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This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about on

This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle ground on issues if we're unable to talk to folks who we don't agree with on 100% of things. This is a dangerous trend for all of us because it makes it impossible find common ground in an open democracy even if half the country in our eyes have essentially deplorable views, we need to recognize that they feel the same about us and then it's simply not constructive to be unable to find common ground.

kuzehanka 8y ago
You articulated so well what I've been observing. With the widening political divide, we find ourselves in this weird situation where any decision makers are swarmed with moral outrage attacks unless they're the bastions of politically correct ideology. An increasing number of topics are taboo because merely opening up a discussion around them summons the moral outrage army. Moral outrage has become most effective social manipulation technique, and morality has long ago stopped playing into the equation. The entire point of ethics discussions is to capture the views of the population in a proportionate manner and try to come to a set of mutually positive outcomes. Bonus points for not stomping on minority views. Instead even on HN we have people claiming that their views are the Correct views and the opposition should not even be given a voice. No matter how disagreeable you may find some particular viewpoint, if it happens to be held by a non negligible number of people and you marginalise them, it will eventually result in tremendous blowback. I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary.
- redwood 8y ago
  What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people and I think it's the right thing to do. However by simply sharing my upthread viewpoint that we need to be careful about this meta-trend I will probably be lumped in as one of these dark web right wing types even though it couldn't be further from the truth.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite. PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Not if you apply the point-of-view that etiquette is what the unethical use to keep their unethical practices under-questioned.
      - SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
        There's no real limit to what bad-faith actors will use to appear legitimate. They'll use philosophy, science, religion, etiquette, etc - in constrained, self-serving ways, of course. We can't just assume anyone doing those things is evil and acting in bad faith - otherwise we're just elevating the ad hominem as our supreme, central dogma.
      - cbracken 8y ago
        That seems to imply an assumption of lack of good faith, unless I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying. While there’s no doubt that one can find cases to which this applies, I’d think that applying that broadly to the vast majority of people who are arguing in good faith would stifle debate.
        fixermark 8y ago
        I think you're taking as assumption that the vast majority of people are arguing in good faith, and many are no longer willing to take on that assumption without evidence. Given what has been seen regarding both 4chan psychological operations and Russian intelligence operations on major message boards, I can see the vantage point where it's fair to not treat good faith as assumable.
- fixermark 8y ago
  I'm underwhelmed. In this specific example, the individual in question could've gotten out ahead of the press cycle and explained herself. That she didn't means the beliefs she holds as reported probably are her beliefs, and yeah---that's unacceptable for this role. This isn't thoughtless litmus-testing; this is "Google has a track record of errors regarding its trans userbase and is a company that specifically wants to do better there." If she doesn't see trans people as valid, she's the wrong fit for the role.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kuzehanka 8y ago
    >If she doesn't see trans people as valid, she's the wrong fit for the role. Surely you can see how that generalises to 'if <decision maker> doesn't hold <my view> then they're not fit to make decisions' and that you're basically demonstrating exactly what's being discussed?
    - fixermark 8y ago
      No, because not all ethical view points are equivalent or interchangeable. And we're not talking about any old ethics board, we're talking about an ethics board at Google, which goes out of its way to be trans inclusive.
      - kuzehanka 8y ago
        Thank you for your candid answer. Can we then sum up your stance in two statements: 1: not all ethics viewpoints are equal, and yours are superior 2: in this instance, you believe that the above opposed viewpoint does not deserve any representation at an ethics board, even if it is represents a significant population of the US and the world? Is that correct? This is your stance?
        fixermark 8y ago
        I think you're confusing my personal viewpoint with my observation on what Google appears to have done in this specific context. But for what it's worth, in the specific question of trans individuals, my personal view point is that majorities have been wrong before, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be wrong again. This is one of those times. Trans exclusionism doesn't pass the "Do not ban that which is not harmful to others" sniff test for freedom-oriented society. But again, my personal viewpoint doesn't rule the Google corporation's decisions. However, we shouldn't be surprised when a company that has positioned itself to be clearly trans-inclusive doesn't find somebody who denies the dignity of trans people acceptable on their ethics board.
- winchling 8y ago
  >I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary. I think we got here because of telecommunications and the internet. The world is joining up and a nascent collective mind is emerging. Like the individual mind it has a set of ideas about who it is and what it should be doing, a.k.a. an 'ego'. Many potential thoughts in a normal mind are continually being censored/suppressed because they do not conform to those fixed ideas. Something similar is happening on a larger scale. However just as there is hope for the individual in the form of spiritual awakening there's hope for the world too. The form it would take is unknowable for now. If it resembled a religious revival then I guess it would have to be a new and rather different kind of religion. Where might militant atheists and religious fundamentalists find common ground? Presumably within the new fields of consciousness and AGI research. Though I doubt they'll like it much, at least to begin with...
