50 ms·

Orthodox Privilege

• newacct583 6y ago
  I was about to post a rant about bothsidesism here, bemoaning the fact that pg is talking about a problem without example, as if it's something that "everyone" does in various contexts. Then I caught the reference in the second to last paragraph. Clever.
• tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  Good post. A point of clarification though: we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate, and of course either side is going to say that the other is the one with all the power.
  • dgellow 6y ago
    Just to be sure we follow, could you name or describe those two orthodoxies?
    • sneak 6y ago
      I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it). These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
      • djsumdog 6y ago
        People want a political home. In countries without any type of per-capita representative voting system (where parties are split amount % of opinions like in MMP), they feel like they need to vote 'tactically.' At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle. Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it. This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
      • Spivak 6y ago
        Woke is a pejorative? Damn I really am in a bubble.
        • antepodius 6y ago
          It's widely considered comical.
      • clairity 6y ago
        the mapped ideologies are dynamic (leaky), but the historically enduring dichotomy is simply power and its disciples vs. the disenfranchised. "anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
        • mumbisChungo 6y ago
          The conflict between "anti-PC" and "woke" in its entirety is in service of power. A perpetual screaming match between poor and middle-class people, about topics that have little to no bearing on profits, is ideal for corporate elites.
          • clairity 6y ago
            yes, there's some truth to that, but the latter group isn't aligned with power, even if the discussion serves the powerful's aims.
            • panzagl 6y ago
              What do you mean? "Woke" is all about people with privilege trying to shield that privilege behind their correctthink as they attempt to disenfranchise the lower classes of their political rivals. "Woke" people do to Arkansas rednecks the same thing they accuse their opponents of doing to inner-city minorities.
              • clairity 6y ago
                "woke" people are more diverse than you claim, and certainly less privileged on average. perhaps the "privileged woke" people you speak about over-exert their privilege, but that's a conquence of privilege, not wokeness.
                • antepodius 6y ago
                  Wokeness and its methods are by their nature an amazing social shield and sword, so they attract the sort of people who want to cloak themselves in righteousness and tear into others.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!". Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress. Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ). TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
      • mumbisChungo 6y ago
        In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree. In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
        • djsumdog 6y ago
          > beyond a reasonable doubt This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences. And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research. Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us. Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was. Science is iterative.
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      At a 50,000 foot level, you have: The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things. The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
      • Spivak 6y ago
        Scott Alexander describes this view as "blue tribe" and "red tribe" where blue has a subgroup "grey" that broadly follows blue but disagrees with a good portion of blue's more extreme actions.
        • tharne 6y ago
          There's also a "grey" subgroup in the red tribe. For instance, a lot of Trump supporters will privately admit that he's a bad guy and an ineffective leader, but preferable to a liberal president. The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
          • watwut 6y ago
            I find it hard to square Biden and Trump as supposedly same level of extreme. Or Clinton and Trump. They just are not the same level of extreme. Quite the opposite, the democratic party is significantly more choosing toward center figures. It also tend to choose less extreme tactics to get their way - there was no democratic goverment shutdown etc.
            • antepodius 6y ago
              Yes. One tribe is a cornered, bleeding, broken animal, one isn't.
              • watwut 6y ago
                Neither is bleeding broken nor animal. That is nonsense. The cornered tribe would not be among two most powerful parties. Having president, majority of supreme court, senate or house suggests you are not cornered. And both parties are represented in those.
    • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years. The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview. In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations. Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
      • malandrew 6y ago
        > one colloquially known as social justice My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment. The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
        • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
          Yep, definitely. It's why it's colloquial. In my view, the usage of that term today carries the same descriptive weight as terms like "free market". It's more evocative than literal.
        • antepodius 6y ago
          The end is justice, so is justified the means. Sit down, shut up, your crown bequeathe.
    • bob33212 6y ago
      Group A would say they are "Sex and Gender Positive and Inclusive". Group A would also say people who disagree with Group A are "Transphobic" Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    Exactly. Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges. Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work. I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture). Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions: 1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin) 2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal. None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people. The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN. I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help. Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right". It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_. The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
    • andreilys 6y ago
      Except it spills over into other elite institutions like the NYT, so it’s not exactly self contained.
  • Uberphallus 6y ago
    From the other side of the pond, I'd like to add, it gets tiring. It's absolutely impossible to have a meaningful exchange with 95% pf the Americans on the Internet these days. Rare are the days I'm not called antifa/communist/libtard/fag and racist/bigot/trumpette/transphobic, often in the very same thread. For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
    • soco 6y ago
      I can totally understand why (and by who) this comment got downvoted, but I happen to share its feeling. I won't say it cannot happen everywhere, but the interactions on USA politics have become (newly?) extremely polarizing.
      • djsumdog 6y ago
        And two people can see the exact same event and read it two different ways. We're no longer in Plato's cave. We're literally watching the same movie, but seeing two different screens.
    • djsumdog 6y ago
      I often go back to Brendon O'Neil's video about the right and duty to offend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        O'Neill is literally a professional troll, to the extent that whenever there's a tragedy people make sport on twitter of predicting exactly what his contrarian take will be.
  • martythemaniak 6y ago
    I think this is broadly correct. In the old days when both the political and cultural spheres were conservative, it was clear what and who was unorthodox. Today, different institutions are both very liberal and very conservative so you can actually say anything you want and be considered both incredibly conventional and outrageously pointed, depending on who is listening and where you are saying it. For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired. Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
    • jes5199 6y ago
      what we currently call “liberal” is another form of conservatism. It’s just that it’s conserving a slightly different set of principles.
      • core-questions 6y ago
        Almost. What you'd call "conservatism" is just slowed-down progressivism, delayed by 10-20 years but otherwise indistinguishable, and both "sides" are squarely within the liberal political theory. Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
        • TimTheTinker 6y ago
          ... except for their views on abortion, welfare, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. Current public policy reflects the left’s view on these matters, and a new one joins the list every few years.
          • klyrs 6y ago
  • jojobas 6y ago
    >Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.
    • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      I tend to be on the conservative end of this issue, so I mostly agree with you. However there have been some notable instances of people getting fired for expressing left-wing viewpoints - the ones I can recall were college professors. So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
      • jojobas 6y ago
        Right-wing entities appear to sack people for left-wing views without external pressure, neutral entities are forced to sack people for right-wing views.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        The paradigm example of right wing "cancellation" is probably "anti-BDS" laws.
        • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
          Yep
      • throwawaygh 6y ago
        27% of transgender workers reported being fired, not hired, or denied promotion in 2016-2017 [2]. That's ~530,000 people [1], and really just the tip of the ice-berg. Until like 2 weeks ago that was completely legal federally, and in the states where it's most prevalent. Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door. I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing. High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass. This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country? [1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad... [2] https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf
  • H_Pylori 6y ago
    >Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate Easy, just track the opinions that can get you fired and unpersoned. Let's not kid ourselves on who holds the real power in America and the West.
  • cowpig 6y ago
    I really can't stand statements like this. There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics. There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies. To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
    • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      > There is more than one dimension This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true. If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
      • dfxm12 6y ago
        If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. Yeah, why let reality get in the way of a made up dichotomy?
        • tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
          My point is that reality gets in the way of everything we think. It's all made up.
          • deleted 6y ago
            [deleted]
        • coldtea 6y ago
          Actually the argument is "why lose the forrest for the trees?". Every day you make abstractions to better understand reality. For example, you don't devote equal attention to every blade of grass, you sum it as "this is a lawn" and move on. If you didn't you'd be lost in the first few feet walking outside of your house, seeing everything as an equally important detail.
  • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions" We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    I think you're falling into the fallacy described in Graham's article. You've also made a false dichotomy.
  • gosukiwi 6y ago
    I'm from Argentina, and we have a "different but similar" thing going on here. Extreme, socialist left wing on one side, right wing on the other (note that our right wing could be considered left wing over there). So both could be considered orthodox, the country is basically 50/50, and it's like the article says: You are either X or Y. No middle ground. People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
  • munificent 6y ago
    > we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently. I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame. When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group. But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now. Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not. I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.
• NhanH 6y ago
  Related, and still one of pg's best writing imo: "What you can't say" - http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html This one, in additional with the previous essay about 2 different kind of centrists really make me curious of what unorthodox opinions PG is holding and can't say right now.
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    Probably largely the same everybody else is holding.
    • H8crilA 6y ago
      Why don't you say it? /s
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        I do see your /s, but I'll answer anyway: I've decided that US cultural problems were a source of stress for no payoff, which I didn't need. I used to be much more involved until I realized I live a world away from the US and the societal problems don't affect me much (and I also realized that I didn't identify as black, white or any of the race options on the census), plus there are much more pressing problems at home. As you can see from the fact that I commented in this thread, I don't always succeed :P
    • neoplatonian 6y ago
      It is pretty clear, if you read Paul Graham's twitter feed, what is it that he wants to say but feels he cannot say. I see where his point of view completely, but having not seen the the other side of privilege: the very real and lived experiences and feelings where cancel culture stems from, I feel this is an issue where he is totally blindsighted. The problem in the US currently, I feel, is not cancel culture per se, but widespread and ever growing narcissism which makes one less questioning about their fundamental worldview than one should be. Paul Graham is somewhat a victim of this himself. For example, the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth" in the moral, cultural and political sphere, that there is a "fact of the matter" whether a belief (say one PG holds) is correct or not. Or that that we live in a static world where such truths can even exist, and not, in a fluid, dynamic, politically messy world where contrasting viewpoints interact and produce something not something ever lasting, but something which is fragile and must always be fought for, this fight being a necessary feature for a functioning democracy.
