11 ms·

What you can't say (2004)

90 points by baud147258 8y ago

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
The comments here will be great. A bunch of people are going to try to relate this to current trends while tiptoeing around to avoid the mob accusing them of thought-crime and it will be a display of some of the behavior discussed in TFA. Edit: At the time of this edit (~1hr later) the top level comments are definitely very carefully worded to be non-specific. The deeper levels are more direct. Keep in mind that comments here are pseudonymous which affords people a little more protection when speaking their mind.
PerryCox 8y ago
See previous discussions here: 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420
- adamrezich 8y ago
  A recap like this is more interesting for this article than most because each comments thread is a snapshot in time of the then-current discussion about what is and is not taboo. Absolutely fascinating to skim from a contemporary perspective.
  - marvin 8y ago
    I hope we can keep this trend up over the next decade too. It will provide a fascinating account of evolving taboos and the power shifts and power them.
stephengillie 8y ago
> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? It's been said before that if you're not risking downvotes, you're not contributing to the conversation. It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions. Times change, trends come and go, but humans are largely the same today as before we invented the Atlatl[∆]. [∆]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower
- kennywinker 8y ago
  Fair enough, but also don’t play devil’s advocate if there’s no reason to. Just being contrarian is a trap of it’s own.
  - cirgue 8y ago
    I think the point was more that if you wander into a discussion where you already agree with everything being said, your contribution is comparatively less valuable than if you're in a discussion where you disagree.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      > Likewise, one of the biggest pests in business is the carbon copy—the fellow who always says: “Yes, Mr. Wrigley, you’re absolutely right.” Perhaps meaning: “Have it your own way, you old buzzard, what do I care!” Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary. - William Wrigley Jr., 1931 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions. Assuming they already exhibit the behavior of respecting people for whom they strongly disagree. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble and no upside.
kirkules 8y ago
"So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong." -- is a litmus test that fails. It's okay for these kinds of terms to trigger you to double-check something, but it's not the case that, for example, every use of "racist" is indicative of faulty thought or misapplied labels.
- hood_syntax 8y ago
  Fully agree, with the minor exception that I'd say it's good for them to trigger a mental alarm. Lots of spin out there...
- ColanR 8y ago
  From his "reply" [0]: > You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century." > This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    > "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century." I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label (socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of capitalism etc.) So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic: >I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich. This immediately jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government does, the more socialist the country is". I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s, 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists. On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they investigate its cause and name technological rationality. Unlike PG they provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a major demotivator, it seems to imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves. But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates. PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques. [0] I'm not saying getting rich is bad.
weberc2 8y ago
Interesting how moral fashion trends in the U.S. have changed since 2004. As I recall, in 2004, it was morally unfashionable to criticize the war effort. In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement. Although I was much less afraid of being a heretic in 2004 than I am in 2018; I'm curious if others have similar or different experiences/opinions?
- kennywinker 8y ago
  > In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement. It seems like there are many social circles where this is expected, not unfashionable. In the world we live in, all these “norms” are context dependent.
  - lowry 8y ago
    He should have said, criticise publicly.
    - zabuni 8y ago
      Jonathan Chait makes a living doing that.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    I guess those circles just seem very far away when you're in the bay area.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      I'm in the midwest fwiw.
      - scarecrowbob 8y ago
        Here in the Texas hill country, there is this funny fashion where folks complain about how they can't complain about the excesses of "the social justice movement". It's a very meta kind of fashion to see in action. It's neat though... it's always funny to hear some duder talking about how he can't even say something that he's saying.
rpassar4 8y ago
Paul puts his finger on the cost/benefit of saying heretical things out loud in a very useful way here.
candiodari 8y ago
> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? The central idea is that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. Especially when it comes to different attitudes about gasp their intelligence, even in groups specifically selected (at least partly) for their intelligence. Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? Kind of depends on who is judging the papers. > This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? Nope. It's not even a forbidden statement. It's not even a statement. Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error. > The idea that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. This is not an uncommon idea in social justice circles, though each specific versions of it is controversial with different supporting and opposing groups. Heck, the entire idea of group privilege as a basis for distrust frequently found in such circles is exactly a form of this idea. > Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist. Since, on top of not being a statement, the implicit axis of differentiation (assuming an answer other than “neither” or “it depends”) in the hypothetical has nothing to do with race, that seems improbable, and may say as much about your thought processes as about theirs.