  - repolfx 8y ago
    I'm not sure it's anything to do with the internet. A lot of this stuff is taking place offline - shouting people down at lectures and things like that. My own theory is it's due to the decline of religion. I say that as a non religious person who has lately started wondering if I'm so right to be that way (I never used to question the righteousness of scientific atheism). Religion can be defined as a moral framework. We have agency and we must act. Religion helps answer the question "how must I act" in a thorough and formalised way: it tells us what right and wrong is, and it does so from a position of pseudo-authority (God says it, so it must be moral). The common thread between all these conservatives-get-censored stories we're seeing is that leadership, whether it be corporate political or academic, is staggeringly weak in the face of moral outrage. Even when that outrage is coming from people who are barely adults, people far more senior and more experienced than them fold immediately - even if they actually disagree. I think this is because without any kind of rigorous moral framework, people don't have any footing on which to push back. Someone pops up and says "that person is the devil because they don't respect women" or whatever, and maybe that's a total pastiche of their position but it's a position anchored in the moral framework of identity politics/femininism. Without any equivalent grounding in an alternative moral framework, the leadership doesn't know how to respond, they are desperate to see themselves as a "good person" and so they're left scrambling to obey the demands of the assembled mob. If they already felt like they were good people, they'd be much more capable of resisting such attacks. Organised religion crops up in every human society throughout history except this one - I believe we're really the first to be widely atheist. But it seems all we've done is replace one set of gods with another: now instead of worshipping invisible deities of peace, love, war, etc, we worship at the deities of minority intersections ... and crusade against heretics who deny the sanctity of that worship.
- GoblinSlayer 8y ago
  Guess what Greeks knew it too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
- kaitai 8y ago
  As with so many ideas in American politics, the use of moral outrage has ping-ponged back and and forth across the political spectrum -- everyone uses it, and people have for a long time. The civil rights era: both sides used moral outrage. Prohibition/the temperance movement. The suffragettes being force-fed during their hunger strike in 1909, and the moral outrage about corrupting women and families and degrading America by allowing women to vote. More recently, social issues have been the wedge between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The Republicans leveraged abortion and contraception because the killing of innocent babies via abortion and/or contraception is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Now progressives leverage LGBQT+ rights because erasing the humanity of a living person is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Climate change has both sides too; killing the planet for the convenience of cars and plastic bags is worst; sacrificing human economic progress and security for some stupid turtles and this made-up sea level thing is the worst. Moral outrage is just a tool. Research is accumulating on the addictiveness of self-righteousness. Moral superiority and outrage get people to do stuff (vote, give money, show up at protests, sign petitions), in a way that self-reflective questioning does not. How could we engineer things so that "moderate compromise with room to listen to the views of others" would get people to act? (Edited to add a paper on self-righteousness, with experiments! http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf)
  - dmix 8y ago
    You seem to be narrowing the issue and abstracting it away from the local problems until you can easily dismiss it as a mere tool everyone has employed historically. But I don't think any recent history has had to have a perfectly "acceptable" political ideology and personal history (sometimes going back 40+ years) - that hasn't "offended" multiple extreme ends of various political camps. ...absent the Victorian age and some time after, which we all moved beyond culturally because it was backwards to force one top-down rigid "proper" way to live and speak. Not to mention the definition of "acceptable" to these special interest camps is forever a moving goal post where anyone who isn't the perfect caricature of mainstream "acceptableness" can't have a say in any economic, cultural, political, etc discourse without being tarred, feather, and demanded to apologize for even thinking they could engage in the process. This is a very different development than just employing moral outrage. A critical part of a healthy democratic society is accepting people have different worldviews. We're moving to a world where there is one alleged correct worldview and anything else is a showstopper.
- mpwoz 8y ago
  I found the book 'The Righteous Mind' very eye-opening and it talks about exactly these things, I recommend it to all my friends. Particularly relevant to my own experience was the commentary on how politicians have become less cooperative with their rivals in other parties, and how political views/party associations have become more extreme/less tolerant overall. Highly recommend. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777
- bobwaycott 8y ago
  I'm not sure there's actually a widening political divide. I believe what we're witnessing is an increasing silence from the center. The fringes are constantly outraged, inconsolable, and unreasonable in their knee-jerk attacks in every direction. One can no longer lean in a particular direction. One must now fall headlong into passionate ruin or go home if they merely wish to reason, consider, and discuss.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" Except, I guess, what the center is has always been subject to discussion. For my part, I think it's a kind of bizarre imaginary construct. A center conjures the idea of some kind of shape that has an inside and an outside. That's a very weird model for people's beliefs, which are kind of discrete, non-connected, certainly not points on lines or planes. I'd go for a definition of center as, exactly whatever compromise or group of interests there are that currently rule. So, obviously, when there's a crisis of leadership, a crisis of norms, the center starts falling apart.