• ivankirigin 6y ago
  "Things you can't say" is interesting because the reason it's dangerous is that a mob might react badly to it. Who is to say that the specific wave washing over social media will hit some people with this orthodox privilege or not? I think you can mine these things by looking at diverse conversations - including those you don't find online. What sentence would you be afraid might be misinterpreted?
  • andreilys 6y ago
    The best part is that an innocuous statement in 2006, can actually be a dangerous one in 2020. Norms change. Nobody knows how but one day something is okay to talk about and the next it’s not.
    • mc32 6y ago
      Progressive statements from 2006 can today be considered dangerous. People don’t care about context at all. But, interestingly, they’ll also gladly ignore massive taboos (from their POV) if it’s in their favor. For example because Bernie makes some good arguments for progressive causes that he was against immigration undercutting wages many years ago, is ignored today, but if someone else had that history as a politician they potentially would be brought down, if they were more moderate (in either party).
• IAmEveryone 6y ago
  > Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem. Alright then! Can we apply this to the Master/Slave and Blacklist/Whitelist debates, and to the use of the "Lena" image? Edit: guess not :(
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    What's the problem with the Lena image?
    • gimboland 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Criticism
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        I see, thank you.
    • IAmEveryone 6y ago
      https://www.losinglena.com https://www.losinglena.com
      • enriquto 6y ago
        Fascinating. What a time to be alive.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • disruptalot 6y ago
    It is applied. More often that not, the argument is not that these words don't have a single true opposition. But that it's negligent to take this opposition and extrapolate it to the world.
• Tenoke 6y ago
  The post points to a true thing, Orthodox Privilege definitely exists and we see examples of it quite often. However, to some extent it exists within bubbles. For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Dogwhistles work because they are not obviously false. The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction. It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter". (There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!) (I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)
    • H8crilA 6y ago
      I believe you're missing the point.
      • jacobush 6y ago
        I wonder how. I often do not agree with pjc50 but I do agree in this case. I miss something too and don't want to miss it.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        .. would you like to explain then?
        • tomp 6y ago
          Au contraire, Saying "Black Lives Matter" is a distraction. The actual problem is police violence and overreach - not just police killings, but even things like swatting, civil forfeiture, police buying surplus army gear, drug war, etc. etc. - and focusing attention on just one tiny issue, then proposing a braindead solution ("defund the police" - do you really want to live in a society with no police? like e.g. CHAZ?) is the worst way to solve the problem.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Do we even have a single American orthodoxy? I think orthodox privilege, like everything now, is politicized and partisan. You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label. On the Far Left, we have cancel culture and accusing others of racism... Those on the Far Left will not be castigated by their own orthodox community, because the far left is collectively agreeing to see racism in more places than it is likely to exist. Those within the moderate left are then punished by not conforming to the extreme orthodoxy for saying not all implicitly racist actions are done by racists. Similarly, those on the right will be castigated by their own orthodox community of religious or gun/freedom figures who place devotion to those causes most highly. Any GOP figure is taking a great risk criticizing Trump now, because there is a great amount of orthodoxy behind his policies and the packing the courts with judges...in order to ensure the country is more conservative for longer, at any cost (even Trump). Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.
  • PaulKeeble 6y ago
    If you work with Java now you will probably not do so well on HN, especially if its for a new product. Yet we ought to know mature reliable platforms are a better place to be than the latest hotness that is still changing and evolving and missing major libraries and features. After all its about the product not the underlying technology. You don't see Java talked about much on HN anymore yet its everywhere running the modern web.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    > You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label. If you don't see that those are actually two sides of the same orthodoxy, and that the truly unorthodox opinions are outside of either of those two, I don't know what to tell you beyond "you should check your orthodox privilege". ;-) When it comes to realpolitik, the Democrats and Republicans are basically only different in terms of the speed at which they implement neoliberal policies and fight neocon wars. The general direction of "progress" is the same.
• skybrian 6y ago
  I guess a weak form of this fallacy would be "there is nothing true you can't say, provided that you are very careful about how you say it." That is, assuming that the people who get in trouble were speaking too bluntly or imprecisely.
• Isamu 6y ago
  Lots of things at work are sacred, I have to avoid talking about them openly. This makes meetings uncomfortable for me when the very orthodox-privilege leader wants you to open up. Things like Agile for instance can’t be discussed unless you have a near orthodox view.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• loourr 6y ago
  Beating around the bush Paul...
• chrischattin 6y ago
  Excellent essay. I think the qualifier for an unorthodox view/idea/opinion is that it’s a little bit scary to say in public. Something like... I think the coronavirus reaction is way overblown. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the media would lead you to believe, and wearing masks is basically ineffective and is just a thing to make people feel like they’re doing something. ;)
• Fiveplus 6y ago
  minor follow-up: How do you distinguish an orthodox privileged person from the herd (besides them telling you to speak your mind)?
  • sneak 6y ago
    I’d venture to guess that a good indicator are people in America who are comfortable using “call the police” as a solution to certain common problems.
• duxup 6y ago
  Maybe I've internalized what "orthodox privilege" means but ... yes things that go against the grain often receive push back. Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven? On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'? Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter. In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them. I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced. > I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything Yes, unfortunately.
    • duxup 6y ago
      It's a weird situation: So many people are a victim of being silenced now. As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...
      • zachthewf 6y ago
        Indeed, the internet allows a public figure to simultaneously be a pariah to the mainstream and also have a platform where they reach millions.
        • grimjack00 6y ago
• mellosouls 6y ago
  I don't really understand what this concept is adding that ideas like "blinkeredness" don't already cover, as orthodox in this case (as has been pointed out by others here) is context-dependent. I've read it a couple of times and am still a bit unsure of what new idea it's getting at.
• kziemio 6y ago
  "For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?" I'm not sure the other side of this issue are reasonable and intelligent. It seems to me that anyone who swallows the orthodoxy of the day wholesale is unreasonable and unintelligent. They seem like the kind of people that have always led mobs. What seems to have changed is that now they have a voice on Twitter. They finally have a modern platform on which to organize their mob behavior, and cancel culture is the result.
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  Sneaky use of orthodox. There has always been the problem of finding words so that the targeted group doesn't know they are talked about. I don't really think the solution of being polite is working for anonymous internet comments for obvious reasons, but for other places it has been the classical solution.
• carlisle_ 6y ago
  This is such a strange post. Mr. Graham speaks in vague generalities, then finally hones in on a specific idea seemingly out of the blue: > For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Why “cancel culture” when there’s any number of issues this is equally true for? Why is it only “reasonably intelligent people” oppose it in this example. This post just seems intellectually lazy. Making sweeping generalizations and then throwing in some appeal to popularity is not a well made point.
  • Tokkemon 6y ago
    It's just a topical example given the New York Times and resignation of Bari Weiss.
• raldi 6y ago
  There are true statements that are rightly unacceptable because placed in certain rhetorical contexts, there's an implied argument that they're making which has been rejected by society. For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society. Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?
  • blueflow 6y ago
    "most of modern society". No. Only to most people on Twitter. People IRL don't have the need nor the time to care about such subtleties.
    • veridies 6y ago
      Many people would, out of habit or expedience, refer to "women" instead of "people who menstruate." However, in this specific context, Rowling's implication is that trans women are not women. "Most of modern society" would probably be disturbed by that implication.
      • enimodas 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure you're in a filter bubble.
        • veridies 6y ago
          I'm sure I am! Look, there are not a lot of great polls about people's opinion on whether sex and gender are different. PRRI has a poll on general support for trans people (https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-transgender-rights/ https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-t...), which suggests that 62% of Americans support letting trans people serve in the military and a plurality oppose bathroom bills. It also shows that a majority of Americans believe that there are only two genders, but only 43% of Americans believe that "strongly," and of course you could believe that sex and gender are different while also believing in only two genders. I don't see clear proof one way or another, but this poll suggests that probably about half of Americans believe that gender can differ from sex. (I'll admit that for non-Americans, it's probably much lower.)
• chrisallick 6y ago
  The concept is not overused. Privilege, and the abuse of it, is _that_ pervasive.
  • wow_no 6y ago
    Sure, but in this case it’s also true. I’ve never done anything to oppress or abuse my privilege, but I am afraid of being fired for not holding “the right opinions” - opinions that are shared with the majority of Americans. Wildly mild stuff, like thinking riots are bad or immigrants shouldn’t openly shit on America all day at work.
• gringoDan 6y ago
  > It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble. It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues: 1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues. 2. A lack of empathy. What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians). While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1] I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs. [1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence
  • makomk 6y ago
    It's less a lack of empathy and more a redefinition of it, at least on the woke blue tribe side. In those circles, not rejecting ideas outside the orthodoxy and dehumanizing those who hold them is seen as a failure of empathy because the correct ideas are, by definition, required in order to treat the people who matter with decency. I'm not familiar enough with other groupthinks to know if this applies there too, but probably not.
• haunter 6y ago
  That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the rich white people as if they have the same privileges When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information
  • seamyb88 6y ago
    If you don't view BLM within the overarching framework of socialism, then you are susceptible to misinterpreting the movement, as I believe you have done. If you think BLM protesters aspire to white levels of wealth inequality then you are mistaken. This would imply that the many, many people on the streets are demanding that they let a selected proportion of black people through the glass ceiling, just enough so that wealth inequality is racially equal. We could combine the two phrases here: all black lives matter.