api 8y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that some heretical ideas are perhaps correct, some are just nuts, and some are both nuts and very damaging. While it is true that moral fashions and taboos of discourse can exclude good ideas, the inverse does not follow. It does not follow that an excluded idea is therefore good. I think this even works in previous ages. While medieval heretics did not deserve the punishments they received, the majority of them were probably nuts and believed things that were at least as irrational as the dominant paradigms of the time. They called Einstein crazy. They also called Otis Eugene Ray crazy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube Would you have considered letting Otis Eugene Ray go from an engineering position if he started arguing for his bizarre stuff? They also called Willis Carto crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto How about those heresies? Would you want him on your staff if he were outspoken about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Jews are responsible for all the evils of the world? Seems to me that a great many of those being excluded from present discourse are being excluded for arguing for very strong forms of biological determinism coupled with a naturalistic fallacy (if it's natural, it's therefore good) argument for the legitimacy of racism and sexism. Those are dubious ideas with a demonstrated recent track record of motivating acts that cause tremendous harm to a lot of people. They're not heresies of the beneficial sort.
- BryantD 8y ago
  All of this, yes. The problems with ascribing value to ideas based on how controversial they are should be obvious. This is possibly the by-product of investment mentality: investing in bad companies is punished financially, but does not appear to pose any societal risk.
jlelonm 8y ago
> So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true? Has anyone actually collected a whole bunch of information on this? In my head I'm imagining a table, with the columns being cultures (i.e. 1990s America, 1850s Britain, etc) and the rows being contentiously debated actions / ideas (i.e. age of consent being "low", male students having sex with female teachers, etc), and each cell representing a boolean "yes, this culture is OK with this" / "no, this culture is not ok with this"? I'd be really interested to see something like that.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  Such a thing would be seen by many as incredibly dangerous information.
why_only_15 8y ago
Why does he have all these footnotes that aren't actually in the article?
- adamrezich 8y ago
  "Notes" hyperlink at bottom of article links to this: http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html
skybrian 8y ago
This article is written with an implicit assumption that expressing opinions is useful. I'm skeptical about this. Sharing sources and stories of our personal experiences (our inputs) seems more useful than sharing unsourced summary outputs. But that's more difficult, so all I'm giving you is yet another opinion.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  To be fair, the Internet was a very, very different place 14 years ago...
- athrowaway3z 8y ago
  We couldn't function if we had the account of every personal experience that, for instance, is in favor of democracy. Ideas are told and spread by unsourced summary outputs. Best case, they can be justified by some archetypal experience.
40acres 8y ago
This seems like another description of the overton window. The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. The overton window is constantly shifting, and in regards to American politics it seems like it's shifting faster than ever. In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military, today such a law would be viewed as archaic. The timeline from when the first state legalized gay marriage to the supreme court decision is also very short in compared to other movements (abolishment of slavery, womens rights, etc.)
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military No, it wasn't. It was, when it was announced, seen as a betrayal of the gay community by the Clinton Administration. At any rate, you are looking at policy changes, not dialogue changes, that tells you about something moving, but not the Overton Window, which need not move in the same direction as policy (though one would expect a sudden backlash if they moved in different directions long enough, but then that's not inconsistent with observations, either.)
ChuckMcM 8y ago
John Cusak wrote a book on this topic https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-Cannot-Said-Conversations/dp/1608467171 https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-Cannot-Said-Conversations...
jstanley 8y ago
> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? > Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true I'm interested... are there some good historical examples of people getting in trouble for expressing ideas that didn't turn out to be correct?
- christophilus 8y ago
  Creationists, pretty much any religious heresy, various scientists who go against the prevailing, accepted scientific opinion...
jstanley 8y ago
> In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. Or perhaps they thought there might be something there, considered it for a bit, and decided probably not. How often did their eyes pause at sites that turned out to be totally benign?
- lolc 8y ago
  And if we try to count the times their gaze lingered on a benign site, are we sure it was benign? Or was that an actual tumor and it was missed?
writepub 8y ago
Among the consequences of morally unfashionable speech is a rate-limit or ban on HN
kadendogthing 8y ago
You still can't talk about Unionizing in some of America's biggest employment venues, that span across every industry and every domain. Not only is it personally unpopular in private conversation a lot of the time, but it can also injure your livelihood. Everything from getting passed up for a promotion or straight up getting fired.
3pt14159 8y ago
This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling. In Bruce Schneier's book Click Here to Kill Everyone[0] he mentions how it took him two years to write the book because of a false start. In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs / strategic threats. I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1] I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic threats I can update my priors and partially relax. But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this: Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize, but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to it being around we're all convinced someone else surely has figured out how to mitigate the downsides. (It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!) [0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up. I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy a copy for every MP in Canada. [1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class / domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves out of it.

