's a mantra. (That doesn't mean that it's not true. It means that you're going to hear it whether it's true or not) 3. The interests of providing a public forum and the interests of society to hear minority opinions and evolve are in conflict. They always have been. The minute the first city built the first city park there was some kind of Nazi-like group wanting to demonstrate there. Such is the nature of public spaces. (Long discussion here about bullshit internet sites pretending to be bulletin-boards when in fact they're publishers and seek to shape and control what appears on their sites) 4. Sharp contrast, conflict, and passion is what drives clicks. PG once said that he wished more folks would publish stuff about Erlang innards and less political/emotional stuff. It was a great sentiment. The problem is that nobody clicks on those stories or upvotes them. But if I run a school for earthworm jugglers, and a link comes up titled "Earthworm schools under attack again!" I'm going to vote that up before I even click on the link. What does that mean? For internet sites with any volume at all, owners focus on making the fewest people possible upset. Over time this always ends up with a site full of people who look, feel, and act just like the owners do. Good for the site, good for the readers (perhaps), terrible for society. No bad guys, evil plots, bigotry, or malice required. It's just a natural result of the system. So yes, you can be both popular and silenced. The mob always find a way to shut out what it doesn't want to hear. That's why open access and free speech for everybody to everybody is so important.

silveroriole 8y ago

I think the ludicrousness that people really MEAN to point out is not that they have viewership yet claim to be silenced - it’s that the views of these people are often exactly that of the mainstream, yet they claim to be silenced. For example, Peterson explicitly represents ‘common sense’ and a return to the supposedly natural values we’re all familiar with. And the (obviously somewhat generalised, here) views that monogamy is good, LGBT is bad, women should be homemakers and men are good at tech, political correctness has gone mad, and (in the case of Sam Harris) bombing the Middle East might be a good idea, aren’t exactly radical viewpoints, so claiming they’re being silenced is laughable. Their opinions are not really taboo, and are popular (especially with the more powerful groups in society) precisely because of it. The comparisons in this article to, say, transgender, workers rights, or peace activists therefore don’t really jibe with me.

Density 8y ago
I remember a certain Google employee who lost his job for having those non-taboo opinions.
- silveroriole 8y ago
  Partly for openly and tactlessly disagreeing with company hiring policies! Still, he found rather widespread dissemination and some amount of support for his views. Is that silencing? And can “women are naturally uninterested in/poorer at science” really, over the recent course of human history, be regarded as NOT a common or mainstream opinion? I remember a Feynman quote where he was amazed that women could understand graphs in sewing patterns!
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    Eh, being fired seems to constitute silencing, at least to me.

roenxi 8y ago

It takes a bit of reading to get there, but the article resolves in the affirmative; yes things can be both popular and silenced. The absurdist scenario to show how at the end rather catches my fancy. That little gem captures quite a complicated interaction about how society orders itself: that the enforcement of conformity shouldn't be so strong that opposition cannot form against it. I suppose the flip side of this is that political groups have a responsibility to self-regulate their own more extreme elements so that external action is clearly not needed. It'd be lovely to see more of that on the left and right of politics.

BlackFly 8y ago
I like the distinction between silencing and censorship, since it just lets you focus on the reality of the situation instead of focusing on the legal meaning. Instead of "I don't care for what you are saying but I will fight to death for your right to say it," you really do have a lot of people behaving in the manner of "I don't care for what you are saying and I will go out of my way to stop you from saying it," while they may be legally consistent, they don't seem to be consistent in ideal.

deleted 8y ago

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