- meko 8y ago
  Not all views are valid and should be tolerated or platformed, though. Assuming you disagree, I challenge you to argue against that without using what amounts to a slippery slope fallacy.
empath75 8y ago
I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to find common ground with fascists, personally.
- kenneth 8y ago
  Thanks for being a great example of what GP was talking about. Shutting down discussions about issues based on the pretext that the people you disagree with are "fascist" or "bigots" is a huge part of the problem. (And yes, the other side does the same while calling you "communists" — doesn't change anything)
  - r_smart 8y ago
    In my defense, the one person I accused of being a communist on this board, turned out to actually be one :) Less flippantly, you're spot on. I'd go further, and say overuse of these words erodes their meaning, and makes it possible for actual facists or bigots (or commies!) to hide among groups of people who have been tarred with the same brush but don't hold the same views.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    > And yes, the other side does the same while calling you "communists" — doesn't change anything Well, both the right and left thinks the other is the fascist. The right also thinks the left is communist. Both think the other is bigoted in different ways.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Calling someone both fascist and communist is, if nothing else, logically incoherent.
      - humanrebar 8y ago
        How?
        8y ago
jbarciauskas 8y ago
This board could have been non-partisan, filled with leading thinkers in the space from academia and industry, and given meaningful access and authority. Google management decided to make it clear the whole thing was a sham by specifying they'll work a whole 8 hours a year and inviting someone who was wholly unqualified. There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this is one. This was just poorly thought through.
- bo1024 8y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think a real challenge is that a group of only leading thinkers from academia and industry has a very good chance of being labeled partisan -- possibly with good reason. The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. (edit) Maybe what you're getting at is that the mission of the group should be more explicitly non-partisan, and then hopefully politics stays away from it altogether. That sounds like a good idea.
  - jbarciauskas 8y ago
    There will be partisan lines drawn in these debates, but we don't need to start there. But mostly this was obviously a PR/DC networking move and not a serious attempt to have oversight or meaningful conversation.
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    > The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. I grew up in small town rural Pennsylvania in a lower middle class family. I'm certainly now someone who is "in the industry". What differentiates me from myself twenty years ago is twenty years of learning and experience. I went to school, I had jobs. What you're implying is that even someone like me wouldn't have a representative opinion of the American population. If any American, after being educated on the subject they're expected to develop ethics guidelines on, is no longer an acceptable candidate, we've started down a very dangerous path. It means that expert opinions are inherently untrusted. How can ethics be developed in a reasonable way if the people we trust with the task are people whose credentials are their likeability?
tzs 8y ago
Where would you draw the line? For example, would you put the president of company that sells a purported homeopathic measles cure (yes, that exists) on a medical ethics board in the name of finding common ground? I wouldn't, because they either (1) know that they are selling a product that is nothing more than a placebo, which they lie about to ignorant people, and which will likely lead to serious harm for many of those people (often children), but value their income more than that, or (2) they actually believe that it works. The former is disqualifying because it calls into question their own ethics, and the later because it calls into question their ability to understand objective evidence and draw sound inferences from it. The Heritage Foundation publishes things like this [1]: > The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees. > Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher. The gist of the article is that people can handle heat in Dubai through the use of air conditioning in their cars and buildings, which shows that maybe if we just go all in for cheap fossil fuel based energy we'll be able to handle the paltry little worst case 7 degrees that we might get if climate change turns out to be real. I find it extremely hard to believe that they don't know that this and most of their other material on climate change is scientifically wrong, and so I'd rule out putting their president on an ethics board because they are not an ethical organization. You want some conservative viewpoints to find common ground on your board? There are conservatives who have not embraced scientific quackery. E.g., [2]. Pick from them. [1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-fuels-will-help-us-confront-climate-change https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-f... [2] https://www.clcouncil.org/plan-co-authors/ https://www.clcouncil.org/plan-co-authors/
- mike00632 8y ago
  This comment gets to the point. It's not just about the Heritage Foundation holding conservative views but about how they've falsified studies and put out deceptive rhetoric. This unethical behavior disqualifies them from serving on an ethics committee.
VikingCoder 8y ago
I respect that someone who studies climate science can have grave concerns with the consensus, and may some day revolutionize or even reverse our current understanding. I welcome their criticism. I believe in Red Teams, who do everything they can to tear down the work of the main stream view. If their best efforts to deny a claim fail, you have that much more strength in the claim. Kay Coles James has not studied climate science. As a lay person, she has rejected the scientific consensus. I have a difficult time imagining the value of the input she would provide to any ethics board. I've worked with IRB for healthcare. I wouldn't want a phrenologist on my IRB. Or a homeopathic medicine advocate. Someone who pushes MLM essential oils. A young-earth creationist. A Christian Scientist who rejects medicine. A Scientologist who rejects psychology. Those people aren't on the Red Team. They're on the Denial Team. They don't want to make my process better. They don't believe in my process. There's a huge difference between respecting a person, engaging them on a personal level, listening to their concerns, granting them dignity, allowing them to self-determine, having a vote in politics, etc... And allowing that same person to steer ethics for a corporation, or industry. Society needs to have the broader conversations you're talking about. No question. I hear what you're saying. But an ethics board can and should be more selective about who they invite.