90 points by baud147258 8y ago

The comments here will be great. A bunch of people are going to try to relate this to current trends while tiptoeing around to avoid the mob accusing them of thought-crime and it will be a display of some of the behavior discussed in TFA. Edit: At the time of this edit (~1hr later) the top level comments are definitely very carefully worded to be non-specific. The deeper levels are more direct. Keep in mind that comments here are pseudonymous which affords people a little more protection when speaking their mind.

PerryCox 8y ago

See previous discussions here: 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119269 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420

adamrezich 8y ago
A recap like this is more interesting for this article than most because each comments thread is a snapshot in time of the then-current discussion about what is and is not taboo. Absolutely fascinating to skim from a contemporary perspective.
- marvin 8y ago
  I hope we can keep this trend up over the next decade too. It will provide a fascinating account of evolving taboos and the power shifts and power them.

stephengillie 8y ago

> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? It's been said before that if you're not risking downvotes, you're not contributing to the conversation. It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions. Times change, trends come and go, but humans are largely the same today as before we invented the Atlatl[∆]. [∆]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower

kennywinker 8y ago
Fair enough, but also don’t play devil’s advocate if there’s no reason to. Just being contrarian is a trap of it’s own.
- cirgue 8y ago
  I think the point was more that if you wander into a discussion where you already agree with everything being said, your contribution is comparatively less valuable than if you're in a discussion where you disagree.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    > Likewise, one of the biggest pests in business is the carbon copy—the fellow who always says: “Yes, Mr. Wrigley, you’re absolutely right.” Perhaps meaning: “Have it your own way, you old buzzard, what do I care!” Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary. - William Wrigley Jr., 1931 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/04/agree/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ryanmarsh 8y ago
It's important to maintain relationships with people who, while they may not respect all of your opinions, at least respect you, and understand why you hold those opinions. Assuming they already exhibit the behavior of respecting people for whom they strongly disagree. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble and no upside.

kirkules 8y ago

"So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong." -- is a litmus test that fails. It's okay for these kinds of terms to trigger you to double-check something, but it's not the case that, for example, every use of "racist" is indicative of faulty thought or misapplied labels.

hood_syntax 8y ago
Fully agree, with the minor exception that I'd say it's good for them to trigger a mental alarm. Lots of spin out there...
ColanR 8y ago
From his "reply" [0]: > You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century." > This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  > "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century." I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label (socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of capitalism etc.) So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic: >I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich. This immediately jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government does, the more socialist the country is". I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s, 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists. On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they investigate its cause and name technological rationality. Unlike PG they provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a major demotivator, it seems to imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves. But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates. PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques. [0] I'm not saying getting rich is bad.

weberc2 8y ago

Interesting how moral fashion trends in the U.S. have changed since 2004. As I recall, in 2004, it was morally unfashionable to criticize the war effort. In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement. Although I was much less afraid of being a heretic in 2004 than I am in 2018; I'm curious if others have similar or different experiences/opinions?

kennywinker 8y ago
> In 2018, it's morally unfashionable to mention the excesses of the social justice movement. It seems like there are many social circles where this is expected, not unfashionable. In the world we live in, all these “norms” are context dependent.
- lowry 8y ago
  He should have said, criticise publicly.
  - zabuni 8y ago
    Jonathan Chait makes a living doing that.
- candiodari 8y ago
  I guess those circles just seem very far away when you're in the bay area.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    I'm in the midwest fwiw.
    - scarecrowbob 8y ago
      Here in the Texas hill country, there is this funny fashion where folks complain about how they can't complain about the excesses of "the social justice movement". It's a very meta kind of fashion to see in action. It's neat though... it's always funny to hear some duder talking about how he can't even say something that he's saying.

rpassar4 8y ago

Paul puts his finger on the cost/benefit of saying heretical things out loud in a very useful way here.

candiodari 8y ago

> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? The central idea is that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. Especially when it comes to different attitudes about gasp their intelligence, even in groups specifically selected (at least partly) for their intelligence. Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? Kind of depends on who is judging the papers. > This is a huge problem with a lot of social-justice things. The above statement is the ultimate forbidden statement, isn't it ? Nope. It's not even a forbidden statement. It's not even a statement. Mistaking it for a statement seems to start with believing no one could possibly view the a sweet to the hypothetical question posed different than you do, and then build on that error. > The idea that people both are different, and that that justifies different attitudes to their statements. This is not an uncommon idea in social justice circles, though each specific versions of it is controversial with different supporting and opposing groups. Heck, the entire idea of group privilege as a basis for distrust frequently found in such circles is exactly a form of this idea. > Because of that, most of the social justice advocates I know would, perhaps after thinking on it for 5 minutes, have no trouble at all calling the above statement racist. Since, on top of not being a statement, the implicit axis of differentiation (assuming an answer other than “neither” or “it depends”) in the hypothetical has nothing to do with race, that seems improbable, and may say as much about your thought processes as about theirs.