  • M2Ys4U 6y ago
    It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality. To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
  • awb 6y ago
    Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.
    • ipnon 6y ago
      On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold. Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
• greenie_beans 6y ago
  he's smart and i always like reading his insight but his writing is so cryptic and always dances around his point without fully committing to it
  • calebm 6y ago
    He's probably choosing not to say some stuff because it's heresy :)
    • greenie_beans 6y ago
      he's very obviously saying those things if you read between the lines so how is that not committing "heresy"?
  • commandlinefan 6y ago
    That's the point - you can't commit to it, or it will be the last thing you ever write.
    • greenie_beans 6y ago
      meh, that's bad writing in my opinion. he's obviously committing to his opinion (in a super round about way), so he can't skirt trying to not commit. commit to what you want to say. he's had no problem in the past doing that.
• wbharding 6y ago
  The world has been hard up for terminology to describe what’s bad about the forces that have dragged down SSC and driven Weiss away from NYT. “Cancel culture” was a good start, as evidenced by those who have been rankled by the suggestion of its existence. My fave part of this essay is that it offers a shiny new tool, “orthodox privilege,” that allows us to enumerate the case for a countervailing force against this age of outrage.
  • awb 6y ago
    It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage. The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc. Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change. It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth. I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people. I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe. Happy to be wrong about this.
    • philwelch 6y ago
      Emmanuel Cafferty wasn’t in a position of power. Sue Schafer wasn’t in a position of power.
      • awb 6y ago
        So why not be mad at "kneejerk bosses" who are actually doing the cancelling? People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that. And the right to free speech (including outrage) seems important. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove... > SDG&E said in a statement: “We hold all SDG&E employees to a high standard and expect them to live up to our values every day. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took appropriate action.” If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue. It's not ideal, but he's not powerless either. The Covington kid was a good example of that.
• donatj 6y ago
  Paul Graham as always says the things I want to say, more clearly and concise, and with the privilege wealth brings of being able to more freely speak.
• intopieces 6y ago
  This article seems to praise people for not being "conventional minded," as if being unorthodox in itself is something to be cherished and rewarded. That is too low of a bar to clear. There are lots of opinions and viewpoints that are unorthodox for good reason -- because they are just bad ideas, or are factually untrue no matter how many times you argue it. It's as if PG is saying to us "Think Different," and just stopping there. What he should be saying is "Think Different, but be prepared to prove it," as well as "Be a little tolerant of people who are doing their best to prove it." The problem is that, unless you're speaking to someone with whom you have a great deal of trust, that second part -- the earnestness of their unorthodoxy -- is difficult to prove.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • carlmr 6y ago
    >reason -- because they are just bad ideas, or are factually untrue no matter how many times you argue it. I think that's why he specifically said, uttering things that are unorthodox and true.
    • zrail 6y ago
      "good/bad" is a different dimension than "true/untrue".
    • intopieces 6y ago
      To the earnest speaker, many abhorrent things are both unorthodox and true. So, I can’t see that as a uncontroversial qualifier itself.
  • djaque 6y ago
    Absolutely agree with you. Sometimes your unorthodox opinion just sucks. Also, was anybody else bracing themselves for what "unorthodox" was code for while reading? I think I'm so used to seeing this argument used in an attempt to justify stuff like blatant racism, antisemitism, etc. that I'm sort of conditioned to look for that. By the way, not saying that's what's going on here, but it was just an interesting reaction I noticed in myself. Ironically, similar to what another commenter posted, the whole article is one of those things which is obviously true, but may completely miss the point depending on context.
• analyst74 6y ago
  Internet mob rule definitely has its problems, but it's also particularly disliked by people who previously had the "Orthodox" privilege, because losing privilege feels terrible, which can be summed as: "I used to be able to say anything honestly, now I can't."
• asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Not my favorite essay ever. Most unorthodox beliefs aren't on the list of things you "can't say." A small subset of unorthodox statements might make you the subject of anger from various groups. The essay seems to suggest that anyone who doesn't have a problem with this is ignorant of "orthodox privilege." IMO, that's uncharitable. I think most people understand that it's easier to have orthodox beliefs. The folks who have no problem with cancel culture view the things being cancelled as a bigger problem than the challenge of having heterodox beliefs. I'll also just note that the vast majority of heterodox beliefs and statements are not on the list of things you "can't say." A small subset of them, especially relating to race and gender, are risky. Maybe there's a good reason for that?
  • david927 6y ago
    I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I would say that most unorthodox beliefs are absolutely on the list of things you "can't say." Most people don't have strong egos (i.e. as "sense of self") and most have frail foundations for what they perceive to be "truth." Nearly everyone, if they wrote out a list of truths, could have that list divided into "universal truths" (e.g. 1+1=2), "group (e.g. cultural) truths" (you flip up on a light switch to turn a light on), and "individual truths" (things only you believe, often wrongly). It's not that you "can't say" a unorthodox statement (one that runs counter to one of these truths), but since all of these truths are held roughly at the same level, it will be the equivalent of saying "1 + 1 = 3," and you'll be dismissed and seen as crazy. The reaction will be visceral and abrupt. There will be little interest in hearing your side of the story; you're just talking nonsense. I'm not a fan of Paul but he's right here. If someone says, "humans didn't go to the moon," it's extremely hard for most Americans to hear that. Their reaction isn't, "Why do you think that?" but "When did you lose your mind?" and all willingness to discuss it is off the table. That's not a normal reaction. The person poked an accepted truth, and in doing so, committed heresy.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > The person poked an accepted truth, and in doing so, committed heresy. That's not an accurate characterization, though. In the case of the particular statement you mentioned, what happened is that the person said something that clustered with things said by a lot of silly people. It is rational (in a Bayesian sense) to take that as evidence that the person making the statement is also silly. The main reason people won't engage in argument about it is because nobody cares that much whether you believe some weird unlikely thing about history. It doesn't affect anything, even in the unlikely event that you were right. There are plenty of heterodox statements that don't have this effect to the same degree. For example, "dark matter doesn't actually exist, and instead serves as a kind of scientific 'god did it' get out of jail free card." This is a heterodox view, but one that doesn't get you cancelled or immediately called crazy. People will be skeptical of the view, and you'll need to bring some pretty heavy arguments, but that's basically tautological. If it were not so, the view would not be heterodox.
• seibelj 6y ago
  What has been especially frustrating to me is identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups. It completely removes all agency and individuality and instead classifies you entirely as a set of labels. The smallest minority truly is the individual, and every individual can make their own decisions regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
  • debacle 6y ago
    The way that this is weaponized by hyperinclusionists to further radicalize groups is terrifying. "If you don't think X, you aren't A." "Well I don't think X, and I am A." "If you don't think X you aren't A." "Well then I guess I'm not A." "If you don't think Y, you aren't A." ...and so on. We've seen it with a few specific political groups.
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      People usually call this salami slicing when a group does it to their ideological opponents. But sometimes it is a wholly internal, self-driven dynamic where the least committed members of a group tend to quit first, and the group ends up with more and more radicalized members over time.
      • debacle 6y ago
        It seems like every progressive group is slowly forced to adopt the platform of every other progressive group until they are effectively politically sterilized.
        • dgellow 6y ago
          That reminds me of Taleb’s essay “ The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
        • 6y ago
• apexalpha 6y ago
  >The spectral signature of orthodox privilege is "Why don't you just say it?" If you think there's something true that people can't say, why don't you be brave, and own it? The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist. Well. This kind of hit a snare with me... I'm the kind of person that would say this to people. I'm not entirely sure what to think of it as a whole, the letter. I might have to read it again later.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    > I'm the kind of person that would say this to people. Recognize that this is probably a combination of: (1) your opinions aren't as unorthodox as you think, they're just a little controversial, and (2) you're the kind of person who can just "say this to people" without significant repercussions. Both of those traits constitute the state described by the linked article: you're "privileged", to use the vernacular. It's not something true of everyone. In fact, were something you said to produce a real, big reaction from offended people, you'd probably be really upset. You just don't know it. Probably 90% of the "cancel culture" paranoia we're seeing on the right is exactly this: people used to being able to exercise their "Freedom to Offend" suddenly finding it's not so fun when the other side hits back.
    • apexalpha 6y ago
      I've read the letter again and if its goal was to make me think it succeeded. Although I'm generally weary of labeling everything "privileged", I get the authors' point. Having thought about it I do live in a culture that is considered extremely blunt, honest or even just rude depending on who you ask. That might change my perspective as well.
• jes5199 6y ago
  ooh a bait and switch! I was going to talk about how people with different kinds of brains (you think anyone in this forum is on the autism spectrum? no?) have to code-switch and perform the normal cognitive style to be taken seriously... but that’s not actually relevant, because this post is about “cancel culture”. Should a person get twitter mobbed for admitting that they’re a bigot? probably not! should a person who says “damn that sounds kinda bigoted” to someone famous get mobbed for saying that in public?? No I’d say no to that too. but we’ve got both sides saying “my mob is good people telling the truth, your mob is cruel trolls running an inquisition” but somehow that devolves into saying “cancel cultures does/doesn’t exist” as if that explained why your mob has the right to wield pitchforks and the other one doesn’t
  • bob33212 6y ago
    I see it as "My mob should be judged by the most moderate and thoughtful of us, your mob should be judged by the worst of you"
• nayuki 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
• 1xdeveloper 6y ago
  I would love to know Paul's definition of a "true thing".