learnstats2 8y ago
Isn't the start point of an ethics board "don't seek to remove rights from an entire demographic of people"? As such, the board would seem to be corrupted if it has people openly working towards that goal. Good that Google has agreed.
- Udik 8y ago
  > Isn't the start point of an ethics board "don't seek to remove rights from an entire demographic of people"? No. That's one specific ethics, the one you seem to agree with. But it's not the only possible one. Btw, you seem to want to remove a right to speak from an entire demographics of people, those who profess ethical stances you don't like. How about this?
linuxftw 8y ago
> This is a dangerous trend for all of us because it makes it impossible find common ground in an open democracy even if half the country in our eyes have essentially deplorable views, we need to recognize that they feel the same about us and then it's simply not constructive to be unable to find common ground. Don't view political impasse as a problem. Indeed, it's the only thing that will lead to the eventual dismantle of the federal system we have today. Why do we need a super-state? We must decentralize authority. Don't try to save democracy, let it fail under it's on weight as all democracies do.
kaolti 8y ago
People in this thread don't seem to get this goes both ways. Dear Hackernews, you are arguing with others who think banning people for different opinions is fine, but also downvoting and flagging them at the same time. Nothing to see here :)
- SkyBelow 8y ago
  I think putting people in cages is unacceptable. But I'm okay with putting people in cages if they were caught putting people in cages. So back to my first statement, I think putting people in cages is unacceptable, as long as they haven't met the criteria by which I find it acceptable.
InTheArena 8y ago
“These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were usually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914, this has resulted in politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if a ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and it’s organizations: he could read a social democratic newspaper, go to a social democratic pub or bar, belong to a social democratic trade union, borrow books from the social democratic library, go to social democratic women’s organization, enroll his children in the social democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a social democratic burial fund. Similar things could be said of the Centre Party but also to a certain extent of other parties too. ....... The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find comprise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easily." - The Coming Of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, page 84.
jasonmp85 8y ago
This is an article about a company normalizing fascist and white supremacist thought in our nation and exporting that sludge to other nations as well. Frankly, who cares.
piokoch 8y ago
Exactly. One more thing: the fight between minorities and minorities within minorities leads to nowhere. People forgot (and media, social networks only helped here in the negative sense), that each of a us is an unique human being and should be considered like that, not as a member of some sexual preferences group or race or whatever other group. This only divides people. It is worth to note that Ray Bradbury described exactly that what we witness now in his "Fahrenheit 451" (written more than 60 years ago). The fight between minorities dumbed-down any substantial discussion. Everything that could hurt any minority was burnt and forbidden and people were left with nothing but stupid soap operas about nothing.
0x262d 8y ago
ooh my god this is such an embarrassing position on this. they had someone from the heritage foundation. stop buying in to the bloviation about free speech for the heritage foundation. I have no common ground with them.
jdavis703 8y ago
This has always been the case, there have always been purity tests. When was the last time a Democratic presidential candidate ran on an anti-abortion campaign or a Republican ran on a tax hike campaign? What’s fairly recent is that millions of us now have the potential to reach millions of people with our social media posts. My Tweets get more views than when I wrote for my college newspaper 10 years ago! So of course if I wind up writing or saying something that a majority of people disagree it will cause me problems. My options are to either not write and say controversial things (or at least not under my name) or to just deal with being in a contrarian position. The great thing about expressing opinions is it’s optional. People who are women or gender non-conforming, racial minorities, homosexual or disabled have no way of changing their position in life so we protect them. Controversial opinions and beliefs? Those are easy to mask or change.
- anon12345690 8y ago
  trans is a choice, it doesnt belong in those other groups.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >People who are women or gender non-conforming, racial minorities, homosexual or disabled have no way of changing their position in life so we protect them. But not men? If you look into it you'll find that men are a minority in quite many places: universities being one of them.
techsin101 8y ago
I believe this what people refer to as snowflake. With these criterias you only get best liars.
xnyan 8y ago
The boot has been on the neck of the environment for decades and we are just now maybe starting to talk about limiting some of the worst damage (starting, its very depressing). I think anyone informed who denies reality of climate change has no place in public discourse.
_bxg1 8y ago
You're right in general - there are many issues on which people today need to learn to peacefully disagree - but LGBT rights and climate change are not those. One is a human rights issue, and the other is scientific fact. There's little nuance to be had.

