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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 s

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.
    - naasking 8y ago
      I have no objection to ignoring etiquette in general. The point I was trying to make is that treating etiquette as ethics is how people justify shutting down debate on controversial topics. They also use it to dehumanize their opponents on an issue, and that is unethical.
- winchling 8y ago
  >I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people What about in private, among a group of friends? Should the degree of correctness be uniform or proportional to the size of the audience? It seems to me that the purpose of the ethics board is to allow a company to be left alone to get on with its private ethically-laden research. It needs to be seen to be ethically responsible and nowadays that requires ultra-political correctness because more people than ever are watching. But this is incompatible with having actual ethics discussions which require diversity of opinion. So there's a dilemma: trying to be ethical versus trying to be seen to be ethical.
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.

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.
  - naasking 8y ago
    I have no objection to ignoring etiquette in general. The point I was trying to make is that treating etiquette as ethics is how people justify shutting down debate on controversial topics. They also use it to dehumanize their opponents on an issue, and that is unethical.
winchling 8y ago
>I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people What about in private, among a group of friends? Should the degree of correctness be uniform or proportional to the size of the audience? It seems to me that the purpose of the ethics board is to allow a company to be left alone to get on with its private ethically-laden research. It needs to be seen to be ethically responsible and nowadays that requires ultra-political correctness because more people than ever are watching. But this is incompatible with having actual ethics discussions which require diversity of opinion. So there's a dilemma: trying to be ethical versus trying to be seen to be ethical.

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.