• KboPAacDA3 6y ago
  Related: Overton window - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window "The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time."
  • chasingthewind 6y ago
    At the moment it seems that we have a "double-hung" overton window. The right sash and the left sash overlap less and less all the time.
• bob33212 6y ago
  "Joining as employee number 15 or later at a startup pretty much guarantees that you will get screwed over on equity if the company needs to raise money again" Can you say that and also still be accepted to ycombinator?
  • jbob2000 6y ago
    This is the problem with this post; Paul isn’t getting into specifics, so it’s easy for anyone to read this and say “ah yes, it is them who have the problem and not me”. I gather he wants to tell all of these people casting platitudes down on everyone to fuck off, but he could also be talking about the people that want to tell those people to fuck off.
    • rurp 6y ago
      This was my impression as well. The main point made sense but was so general I didn't really get much out of it. Maybe it's because I don't follow Twitter or movements like "cancel culture" much, but I couldn't readily think of any specific real world situations that this article gave me any new insight on.
      • jonny_eh 6y ago
        Exactly! I want to be charitable, but I can't help but feel he really really wants to say something awful, James Watson style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race
• jarmitage 6y ago
  For a list of 46 other privileges (some that overlap with this proposal), see this classic article: White privilege and male privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies (1988) by Peggy McIntosh https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/white-privilege-and-male-privilege.pdf https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/white-privilege-and...
  • vertbhrtn 6y ago
    Sounds like a very fundamental work!
• scarmig 6y ago
  One interesting part of living in China has been the different sets of orthodoxies and heresies people have. Things that are unspeakable in the US are conventional wisdom here, and things that are unspeakable in China are conventional wisdom in the US. Of course, the conventional wisdom in the US as it exists among upper-middle class, college-educated white folk in 2020 is exactly right about everything, but it's interesting to see just how wrong people in a different society can be without even realizing it.
  • Invictus0 6y ago
    I'm curious, can you give some examples of Chinese conventional wisdom that are unspeakable in the US?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • celeritascelery 6y ago
      > can you give some examples ... that are unspeakable? There is a reason they are called unspeakable.
    • peacefulhat 6y ago
      Talking with Chinese expats in America, one that really sticks out for me is: Despite massive economic backslide under Mao, China would not have industrialized without him. I've heard people who are otherwise very critical of Mao say this, seems ubiquitous. The American perspective of course is that Mao was only a negative and stunted Chinese growth. I think the idea is that land owners were overly conservative with capital investment and Taiwanese/Hong Kong growth is explained by foreign investment that Republican China would not have received. And not as ubiquitous but several have said that the Japanese military is a major threat to China, which seems absurd. Haven't gotten a real justification for this other than "they make good technology", like they're secretly developing a Gundam.
      • scarmig 6y ago
• rexreed 6y ago
  Sounds like just another way of saying "groupthink". It's a rebranding of the concept of groupthink which has been around as long as hominids have been in groups and have been thinking. It's not a form of privilege. Rather, it's the nature of our brains. We are social animals. We prefer not being ostracized. We self-censor as a result. This is not a privilege. People who groupthink are not more privileged than those who don't. The only privilege is the ability to say "yes" to the group more frequently.
• 082349872349872 6y ago
  For an example of a US southerner speaking from orthodox privilege in 1860: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739361 For an example of a Nazi speaking from orthodox privilege in 1943: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36.htm https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36... "The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not. ... We also know our historic responsibility. Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. One cannot overestimate the danger. ... The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe." For an example of Athenians speaking from the Most Orthodox Of All Privileges in 431 BC: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm "right ... is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
• __alexs 6y ago
  Great piece. I frequently find myself withholding opinions about inequality because they'd get me in trouble. The orthodoxy really has the debate on lock down, glad the Trump situation has really got the debate moving again though.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ot 6y ago
  I'm not sure what the point of this post is. It says > And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be. and then goes on to argue that saying certain things could get you in trouble. I'm sure that the orthodoxy-aligned people at any point in time believed that they couldn't say anything that would get them in trouble as well. So it may be an unfortunate dynamic, but the post contradicts itself in presenting it as a product of our time. If anything, things got better: in the past you'd be imprisoned or killed, today people yell at you on Twitter and in the worst case you may have to switch jobs.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jeffmcmahan 6y ago
    > but the post contradicts itself in presenting it as a product of our time. No. It doesn't. Nope. It presents the phenomenon as something that's always true - recall the discussion of time traveling and meeting the same dynamic with different particulars in each time and place. Moreover, "the point of this post" is abundantly clear: the more closely your views adhere to the mainstream, the more blind you'll be to the costs of holding opinions outside the mainstream because you don't encounter those costs. It's a good point and not hard to understand.
• JarlUlvi 6y ago
  > Check your privilege I'll respond with something I believe written by <a href="http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm">Owen http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm... M. Williamson.</a> >The Identity Fallacy (also Identity Politics; "Die away, ye old forms and logic!"): A corrupt postmodern argument from ethos, a variant on the Argumentum ad Hominem in which the validity of one's logic, evidence, experience or arguments depends not on their own strength but rather on whether the one arguing is a member of a given social class, generation, nationality, religious or ethnic group, color, gender or sexual orientation, profession, occupation or subgroup. In this fallacy, valid opposing evidence and arguments are brushed aside or "othered" without comment or consideration, as simply not worth arguing about solely because of the lack of proper background or ethos of the person making the argument, or because the one arguing does not self-identify as a member of the "in-group." E.g., "You'd understand me right away if you were Burmese but since you're not there's no way I can explain it to you," or "Nobody but another nurse can know what a nurse has to go through." Identity fallacies are reinforced by common ritual, language, and discourse. However, these fallacies are occasionally self-interested, driven by the egotistical ambitions of academics, politicians and would-be group leaders anxious to build their own careers by carving out a special identity group constituency to the exclusion of existing broader-based identities and leadership. An Identity Fallacy may lead to scorn or rejection of potentially useful allies, real or prospective, because they are not of one's own identity. The Identity Fallacy promotes an exclusivist, sometimes cultish "do for self" philosophy which in today's world virtually guarantees self-marginalization and ultimate defeat. A recent application of the Identity Fallacy is the fallacious accusation of "Cultural Appropriation," in which those who are not of the right Identity are condemned for "appropriating" the cuisine, clothing, language or music of a marginalized group, forgetting the old axiom that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Accusations of Cultural Appropriation very often stem from competing selfish economic interests (E.g., "What right do those p*nche Gringos have to set up a taco place right here on Guadalupe Drive to take away business from Doña Teresa's Taquería? They even dare to play Mexican music in their dining room! That's cultural appropriation!"). See also, Othering.
• dexen 6y ago
  >If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't I guess this is an accidentally in-apt example...? It certainly detracts from the essay (mildly and in oh so many words) pushing against accusations of wrongthink - which includes accusations of dogwhistling.
• getpost 6y ago
  Is there a high-pitched sound, or not? If the people in power say there's no high-pitched sound, and the people out of power are suffering from the high-pitched sound, what is "true"? There is "a truth," or "two truths," but not "the truth." The ideal of polite conversion is that people who disagree can come to a conclusion, a "truth," that was previously inaccessible to either of them. Asserting "the truth," is a dominator paradigm privilege.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Famous visual examples of two truths: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23843723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23843723
    • throwaway744678 6y ago
      Also, The Dress![https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress]
    • malandrew 6y ago
      This is a great one: https://gfycat.com/softklutzyblackbird https://gfycat.com/softklutzyblackbird
  • nailer 6y ago
    > If the people in power say there's no high-pitched sound, and the people out of power are suffering from the high-pitched sound, what is "true"? How is the power of the speaker relevant to the truth of what they are saying? Would the presence of a high pitched sound change if the people in power say there /is/ a high-pitched sound, and the people out of power say it doesn't exist? The way we find truth is to measure the sound, rather than to pay undue attention to anecdotal evidence to one party based on identity.
  • malandrew 6y ago
    This is also captured in the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
• rexreed 6y ago
  Here's something for you: HN has groupthink (er, I mean PG-branded Orthodox Privilege) in spades. If you agree with the Group (orthodoxy) you get upvotes and lots of kudos. If you don't, you get downvotes and criticism.
  • non-entity 6y ago
    > If you don't, you get downvotes and criticism. Heh, if you're lucky. Often you get just the downvotes.
    • skissane 6y ago
      The incentives encourage people to downvote rather than criticise. If they post a critical response, they run the risk of being downvoted by those who disagree with that criticism. You can't get downvoted for a silent downvote.
  • martinlaz 6y ago
    Awesome. So we can just scroll to the bottom and fish out some of the truths visitors from the future better be careful not to say.
• t0astbread 6y ago
  A lot of this seems to focus on ideas and worldviews but I think there's a more general truth in Orthodox Privilege: If you're in the majority it's easy to overestimate the quality of life in the minority (and this applies to many kinds of majorities and minorities). I think a lot of politics (at least in my country) also work this way. Simply by not addressing real problems, a politician can look like a winner because hey, there are no problems when they're in charge! Addressing problems not only becomes a political liability, it's in fact hardly possible at all because the majority of people wouldn't believe you if you told them about it and would accuse you of making up problems.
  • bravo22 6y ago
    This also reveals a fundamental bug in naive democracy (i.e. we should do everything that the majority wants). It creates an implicit tyranny against the minority by the majority. Of course the same person can be in a majority group in one category but minority in the other. U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other similar fundamental laws were conceived as essentially a way to fix this problem; to keep the minority safe from the majority. You wouldn't be able to solve slavery with democracy. The majority would vote to maintain it.