kuzehanka 8y ago

You articulated so well what I've been observing. With the widening political divide, we find ourselves in this weird situation where any decision makers are swarmed with moral outrage attacks unless they're the bastions of politically correct ideology. An increasing number of topics are taboo because merely opening up a discussion around them summons the moral outrage army. Moral outrage has become most effective social manipulation technique, and morality has long ago stopped playing into the equation. The entire point of ethics discussions is to capture the views of the population in a proportionate manner and try to come to a set of mutually positive outcomes. Bonus points for not stomping on minority views. Instead even on HN we have people claiming that their views are the Correct views and the opposition should not even be given a voice. No matter how disagreeable you may find some particular viewpoint, if it happens to be held by a non negligible number of people and you marginalise them, it will eventually result in tremendous blowback. I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary.

redwood 8y ago
What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people and I think it's the right thing to do. However by simply sharing my upthread viewpoint that we need to be careful about this meta-trend I will probably be lumped in as one of these dark web right wing types even though it couldn't be further from the truth.
- naasking 8y ago
  > What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite. PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Not if you apply the point-of-view that etiquette is what the unethical use to keep their unethical practices under-questioned.
    - SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
      There's no real limit to what bad-faith actors will use to appear legitimate. They'll use philosophy, science, religion, etiquette, etc - in constrained, self-serving ways, of course. We can't just assume anyone doing those things is evil and acting in bad faith - otherwise we're just elevating the ad hominem as our supreme, central dogma.
    - cbracken 8y ago
      That seems to imply an assumption of lack of good faith, unless I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying. While there’s no doubt that one can find cases to which this applies, I’d think that applying that broadly to the vast majority of people who are arguing in good faith would stifle debate.
      - fixermark 8y ago
        I think you're taking as assumption that the vast majority of people are arguing in good faith, and many are no longer willing to take on that assumption without evidence. Given what has been seen regarding both 4chan psychological operations and Russian intelligence operations on major message boards, I can see the vantage point where it's fair to not treat good faith as assumable.
fixermark 8y ago
I'm underwhelmed. In this specific example, the individual in question could've gotten out ahead of the press cycle and explained herself. That she didn't means the beliefs she holds as reported probably are her beliefs, and yeah---that's unacceptable for this role. This isn't thoughtless litmus-testing; this is "Google has a track record of errors regarding its trans userbase and is a company that specifically wants to do better there." If she doesn't see trans people as valid, she's the wrong fit for the role.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kuzehanka 8y ago
  >If she doesn't see trans people as valid, she's the wrong fit for the role. Surely you can see how that generalises to 'if <decision maker> doesn't hold <my view> then they're not fit to make decisions' and that you're basically demonstrating exactly what's being discussed?
  - fixermark 8y ago
    No, because not all ethical view points are equivalent or interchangeable. And we're not talking about any old ethics board, we're talking about an ethics board at Google, which goes out of its way to be trans inclusive.
    - kuzehanka 8y ago
      Thank you for your candid answer. Can we then sum up your stance in two statements: 1: not all ethics viewpoints are equal, and yours are superior 2: in this instance, you believe that the above opposed viewpoint does not deserve any representation at an ethics board, even if it is represents a significant population of the US and the world? Is that correct? This is your stance?
      - fixermark 8y ago
        I think you're confusing my personal viewpoint with my observation on what Google appears to have done in this specific context. But for what it's worth, in the specific question of trans individuals, my personal view point is that majorities have been wrong before, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be wrong again. This is one of those times. Trans exclusionism doesn't pass the "Do not ban that which is not harmful to others" sniff test for freedom-oriented society. But again, my personal viewpoint doesn't rule the Google corporation's decisions. However, we shouldn't be surprised when a company that has positioned itself to be clearly trans-inclusive doesn't find somebody who denies the dignity of trans people acceptable on their ethics board.
winchling 8y ago
>I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary. I think we got here because of telecommunications and the internet. The world is joining up and a nascent collective mind is emerging. Like the individual mind it has a set of ideas about who it is and what it should be doing, a.k.a. an 'ego'. Many potential thoughts in a normal mind are continually being censored/suppressed because they do not conform to those fixed ideas. Something similar is happening on a larger scale. However just as there is hope for the individual in the form of spiritual awakening there's hope for the world too. The form it would take is unknowable for now. If it resembled a religious revival then I guess it would have to be a new and rather different kind of religion. Where might militant atheists and religious fundamentalists find common ground? Presumably within the new fields of consciousness and AGI research. Though I doubt they'll like it much, at least to begin with...
- repolfx 8y ago