api 8y ago

The problem with this reasoning is that some heretical ideas are perhaps correct, some are just nuts, and some are both nuts and very damaging. While it is true that moral fashions and taboos of discourse can exclude good ideas, the inverse does not follow. It does not follow that an excluded idea is therefore good. I think this even works in previous ages. While medieval heretics did not deserve the punishments they received, the majority of them were probably nuts and believed things that were at least as irrational as the dominant paradigms of the time. They called Einstein crazy. They also called Otis Eugene Ray crazy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube Would you have considered letting Otis Eugene Ray go from an engineering position if he started arguing for his bizarre stuff? They also called Willis Carto crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto How about those heresies? Would you want him on your staff if he were outspoken about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Jews are responsible for all the evils of the world? Seems to me that a great many of those being excluded from present discourse are being excluded for arguing for very strong forms of biological determinism coupled with a naturalistic fallacy (if it's natural, it's therefore good) argument for the legitimacy of racism and sexism. Those are dubious ideas with a demonstrated recent track record of motivating acts that cause tremendous harm to a lot of people. They're not heresies of the beneficial sort.

BryantD 8y ago
All of this, yes. The problems with ascribing value to ideas based on how controversial they are should be obvious. This is possibly the by-product of investment mentality: investing in bad companies is punished financially, but does not appear to pose any societal risk.

jlelonm 8y ago

> So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true? Has anyone actually collected a whole bunch of information on this? In my head I'm imagining a table, with the columns being cultures (i.e. 1990s America, 1850s Britain, etc) and the rows being contentiously debated actions / ideas (i.e. age of consent being "low", male students having sex with female teachers, etc), and each cell representing a boolean "yes, this culture is OK with this" / "no, this culture is not ok with this"? I'd be really interested to see something like that.

adamrezich 8y ago
Such a thing would be seen by many as incredibly dangerous information.

why_only_15 8y ago

Why does he have all these footnotes that aren't actually in the article?

adamrezich 8y ago
"Notes" hyperlink at bottom of article links to this: http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html

skybrian 8y ago

This article is written with an implicit assumption that expressing opinions is useful. I'm skeptical about this. Sharing sources and stories of our personal experiences (our inputs) seems more useful than sharing unsourced summary outputs. But that's more difficult, so all I'm giving you is yet another opinion.

adamrezich 8y ago
To be fair, the Internet was a very, very different place 14 years ago...
athrowaway3z 8y ago
We couldn't function if we had the account of every personal experience that, for instance, is in favor of democracy. Ideas are told and spread by unsourced summary outputs. Best case, they can be justified by some archetypal experience.

40acres 8y ago

This seems like another description of the overton window. The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. The overton window is constantly shifting, and in regards to American politics it seems like it's shifting faster than ever. In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military, today such a law would be viewed as archaic. The timeline from when the first state legalized gay marriage to the supreme court decision is also very short in compared to other movements (abolishment of slavery, womens rights, etc.)

dragonwriter 8y ago
> In the 90s Don't Ask Don't Tell was seen as a law that championed the rights of homosexuals in the military No, it wasn't. It was, when it was announced, seen as a betrayal of the gay community by the Clinton Administration. At any rate, you are looking at policy changes, not dialogue changes, that tells you about something moving, but not the Overton Window, which need not move in the same direction as policy (though one would expect a sudden backlash if they moved in different directions long enough, but then that's not inconsistent with observations, either.)

ChuckMcM 8y ago

John Cusak wrote a book on this topic https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-Cannot-Said-Conversations/dp/1608467171 https://www.amazon.com/Things-that-Cannot-Said-Conversations...

jstanley 8y ago

> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? > Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true I'm interested... are there some good historical examples of people getting in trouble for expressing ideas that didn't turn out to be correct?

christophilus 8y ago
Creationists, pretty much any religious heresy, various scientists who go against the prevailing, accepted scientific opinion...

jstanley 8y ago

> In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. Or perhaps they thought there might be something there, considered it for a bit, and decided probably not. How often did their eyes pause at sites that turned out to be totally benign?

lolc 8y ago
And if we try to count the times their gaze lingered on a benign site, are we sure it was benign? Or was that an actual tumor and it was missed?

writepub 8y ago

Among the consequences of morally unfashionable speech is a rate-limit or ban on HN

kadendogthing 8y ago

You still can't talk about Unionizing in some of America's biggest employment venues, that span across every industry and every domain. Not only is it personally unpopular in private conversation a lot of the time, but it can also injure your livelihood. Everything from getting passed up for a promotion or straight up getting fired.

3pt14159 8y ago

This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling. In Bruce Schneier's book Click Here to Kill Everyone[0] he mentions how it took him two years to write the book because of a false start. In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs / strategic threats. I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1] I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic threats I can update my priors and partially relax. But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this: Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize, but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to it being around we're all convinced someone else surely has figured out how to mitigate the downsides. (It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!) [0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up. I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy a copy for every MP in Canada. [1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class / domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves out of it.