• deleted 6y ago
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• SoSoPrivilege 6y ago
  One way of knowing if a person suffers from "orthodox privilege" is their reaction to opinions they disagree with strongly. A person afflicted with "orthodox privilege" has the power to label a dissenter a "troll" then ban, cancel, or deplatform the offender without recourse. With privilege comes power and often a complete lack of self awareness. "Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. Like any pejorative term, it can be used as an ad hominem attack, suggesting a negative motivation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll In echo chambers or filter bubbles, "users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble "HN is a liberal echo chamber identical to all other social media where all dissenting viewpoints get suppressed. The truth is HN is Reddit, but with a better interface and a smarter crowd." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765172 When new information shakes the foundation of your core beliefs, it hurts. No pain, no gain, no growth. Branding anyone who introduces shocking, new information as a person who is obviously a troll, is a mirror image of the behavior privileged free speech advocates claim to oppose. Banning or deplatforming them is the internet equivalent of book burning. "The burning of books represents an element of censorship and usually proceeds from a cultural, religious, or political opposition to the materials in question." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning Here are a few obvious opinions that most HNers would have taken as truth just a few years ago: * America is the land of the free. * We are the good guys so we only bomb terrorist bad guys. * America has the best healthcare system in the world. * Our democracy is the best system of governance the world has ever known. * Our democracy is the best so freedom and justice require that we impose our system on others by force. * The Chinese are not creative; they only know how to copy. * The Russians started the wars in Ukraine and in Georgia. * People who believe the Snowden and Assange reveals are "conspiracy theorists." * Having a nuanced view on Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, or Iran makes one an America-hating troll. * There are no false rape/harassment accusations therefore "believe all women." * Conservatives are white, racist bigots and black conservatives are sellouts who are not really black. * Feminism is about equality for all so any allegation that it's an exploitative, supremacist movement is just trolling. * Anyone who mentions the Manosphere, MRA, the red pill, MGTOW, misandry is an obvious misogynist, conservative, racist (white) male incel troll who should be banned because reasons. I used to hold several of the opinions above. In a few years, expressing those opinions might be considered "trolling". Opinions and fashions change. To those who disagree with this post, (a) check privilege, (b) provide a reasoned response that relies on facts instead of feelings. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
• 5cott0 6y ago
  Is "orthodox privilege" not the operating principle of hacker news? Shouting down unpopular opinions under the guise of "civility"?
• deleted 6y ago
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• bhntr3 6y ago
  Orthodox privilege probably exists but, at least in the US, we also see a lot of people who fetishize independent-mindedness to a degree that's irrational as well. I have advocated before for epistemic learned helplessness (https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_Helplessness https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_...). > thinking for ourselves is over-rated in most cases. In most cases, for most of us, good science and pseudoscience, good history and pseudohistory are going to be equally convincing. Bayesian logic suggests that sticking with mainstream experts and consensus thinking is a safer bet than rolling the dice on the Galileo Gambit. So PG seems to be arguing that orthodox privilege is bad and independent-mindedness is important while Scott Alexander seems to be arguing that conventional mindedness should be the default. They're both very convincing essayists. Who is saying something true that can't be said and who is saying something popular but false?
• woodruffw 6y ago
  A glaring omission: the views and positions that paulg is (obliquely) referring to just aren't orthodox. He's upset that a small, vocal minority[1] is challenging a set of orthodox social norms that continue to enrich and empower him. The average American is doesn't read Twitter daily, and is somewhere between a moderate liberal and a moderate conservative[2]. These people represent orthodox privilege. [1]: Case in point: they continue to lose primary elections within their own (ostensible) party. [2]: On the American political scale, which is uniformly further "right" than European left-right divides.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    In Applesauce Town, you are required to eat only applesauce. To a person who wants to eat ham with his applesauce, the fact that the larger American society that envelops Applesauce Town permits all kinds of food matters little to him, because his boss, his wife, and all of his friends vigorously enforce Applesauce Culture.
    • woodruffw 6y ago
      To be clear: are you claiming that paulg, whose net worth is (probably) somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars[1] and who runs the company that manages this extremely popular forum, is somehow required to live in "Applesauce Town"? paulg is the boss in this analogy. He wields more material power than almost anybody who can possibility be mean to him on the Internet. [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Grahams-net-worth https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Grahams-net-worth
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        Is PG necessarily defending himself, personally? What he's saying applies to everyone who might want to say something online, from Google executives to janitors. Furthermore, no matter how much you have it's still possible for someone to harm you unfairly. "PG is a billionaire" doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to do something morally wrong that results in him being worse off. Rich people deserve all of the same standards of fairness that anyone else does.
• deleted 6y ago
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• Kapura 6y ago
  pg has been opining about so-called "cancel culture" on twitter, and the last paragraph makes it clear that this entire post is his attempt to formulate a response: >Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it. "Orthodox privilege" is, he sees, why some people are not worried about being "cancelled." In his mind, these people are saying what is considered correct, so they don't fear cancellation. Perhaps this is true for some people, but I think that it is inventing (or at least overscoping) a phenomenon to answer a question that has another, simpler answer. Some people are able to honestly assess their past positions and statements, understand why things could be construed as problematic, and make efforts to better themselves. That, and a sense of what conversations are appropriate for public forums versus informal conversation over drinks, act as pretty great cancellation buffers.
  • Tainnor 6y ago
    I think it's more that most people realise "I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore" or "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore". Those people might be leading healthier lives (why die on a hill you don't have to die on), but it doesn't mean they're closer to the truth necessarily. The fact about some debates not being acceptable on public forums as opposed to private discussions would be fine, if it weren't for that fact that it's being applied extremely inconsistently.
    • JadeNB 6y ago
      > "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore" I would like to quote pg's own rhetoric of "is my situation unique?": > And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be. I suspect that many people, myself among them, think "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I am likely to be wrong." Otherwise I am forced to believe that I am the only person who can see things correctly, a mindset that is at least statistically false, even if it might very occasionally apply to a particular person. This response I think naturally worries a lot of people, since it sounds awfully close to silencing dissent, but there are two things that I think make it meaningfully different. 1. If everyone disagrees with you about your scientific, or otherwise verifiable, ideas, then you definitely should not say "oh well, I must be wrong." You should test those ideas. The risk (failed investment in a test whose outcome was widely predicted) and reward (being the scientific or other leader in a discovery that upends expectations) here are both high, and many parts of science, at least, are set up to reward individuals who decide to make that trade. 2. There is a difference between my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am likely to be wrong", which I think is a good thing, and my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am wrong", which I think is a bad thing. Experiencing widespread disagreement should make me carefully examine my assumptions and biases, not just import opposite assumptions and biases.
• leafboi 6y ago
  I was actually warned by the HN administrator for saying something "True" and slightly negative about a race/culture. I threw a bit of "privilege" around because that race was basically my race. Perhaps it was also an example of "orthodox privilege." I'm Chinese, the topic was about educational fraud in China and I made a negative comment associating corruption and Chinese culture in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781696 I felt the reaction by dang was out of hand and overblown especially given the fact that he likely has no actual first hand knowledge about the topic. It's also a reaction that I feel is unique to the culture in the United States. Definitely, there are racial issues in the United States with issues like Floyd, but I'm not commenting about that issue, I'm talking about freedom of speech and when it's appropriate to say things that are the result of "orthodox privilege." The united states is one of the least racist countries in the world. This is a very commendable trait that every citizen should be proud of but every citizen should also be aware that in being the least racist country in the world, the United States, as a result, also has one of the most irrational opinions on race and equality. A black person is generally bigger, taller and stronger than an asian person. Black people are so much further to the right with the bell curve on these traits that the olympic gold medals in strength based sports are typically taken by people of African descent while even rich countries like China with targeted programs to win gold medals rarely bring home gold for strength based sports. These are just biological generalities that are true and that are accepted that not all people/races are equal from a physical standpoint. However if I say an one race generally has higher biological IQ then another race... I crossed a line. What black magic allows people to be biologically different physically but doesn't allow them to be biologically different behaviorally or mentally? Sure, maybe none of the IQ differences are real and there might be research somewhere that normalizes racial IQ scores when you account for things like socioeconomic background... However, the backlash for even bringing up a topic on biological and racial IQ is outright vicious and as I said before: unique to the United States in terms of the level of intensity. There's definitely government oppression in China in terms of what you can and cannot talk about, but there's none of this irrational touchy touchy equality stuff you get in the United States. Speech in the united states is regulated by culture and society rather than centrally like in China.. It Changes the overall nature of what is censored and what you can and cannot talk about... For example if you're born with a big nose in China, that basically becomes your nickname in China. I literally have a friend with a big nose and everyone just calls him "Big Nose." I also have a friend in China who's fat and his Chinese nickname is Fatass. People just call him "Fatass" by name and it's considered slightly derogatory, inline with "Big Nose" but otherwise not a big deal because it's also the physical reality. This is in stark contrast to the states where there's a whole Body positivity movement is trying to change reality as we know it. I'm not going to comment on whether being obese is healthy or not, it could or it could not be... but I will say that the Body positivity movement exists not because of there's scientific proof that being obese can be healthy... it exists because people are so scared of being insensitive and having their precious feelings hurt that they want to rewrite reality into viewing fat obese people as culturally normal. Again this phenomenon is uniquely prevalent in the United States and not only unique to race and weight. Another example of this occurs in gender pronouns but let's not get into that, I'm sure you already get the point. I have a different conclusion than Paul. I would say that you're conventional minded if you're afraid to talk about or think about very real yet hard to stomach taboo topics that are True. Cultural biases caused by guilt from past injustices in the United States has taken hysteria and fear to unreasonable levels. I would tell Paul and anyone in a similar situation to take a good look at themselves. If you can't comfortably have a scientific conversation about biological IQ, weight, gender and race without fear of losing your job or offending someone how is that different from the christian religion making you feel uncomfortable talking about evolution and natural selection? The cultural biases and conventional thinking exists in the people who are incapable of talking about truth, not the other way around.