  I'm not sure it's anything to do with the internet. A lot of this stuff is taking place offline - shouting people down at lectures and things like that. My own theory is it's due to the decline of religion. I say that as a non religious person who has lately started wondering if I'm so right to be that way (I never used to question the righteousness of scientific atheism). Religion can be defined as a moral framework. We have agency and we must act. Religion helps answer the question "how must I act" in a thorough and formalised way: it tells us what right and wrong is, and it does so from a position of pseudo-authority (God says it, so it must be moral). The common thread between all these conservatives-get-censored stories we're seeing is that leadership, whether it be corporate political or academic, is staggeringly weak in the face of moral outrage. Even when that outrage is coming from people who are barely adults, people far more senior and more experienced than them fold immediately - even if they actually disagree. I think this is because without any kind of rigorous moral framework, people don't have any footing on which to push back. Someone pops up and says "that person is the devil because they don't respect women" or whatever, and maybe that's a total pastiche of their position but it's a position anchored in the moral framework of identity politics/femininism. Without any equivalent grounding in an alternative moral framework, the leadership doesn't know how to respond, they are desperate to see themselves as a "good person" and so they're left scrambling to obey the demands of the assembled mob. If they already felt like they were good people, they'd be much more capable of resisting such attacks. Organised religion crops up in every human society throughout history except this one - I believe we're really the first to be widely atheist. But it seems all we've done is replace one set of gods with another: now instead of worshipping invisible deities of peace, love, war, etc, we worship at the deities of minority intersections ... and crusade against heretics who deny the sanctity of that worship.
GoblinSlayer 8y ago
Guess what Greeks knew it too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
kaitai 8y ago
As with so many ideas in American politics, the use of moral outrage has ping-ponged back and and forth across the political spectrum -- everyone uses it, and people have for a long time. The civil rights era: both sides used moral outrage. Prohibition/the temperance movement. The suffragettes being force-fed during their hunger strike in 1909, and the moral outrage about corrupting women and families and degrading America by allowing women to vote. More recently, social issues have been the wedge between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The Republicans leveraged abortion and contraception because the killing of innocent babies via abortion and/or contraception is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Now progressives leverage LGBQT+ rights because erasing the humanity of a living person is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Climate change has both sides too; killing the planet for the convenience of cars and plastic bags is worst; sacrificing human economic progress and security for some stupid turtles and this made-up sea level thing is the worst. Moral outrage is just a tool. Research is accumulating on the addictiveness of self-righteousness. Moral superiority and outrage get people to do stuff (vote, give money, show up at protests, sign petitions), in a way that self-reflective questioning does not. How could we engineer things so that "moderate compromise with room to listen to the views of others" would get people to act? (Edited to add a paper on self-righteousness, with experiments! http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf)
- dmix 8y ago
  You seem to be narrowing the issue and abstracting it away from the local problems until you can easily dismiss it as a mere tool everyone has employed historically. But I don't think any recent history has had to have a perfectly "acceptable" political ideology and personal history (sometimes going back 40+ years) - that hasn't "offended" multiple extreme ends of various political camps. ...absent the Victorian age and some time after, which we all moved beyond culturally because it was backwards to force one top-down rigid "proper" way to live and speak. Not to mention the definition of "acceptable" to these special interest camps is forever a moving goal post where anyone who isn't the perfect caricature of mainstream "acceptableness" can't have a say in any economic, cultural, political, etc discourse without being tarred, feather, and demanded to apologize for even thinking they could engage in the process. This is a very different development than just employing moral outrage. A critical part of a healthy democratic society is accepting people have different worldviews. We're moving to a world where there is one alleged correct worldview and anything else is a showstopper.
mpwoz 8y ago
I found the book 'The Righteous Mind' very eye-opening and it talks about exactly these things, I recommend it to all my friends. Particularly relevant to my own experience was the commentary on how politicians have become less cooperative with their rivals in other parties, and how political views/party associations have become more extreme/less tolerant overall. Highly recommend. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777
bobwaycott 8y ago
I'm not sure there's actually a widening political divide. I believe what we're witnessing is an increasing silence from the center. The fringes are constantly outraged, inconsolable, and unreasonable in their knee-jerk attacks in every direction. One can no longer lean in a particular direction. One must now fall headlong into passionate ruin or go home if they merely wish to reason, consider, and discuss.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" Except, I guess, what the center is has always been subject to discussion. For my part, I think it's a kind of bizarre imaginary construct. A center conjures the idea of some kind of shape that has an inside and an outside. That's a very weird model for people's beliefs, which are kind of discrete, non-connected, certainly not points on lines or planes. I'd go for a definition of center as, exactly whatever compromise or group of interests there are that currently rule. So, obviously, when there's a crisis of leadership, a crisis of norms, the center starts falling apart.
meko 8y ago
Not all views are valid and should be tolerated or platformed, though. Assuming you disagree, I challenge you to argue against that without using what amounts to a slippery slope fallacy.