• tomlockwood 6y ago
  > It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be particularly sure of it. Exactly! Like for instance, the vast majority of people, who believe they can objectively identify mindless orthodoxies, while somehow remaining immune to them.
  • hawkice 6y ago
    I think the trick is to distinguish "that's an unorthodox idea" from "you are violating the orthodoxy". For instance, here are (relatively anodyne?) statements, the first being rare to hear but unpoliced (unorthodox), and the other being one where I've had people, in person, prompt me to explain it so that they and their friend can laugh at me (violating the orthodoxy). a) The exception in the 13th amendment for criminals is bad, currently used to legally shield slavery in American prisons, and should be repealed. b) All Americans, including minors of all ages, should be allowed to vote. Seeing the difference in reactions to them has sharpened my conception of precisely what orthodoxy is, and what social purpose it serves. [As a historical note, Nazis displayed art they hated at prominent museums, specifically to encourage people to mock it for how terrible it was (of course, almost universally art created by Jews). Ben Shapiro would be out of a job if the people he mocks were _actually_ silenced -- not because he'd have nothing else to talk about, but because the format would be boring. Same for Chapo Trap House, etc etc etc.]
    • tomlockwood 6y ago
      I don't know if the distinction is necessarily clear here - I think the idea b is so jarring to people is they can immediately visualize the edge case - where a baby is voting. I know you've probably got more nuance to that belief, but a naive person probably immediately thinks about it. I'm not sure you've successfully identified an orthodoxy there because, also, I've never heard anyone defend the current voting age with any vigor.
      • hawkice 6y ago
        If people defend it with vigor, it's probably something still up for grabs in American discussion, and not really an orthodoxy. You'll see this in modern, fresher orthodoxies, where even though most people would disagree it is assumed the audience doesn't need to be told why it's right, or even that it's right
• peisistratos 6y ago
  The a priori to all of this current hubbub is a large number of people who are not of an upper class or upper middle class white American background, who are not even heard at all. One example would be Tulsi Gabbard. We do not hear what she says. We hear from a New York Times columnist who went to exclusive prep schools and then to an Ivy League college (where she tried to "cancel" Arab professors by testifying against them that they were antisemitic) before landing her plum role, that Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". After years of throwing mud from her aerie, she herself finally feels some criticism come in, and quits her job in a huff, with ramblings about the end of freedom. Hillary Clinton not so indirectly implied Gabbard was some sort of stalking horse of Putin's as well. Saturday Night Live joins in. This is all not considering canceling though. It's not, in a sense, the notion that the US should not have military bases all over the world was never out there on the corporate controlled media channels . There's nothing to cancel - that show was never allowed on to start with. Pushback against this mudslinging is considered canceling though. This is the threat to freedom we hear Sturm and Drang about. The channels of media out there all blast forth establishment views, benefiting a minority of privileged people. They are born upper and upper middle class, white, and are American if not by birth then by coming to the US. Other voices are excluded. All that is left and that can finally be faintly heard is some criticism of these establishment narratives. That this pushback is causing demonstrations around the country and criticism of the establishment narrative is very distressing for these people. (A tangential example - in the days after 9/11, the New York Times published excerpts of an Osama bin Laden statement. As the whole world seemed to be pivoting on this dialectic, I tried to find the full statement somewhere. I was unable to. I could not even find it on the net. Perhaps it has surfaced in the past 20 years. It reminds me of the old Irish republican cartoon of an Irishman with a British gag over his mouth representing BBC voice bans etc. When the gag is removed a dove of peace comes out. NATO bombing Serbian press is not considered censorship. Satellite installers jailed for installing al-Manar is not censorship. Privileged people who tried to cancel Arab professors getting criticism is considered censorship.) In the current dialectic, we have to-the-manor born, white, more or less American establishment types suddenly having to contend with voices who are not necessarily white or American, who went to public schools and grew up middle class or working class or poor, who are finally having their voices heard and who are challenging the establishment hegemony. I know which side I am on.
• pyb 6y ago
  It's not the first time that pg alludes to "what you can't say". It would be nice if he could at least outline what it is that he believes he's not allowed to say. Otherwise the discussion remains exceedingly abstract. Furthermore, some may assume the worst of whatever he had in mind that "can't be said"
  • gridlockd 6y ago
    “All lives matter”
    • GenerocUsername 6y ago
      "Its ok to be white"
  • ksdale 6y ago
    He explicitly mentions that whenever you talk about speech in the abstract, people will assume you believe whatever thing they don't like. Agree with him or not, I think it completely misses his point to need to hear his opinions before you decide whether he's correct in the abstract about speech.
    • pyb 6y ago
      It's true that the 2nd half of the post (which I should have read before commenting) is a retort to my objection. If I understand well, the response is that I am blessed (?) with "orthodox privilege".
  • wry_discontent 6y ago
    Nobody who complains about cancel culture can actually do that cause they'll out what they really mean, which is something like "I want to say racist/sexist shit but can't cause I'll get in trouble now."
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      It's more like: "I can't say anything that someone somewhere might uncharitably interpret as sexist/racist/transphobic/homophobic or else I get in trouble now." For instance, pointing out scientifically well-established differences between genders and daring to draw the conclusion that maybe gender inequity is not entirely the fault of a sexist white cismale conspiracy - that will probably get you cancelled.
• brm 6y ago
  I can't think of a TRUE statement that you'll be cancelled for. I can think of a lot of opinions presented as truths that will get you cancelled. For my edification, can you all please present some hypothetical examples of current TRUE statements that cannot/should not be said? Something like "Fat people are a burden on a healthcare system" is true and won't get you cancelled. Something like "Trans people are currently the gender they were born" is a philosophical opinion and might get you cancelled but whether its true or not is a sort of Ship of Theseus problem. Something like "Donald Trump has a low IQ" may impede your work progress but that has its own implications about cancel culture that aren't what we're talking about. So please for the sake of argument, show me an actual truth that will get you cancelled. Seriously looking for examples...
  • apsec112 6y ago
    Here's a list: https://mobile.twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598 https://mobile.twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/12824046471609...
    • brm 6y ago
      That is not a list that provides examples of truths being cancelled.
• deleted 6y ago
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• temac 6y ago
  I'm wary of social hypotheses that place an irrefutable / indefensible burden on "me" (well, actually, on anybody), especially if the only reason is by association because of correlations with arbitrary traits. I can very well admit that some cultures (in a very broad sense of the term) have agressive characteristics perceived by people used to others and, to the extend the advantages are greater than potential drawbacks (which are often not even present or can be short term, granted), try to be careful about that in hopefully a benevolent way. Also, people classified as privileged might also perceive tons of things as aggressive against them, and mere injunctions to stop or act as if not in all regard, are not productive -- it does not really matter who is "wrong" or "right" if an action is de-facto antagonizing and polarizing over and over (well, from an individual ethic pov it does matter very much, but from an outcome that's debatable...), unless you are ready to escalate, and that seems a terrible idea. So I don't believe people with characteristic X or Y shall be approached all the time as if they are a mean representative of their "group" and shall as a result apply a parody of Bayesianism blind to all other traits, and blind to individual variance, and blind to the knowledge of themselves. I don't see why, from time to time, there would not be people who are "true" about things they won't even say, but that does not seem a very powerful thing to act upon. I just don't know what to do with that, and especially I'm not sure I understand where to go from that to the conclusion. Some intelligent people think X and other intelligent people not X? Yes, that happens. Very often. Extremely often. But is there even an absolute truth when "cancel culture" is concerned, and what even is the precise definition? The wording is typically used to talk about things believed excessive. For example it's one thing being associated with Epstein and people not wanting to work with you anymore; it's another thing to be fired because you told a silly joke to a friend during a conference, and a third party ears it. Absolute truth in social subjects is rarely to be seen, especially when we talk about blurry concepts. (edit: typos)
• known 6y ago
  Always post your opinions anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.
• deleted 6y ago
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• emiliobumachar 6y ago
  Great essay, useful concept I never noticed before. But I cannot agree with the last sentence. "If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it." Even if one is 100% convinced that true statements are 100% safe, there remains the possible beliefs that being wrong is okay to some degree, and that becoming right is a hard process that may involve believing false statements and saying them.