empath75 8y ago

I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to find common ground with fascists, personally.

kenneth 8y ago
Thanks for being a great example of what GP was talking about. Shutting down discussions about issues based on the pretext that the people you disagree with are "fascist" or "bigots" is a huge part of the problem. (And yes, the other side does the same while calling you "communists" — doesn't change anything)
- r_smart 8y ago
  In my defense, the one person I accused of being a communist on this board, turned out to actually be one :) Less flippantly, you're spot on. I'd go further, and say overuse of these words erodes their meaning, and makes it possible for actual facists or bigots (or commies!) to hide among groups of people who have been tarred with the same brush but don't hold the same views.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > And yes, the other side does the same while calling you "communists" — doesn't change anything Well, both the right and left thinks the other is the fascist. The right also thinks the left is communist. Both think the other is bigoted in different ways.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Calling someone both fascist and communist is, if nothing else, logically incoherent.
    - humanrebar 8y ago
      How?
      - 8y ago

jbarciauskas 8y ago

This board could have been non-partisan, filled with leading thinkers in the space from academia and industry, and given meaningful access and authority. Google management decided to make it clear the whole thing was a sham by specifying they'll work a whole 8 hours a year and inviting someone who was wholly unqualified. There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this is one. This was just poorly thought through.

bo1024 8y ago
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think a real challenge is that a group of only leading thinkers from academia and industry has a very good chance of being labeled partisan -- possibly with good reason. The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. (edit) Maybe what you're getting at is that the mission of the group should be more explicitly non-partisan, and then hopefully politics stays away from it altogether. That sounds like a good idea.
- jbarciauskas 8y ago
  There will be partisan lines drawn in these debates, but we don't need to start there. But mostly this was obviously a PR/DC networking move and not a serious attempt to have oversight or meaningful conversation.
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  > The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. I grew up in small town rural Pennsylvania in a lower middle class family. I'm certainly now someone who is "in the industry". What differentiates me from myself twenty years ago is twenty years of learning and experience. I went to school, I had jobs. What you're implying is that even someone like me wouldn't have a representative opinion of the American population. If any American, after being educated on the subject they're expected to develop ethics guidelines on, is no longer an acceptable candidate, we've started down a very dangerous path. It means that expert opinions are inherently untrusted. How can ethics be developed in a reasonable way if the people we trust with the task are people whose credentials are their likeability?

tzs 8y ago

Where would you draw the line? For example, would you put the president of company that sells a purported homeopathic measles cure (yes, that exists) on a medical ethics board in the name of finding common ground? I wouldn't, because they either (1) know that they are selling a product that is nothing more than a placebo, which they lie about to ignorant people, and which will likely lead to serious harm for many of those people (often children), but value their income more than that, or (2) they actually believe that it works. The former is disqualifying because it calls into question their own ethics, and the later because it calls into question their ability to understand objective evidence and draw sound inferences from it. The Heritage Foundation publishes things like this [1]: > The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees. > Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher. The gist of the article is that people can handle heat in Dubai through the use of air conditioning in their cars and buildings, which shows that maybe if we just go all in for cheap fossil fuel based energy we'll be able to handle the paltry little worst case 7 degrees that we might get if climate change turns out to be real. I find it extremely hard to believe that they don't know that this and most of their other material on climate change is scientifically wrong, and so I'd rule out putting their president on an ethics board because they are not an ethical organization. You want some conservative viewpoints to find common ground on your board? There are conservatives who have not embraced scientific quackery. E.g., [2]. Pick from them. [1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-fuels-will-help-us-confront-climate-change https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-f... [2] https://www.clcouncil.org/plan-co-authors/ https://www.clcouncil.org/plan-co-authors/

mike00632 8y ago
This comment gets to the point. It's not just about the Heritage Foundation holding conservative views but about how they've falsified studies and put out deceptive rhetoric. This unethical behavior disqualifies them from serving on an ethics committee.

VikingCoder 8y ago

I respect that someone who studies climate science can have grave concerns with the consensus, and may some day revolutionize or even reverse our current understanding. I welcome their criticism. I believe in Red Teams, who do everything they can to tear down the work of the main stream view. If their best efforts to deny a claim fail, you have that much more strength in the claim. Kay Coles James has not studied climate science. As a lay person, she has rejected the scientific consensus. I have a difficult time imagining the value of the input she would provide to any ethics board. I've worked with IRB for healthcare. I wouldn't want a phrenologist on my IRB. Or a homeopathic medicine advocate. Someone who pushes MLM essential oils. A young-earth creationist. A Christian Scientist who rejects medicine. A Scientologist who rejects psychology. Those people aren't on the Red Team. They're on the Denial Team. They don't want to make my process better. They don't believe in my process. There's a huge difference between respecting a person, engaging them on a personal level, listening to their concerns, granting them dignity, allowing them to self-determine, having a vote in politics, etc... And allowing that same person to steer ethics for a corporation, or industry. Society needs to have the broader conversations you're talking about. No question. I hear what you're saying. But an ethics board can and should be more selective about who they invite.

learnstats2 8y ago

Isn't the start point of an ethics board "don't seek to remove rights from an entire demographic of people"? As such, the board would seem to be corrupted if it has people openly working towards that goal. Good that Google has agreed.

Udik 8y ago
> Isn't the start point of an ethics board "don't seek to remove rights from an entire demographic of people"? No. That's one specific ethics, the one you seem to agree with. But it's not the only possible one. Btw, you seem to want to remove a right to speak from an entire demographics of people, those who profess ethical stances you don't like. How about this?

linuxftw 8y ago

> This is a dangerous trend for all of us because it makes it impossible find common ground in an open democracy even if half the country in our eyes have essentially deplorable views, we need to recognize that they feel the same about us and then it's simply not constructive to be unable to find common ground. Don't view political impasse as a problem. Indeed, it's the only thing that will lead to the eventual dismantle of the federal system we have today. Why do we need a super-state? We must decentralize authority. Don't try to save democracy, let it fail under it's on weight as all democracies do.

kaolti 8y ago

People in this thread don't seem to get this goes both ways. Dear Hackernews, you are arguing with others who think banning people for different opinions is fine, but also downvoting and flagging them at the same time. Nothing to see here :)

SkyBelow 8y ago
I think putting people in cages is unacceptable. But I'm okay with putting people in cages if they were caught putting people in cages. So back to my first statement, I think putting people in cages is unacceptable, as long as they haven't met the criteria by which I find it acceptable.

InTheArena 8y ago

“These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were usually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914, this has resulted in politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if a ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and it’s organizations: he could read a social democratic newspaper, go to a social democratic pub or bar, belong to a social democratic trade union, borrow books from the social democratic library, go to social democratic women’s organization, enroll his children in the social democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a social democratic burial fund. Similar things could be said of the Centre Party but also to a certain extent of other parties too. ....... The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find comprise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easily." - The Coming Of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, page 84.

jasonmp85 8y ago

This is an article about a company normalizing fascist and white supremacist thought in our nation and exporting that sludge to other nations as well. Frankly, who cares.

piokoch 8y ago

Exactly. One more thing: the fight between minorities and minorities within minorities leads to nowhere. People forgot (and media, social networks only helped here in the negative sense), that each of a us is an unique human being and should be considered like that, not as a member of some sexual preferences group or race or whatever other group. This only divides people. It is worth to note that Ray Bradbury described exactly that what we witness now in his "Fahrenheit 451" (written more than 60 years ago). The fight between minorities dumbed-down any substantial discussion. Everything that could hurt any minority was burnt and forbidden and people were left with nothing but stupid soap operas about nothing.

0x262d 8y ago

ooh my god this is such an embarrassing position on this. they had someone from the heritage foundation. stop buying in to the bloviation about free speech for the heritage foundation. I have no common ground with them.

jdavis703 8y ago

This has always been the case, there have always been purity tests. When was the last time a Democratic presidential candidate ran on an anti-abortion campaign or a Republican ran on a tax hike campaign? What’s fairly recent is that millions of us now have the potential to reach millions of people with our social media posts. My Tweets get more views than when I wrote for my college newspaper 10 years ago! So of course if I wind up writing or saying something that a majority of people disagree it will cause me problems. My options are to either not write and say controversial things (or at least not under my name) or to just deal with being in a contrarian position. The great thing about expressing opinions is it’s optional. People who are women or gender non-conforming, racial minorities, homosexual or disabled have no way of changing their position in life so we protect them. Controversial opinions and beliefs? Those are easy to mask or change.

anon12345690 8y ago
trans is a choice, it doesnt belong in those other groups.
Mirioron 8y ago
>People who are women or gender non-conforming, racial minorities, homosexual or disabled have no way of changing their position in life so we protect them. But not men? If you look into it you'll find that men are a minority in quite many places: universities being one of them.

techsin101 8y ago

I believe this what people refer to as snowflake. With these criterias you only get best liars.

xnyan 8y ago

The boot has been on the neck of the environment for decades and we are just now maybe starting to talk about limiting some of the worst damage (starting, its very depressing). I think anyone informed who denies reality of climate change has no place in public discourse.

_bxg1 8y ago

You're right in general - there are many issues on which people today need to learn to peacefully disagree - but LGBT rights and climate change are not those. One is a human rights issue, and the other is scientific fact. There's little nuance to be had.