• honkycat 6y ago
  What a bad take. I would expect Paul Graham to be more educated on a topic before he says something so tired and uninsightful. It comes from BOTH SIDES. The right wing also cancels people with social media. A few well-placed articles by right-wing publications and their targets will have a months long harassment campaign of people trying to break into their social media and bank accounts, constant death threats and hate messages and photographs of their house, insults, harassment at their place of work. Convenient that always gets left out of the "cancel culture" discussions. We need to stop acting like conservatives have no power in this country. They do, they literally run the country and arguments like this are just people getting in additional body-blows against liberal opponents. You want to see what "performatice victimhood" looks like, look at the extremely rich Paul Graham whining that people get mad at him when he says things we don't like. We do not like the way we are treated, and we are going to continue to speak out. If that gets you fired: GOOD. I understand it is frustrating, and I have said before: I don't like the cry bullies and woke-scolds on the internet. I do not think they actually care about the cultural movement, and I think they should go outside and get a life. But I honestly believe the progress we have made in the cultural consciousness for gay, trans, and people of color has been phenomenal, and it arises from the new "woke culture." I think the cry-bullying and woke-scolding days are numbered, they are starting to eat their own and even allies are getting sick of it.
• muxl 6y ago
  The core message of this article is that it's possible for even large groups of people to be wrong about things and that those people won't think they're wrong (they're wrong about being wrong). The author summarizes this mechanism as: these people are so accustomed to being "right" by appealing to consensus that they can't imagine being wrong. This argument seems to generalize not just to large groups but also to small ones. The problem I see is that in the case of large groups the author calls this "privilege" and in the case of small groups he doesn't. Since the size of the group doesn't really effect the nature of group orthodoxy and adherence the argument seems to collapse to "large groups are privileged." I agree that large groups are privileged but to claim that part of privilege is not being able to conceive of your group as being wrong seems tangential and potentially just incorrect. Perhaps the author is assuming that people in small groups more frequently encounter other groups which (1) they disagree with (2) they eventually determine are right but it isn't obvious to me that (2) would be more likely to occur in a small group than in a large group. There have been fanatical large groups and small ones which do not tolerate deviation on certain points.
  • jlawson 6y ago
    It has nothing to do with the size of the group. It's about whether a member of the group will ever have to encounter or understand views that are unorthodox in that group. If not, they assume they can't be wrong. It's the "way things are" which nobody disputes. This creates a mental blindness where they can't possibly imagine someone wanting to say something in good faith that was against this "way things are", to them it would be like saying the Earth has no moon or that cats can fly. Why would you claim that? What's wrong with you?
• carapace 6y ago
  What? Is this a cry for help? Is it ax-grinding? Are there "unorthodox and true" statements that pg would like to make but is afraid of "terrible trouble"? I find the idea of "orthodox privilege" an oxymoron. I don't understand what the phrase captures that isn't just "privilege". Maybe the whole essay is just going over my head. Or perhaps I don't hear the same "high-pitched noise"? Look, I do something called "Reiki". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. I also do something called "computer programming". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. (Being a computer nerd used to be cause for abuse and shunning, now we're celebrated. So it goes.) My point is, there are lots of ways to rile up the mob and get them to pick up their pitchforks and torches. In some places all you have to do is exist and be black or gay or a woman or white or straight or a man or neither a man nor a woman, or both-at-the-same-time (hermaphrodite), or be both black and white (Trevor Noah's autobiography of his childhood in S. Africa, "Born a Crime", is worth reading, IMO), or be a computer nerd in the locker room at the wrong time, or wear the wrong kind of hat. Mob-ism, with the pitchforks and torches, is a problem (this is hardly news though, eh?)
• padseeker 6y ago
  talking politics on hacker news generally goes terribly wrong - exhibit A: the comments on this thread.
• munificent 6y ago
  In all of the many arguments swirling around cancel culture, I have yet to see anyone raise what I think is the most important distinction: good faith. Open debate and public disagreement is a healthy vital tool of progress when the claims and argument are made in good faith. When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them. But if you assume all arguments are in good faith, then you leave the public sphere ripe for exploitation. This is what white surpremacists and others have clicked to recently. A bad actor can exploit a presumption of good faith to add legitimacy to their position. "Look, famous person X rebutted me. My claim must be at least significant enough to be worth rebutting." Or they can use it to make the other party look bad by sea-lioning. "I am merely politely asking questions. Why are you so angry? Aren't you able to control your feelings?" "Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication. The challenge is that as we get increasingly polarized and tribal and as the bad faith actors get more savvy, everything starts to look like a bad faith argument. And at some point, people start concluding that the only foolproof algorithm for determining if an argument is in bad faith is "does it disagree with me?" And then you start seeing the banhammer swung freely. That in turn increases polarization and tribalism because good faith dissenters, people with middle ground positions, and people who aren't sure where they stand self-censor to avoid taking friendly fire. It is a very nasty feedback loop we're in, exacerbated by the already bad feedback loops of social media AIs being trained to show us content we already agree with.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    > "Cancel culture" [is an important tool] to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease. But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.
    • 6y ago
• dilandau 6y ago
  Twitter is perfectly designed for coordinating attacks on individuals. The problem is that so many organizations tend to yield to the slightest hint of twitter outrage, which reinforces these kinds of cancellations.
• everdrive 6y ago
  I sometimes wonder if this is not just the novelty of social media, but rather the new normal. ie, perhaps social media will always be this divisive? This is a very limited metaphor, but it reminds me of how a moth circles around a flame. Usually, a moth would use the Moon (or Sun) to navigate, which is focused to infinity. The flame is close by, and the way the moth's natural circuitry works causes it to malfunction. A straight line becomes an inward spiral, towards the flame. The basic problems of social media are nothing new to human behavior: tribalism, moral judgement / righteousness, extremist viewpoints. But I wonder if it's a bit like the moth and the flame. With so many extreme opinions from so many strangers, we begin spiraling to more extreme positions, and taking sides in a more extreme fashion. Under normal conditions extreme opinions can still exist, but they are usually tempered by contact with other people. Even when extremity existed in the past, it at least appeared to be stable over time. ie, you'd have single group with unified (albeit extreme) ideas. People are normally meant to be socially and morally judgemental. (to what degree, and about what is up for some debate, but as an animal we like to make moral judgements.) But, they're also meant to find consensus within a community. Well, the internet breaks down some of that consensus building, while also introducing and amplifying more and more extreme positions. I really wonder that like the moth, social media breaks our normal intuition for social judgement and coalition building. And lastly, I wonder if it's any surprise that things seem to have gotten crazier since most have been on quarantine -- away from normal people, but glued to our screens. Maybe that's just anecdotal on my part, though.
• not2b 6y ago
  I'm not impressed with this argument, which we are seeing more of these days. Expressing one's opinion on controversial issues risks that people will be pissed off, but it isn't just the originally expressed opinion that is "free speech"; the furious criticisms of the original opinion are also "free speech". Refusing to associate with people because of their expressed opinions is also a right. And there isn't one orthodoxy, there are many. The range of opinions that can be expressed in the vicinity of Paul Graham without risking that he won't fund your startup is very different from the range of opinions that an assistant professor going for tenure in a humanities department may express, but it's not clear whether Graham is conscious of the orthodoxy he himself imposes, by his economic power.
  • seibelj 6y ago
    It's not enough to merely criticize someone. The fear is that you are fired and your career is destroyed, which is very bad for you and your family. When expressing even a minor deviation from the party line can result in life-destroying consequences, all dissent and discussion is stifled out of fear. This is the chilling effect.
    • not2b 6y ago
      Yes, if it were true that "expressing even a minor deviation from the party line can result in life-destroying consequences", that would be bad. But it really isn't. You can get fired from a company by disagreeing with its party line on some issue, but that doesn't destroy your life.
    • Miner49er 6y ago
      There has never been a time in history when this wasn't the case for certain views. PG touches on this for much of this article. The difference now is that fairly orthodox views are the ones people are facing consequences for.
• platz 6y ago
  > If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it. I'm having a hard time parsing the logic in this sentance. Is there something like affirming the consequent going on here?
• staycoolboy 6y ago
  The last paragraph is nefarious: "Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it." Wow, talk about a word-salad to defend privelege. Who would suspect more wisdom on privilege from proud sexist Paul Graham. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-graham-revives-sexism-tech-talk/356541/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-... He's STILL complaining about "things you can't say" in this article: http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html And completely missing the boat on "right to free speech" != "right to no consequences". He's learned nothing. Not a self-reflective bone in this man's body.
  • diffrinse 6y ago
    > Wow, talk about a word-salad to defend privelege. "I'm on the right side of history, and for other people like me, here is how to navigate this trying persecution". It's also clear that you can replace the term "orthodox privledge" with "perspective" and the good parts of the article would make complete sense while excluding the rather uncritical parts, since their substance largely hinges on the rhetorical value of this weaponized spin on the term privilege. What's funny is he has no idea this entire elaboration can be perfectly applied to himself since, again, the whole thing lives-or-dies on the implicit perspective that he, or whatever persecuted idea(s), is on the "right side of history. Like, which perspective is defining orthodox?
    • staycoolboy 6y ago
      I agree that using the word "perspective" is useful as a 101-level concept because perspectives can change radically based on a number of socioeconomic and cultural conditions out of their control. I think privilege is a 201-level concept that should only be deployed after someone internalizes the former statement, you gotta walk before you can run.
• d_burfoot 6y ago
  One important thing that the essay doesn't mention is that our current orthodoxy isn't democratic. The orthodoxy is dictated by newspapers and universities, with some help from Hollywood and tech companies. None of those institutions are remotely democratic (if they were, they wouldn't be so strongly aligned with the left). Perhaps we need to establish some limitations on what people are allowed to say, but if so, those limits must be decided by formal democratic processes.
• carapace 6y ago
  What? Is this a cry for help? Is it ax-grinding? Are there "unorthodox and true" statements that pg would like to make but is afraid of "terrible trouble"? I find the idea of "orthodox privilege" an oxymoron. I don't understand what the phrase captures that isn't just "privilege". Maybe the whole essay is just going over my head. Or perhaps I don't hear the same "high-pitched noise"? Look, I do something called "Reiki". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. I also do something called "computer programming". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. (Being a computer nerd used to be cause for abuse and shunning, now we're celebrated. So it goes.) My point is, there are lots of ways to rile up the mob and get them to pick up their pitchforks and torches. In some places all you have to do is exist and be black or gay or a woman or white or straight or a man or neither a man nor a woman, or both-at-the-same-time (hermaphrodite), or be both black and white (Trevor Noah's autobiography of his childhood in S. Africa, "Born a Crime", is worth reading, IMO), or be a computer nerd in the locker room at the wrong time, or wear the wrong kind of hat. Mob-ism, with the pitchforks and torches, is a problem (this is hardly news though, eh?)
• francoisp 6y ago
  kudos to Paul for this one. Writing about a very very charged and divisive social phenomenon and putting out a meta-conception that casts a better light in a very adroit, objective angle. True free thinker stuff. This is prolly how enlightened individuals had to softly tread their way also in other times, although one on one and small groups allows more forgiveness and time to practice wording your conception than big bad internet.
• neilk 6y ago
  pg has (for a long time) asserted that he has opinions that would get him pilloried in the public square. He's advocated that one shouldn't share those opinions. And he's continued to frequently allude to their existence. Having already dismissed the common people's ability to process unorthodox beliefs, he then goes on to complain that people shouldn't speculate or make assumptions about those beliefs that he keeps alluding to? He further asserts that people who advocate open discussion must be dullards, whose minds are only filled with the opinions of others? I don't agree. What should a rational, Bayesian person conclude about someone who keeps alluding to beliefs they can't say? What's the most frequent such belief? Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones -- https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174... Caveats: I'm not saying that pg holds any particular views, racist or otherwise. I don't know what it's like to be someone in his position. I expect there are a lot of people who are eager to take his statements out of context and that can be wearying. And although the above tweet is a pithy illustration, I don't think pg qualifies as a conservative either. But I'm pretty sure that pg is not hiding a belief like "Amazon should be broken up", or "recycling is mostly a sham" or "actually nuclear power is green" or even "I oppose reparations for slavery". The beliefs at issue these days on social media tend to be about _personhood_ - acceptance of trans people, the acceptance of certain identities as oppressed, and so on. Someone popping up in the discussion and saying that he holds beliefs he can't say - well, what am I supposed to think? And if I was being generous and assuming they were constructive views that were inexpressible right now, what am I supposed to do? What action does pg want us to take to fix that? I don't even know what direction pg wants the discussion to go in.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    This comment sounds a bit like you feel attacked by the idea he lays out and are going for an offense. "I'm not saying that pg holds any particular views, racist or otherwise" while quoting a tweet implying just that does smell a little bit. I don't know whether he holds any problematic opinions. Those essays sounded more like PSAs to me, essentially "hey, Robespierre, before you start going after those people, remember that you might not be right on everything, so having an opinion that differs from your own doesn't really mean that somebody is an evil agent of the reactionary forces".
• xtat 6y ago
  The irony here is that PG loves the valley and one of my biggest frustrations with the valley is how cargo culty everything is - how hard you have to fight to do anything different from the SV way. (Edit: I should add that I also enthusiastically agree with what he's saying here.)
• voidhorse 6y ago
  Essays like this are always enticing to people who consider themselves “reasonable”, “logical”, or “intellectual” because they seem to defend the virtues of reason on the surface—flout convention—ally yourself with reason, science! Then you start to realize that while the slef-aggrandizing, implicit, unstated analogy is to someone like Galileo—the mytho-legendary figure of “unconventional wisdom”—the sage that rose us out of the muck—the actual analogy falls apart very quickly because the stances being defended, generally when people rage against “cancel culture” are not progressive, scientifically backed, or methodologically carefully won informed positions, but rather regressive values, such as arguments for the subordination or mistreatment of certain classes of people, the objectification of people, etc. Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression. If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”. pg seems to want to ascribe some inherent moral value in being heterodox without actually questioning the contents of that heterodoxy—which is really foolish. It’s a view that abuses history by viewing it in the abstract in order to, at worst, build up extremely flimsy defenses of bad behavior, and at best, state nothing more than the extremely obvious “some people in history were right when the majority of people were wrong” I also think right and wrong are the completely incorrect categories to use in this context—going back to Galileo—it makes sense to say he was “right” in matters of science while the church was “wrong” because science is rigidly defined, verifiable, etc.—politics and moral questions are not rigidly defined and there is no completely agreed upon system for working out binary categories of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to political and ethical matters—people subscribe to tons of different moral systems many of which yield incompatible views over the same issue—pg seems to assume everyone operates using the same moral/political calculus—it would be different if we were discussing matters of science but its very clear that the intended topic zone here is political—pg just never states these things explicitly since being concrete about it would demolish his position and reveal how ridiculous it is.
  • amadeuspagel 6y ago
    > Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression. > If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”. Replace "whiners about cancel culture" with "counter revolutionaries" or "reactionary forces" and this could have been written during the stalinist purges or the cultural revolution.
• myth_buster 6y ago
  AKA, nothing to hide argument. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
• mlang23 6y ago
  Using "blind" as a negative figure of speech is about as intelligent and empathic as is "crippled". Talk about priviledge and not being able to see the POV of outsiders. -- a blind admin/coder
• mlang23 6y ago
  Using "blind" as a negative figure of speech is about as intelligent and empathic as is using "crippled". Talk about priviledged people that can not see the POV of outsiders. -- a blind admin/coder
• luckylion 6y ago
  I believe that there's one big flaw in this essay, and it's these two sentences: But they can't overcome orthodox privilege just by learning more. They'd have to become more independent-minded. I don't necessarily disagree, but from reading a few comments here, I believe that they are counter-productive in so far that nobody likes to think of themselves as somebody who isn't independent-minded. When somebody now reads about something they haven't experienced (having opinions they know they can't share without undue pushback) and then goes on to read that this is because they're not "independent-minded", it'll automatically trigger their ego-defenses, making it hard for them to even accept that the author isn't just arguing in bad faith because their horrific beliefs are rejected, and at the same time makes them double down in the belief that there is no such thing as an Orthodox Privilege.
• greenail 6y ago
  Learning about the underlying theories of Postmodernism and Critical Theory helped me get a better understanding of some of the "cancel culture" behavior and illiberal-ism which seems to be trending. It has also helped me avoid falling into traps I would otherwise have blindly stumbled into.
  • ponker 6y ago
    Have any links to overview resources?
    • greenail 6y ago
      this may help. Keys are the rejection of objective truth and other "enlightenment" ideas. https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
• diffrinse 6y ago
  I need everybody to stop presuming themselves on the "right side of history" — this isn't the fucking Soviet politburo where we all stand and applaud every pronouncement as history manifesting itself
• baddox 6y ago
  > It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. The premise is not sound. Not everyone who has a conventionally accepted idea has that idea because the idea is conventionally accepted. It could be, for example, that there is some other cause that leads to me having an idea and that idea being conventionally accepted. As an obvious example, I don’t think that one plus one equals two because I observe that to be conventionally accepted. I have good reasons to think that’s true even if most people disagreed. And I certainly wouldn’t think anyone who disagrees was being discriminated against for having unconventional ideas.
  • bhelkey 6y ago
    It sounds like you are interpreting Paul Graham to mean, 'if one of a person's ideas is conventionally accepted, then the source of that opinion is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe'. I interpreted this to mean, 'if all of a person's ideas are conventionally accepted, then the source of their opinions are whatever it's currently acceptable to believe'. Part of why I interpreted this passage the way I did was because this builds on Graham earlier post titled 'What You Can't Say': > 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? > If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told. [1] [1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
    • baddox 6y ago
      I think what both of his sentiments are missing is that we should try to shape society such that the good beliefs are also the conventional ones, instead of praising people for having unconventional beliefs for its own sake.
• Liron 6y ago
  ‪I’m seeing more complaints about the abstract concept of “things you can’t say” than actual object-level things-you-can’t-say said anonymously.‬ ‪How come, if the internet makes anonymous publishing so easy and safe?‬
• smitty1e 6y ago
  > The spectral signature of orthodox privilege is "Why don't you just say it?" If you think there's something true that people can't say, why don't you be brave, and own it? The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist. That's not "orthodox privilege". That's fear. > How do you respond to orthodox privilege? Wait for the storm of folly to blow over. The nihilistic idiocies that I cannot name shall have destroyed themselves in their madness before much longer, like the French Revolution before them. > If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it. The best generals are quite choosy where/when they engage. But stand by for the silent majority to weigh in some months hence.
• hashkb 6y ago
  Does pg reach many people who don't want his money or favor?
• grugagag 6y ago
  To keep my sanity I tuned out of this conversation. I get easily confused by diverging opinions and I came to become afraid to say anything at all publicly because someone may feel hurt. I don't want to cause that to anyone but I get a general sense of going crazy when I think of what to say: huge cognitive dissonance. And that is not because I have some views that are not in sync with other peoples views, their views are simply confusing to follow. Wake me up when this is over. I will do a last effort when things stabilize so I get on the same page with everyone or basically the general consensus.
• josephhurtado 6y ago
  Good argument, but the naming is wrong. It is NOT orthodox privilege, but the complete opposite we are dealing with today. Let's remind ourselves what orthodox means: "Following or conforming to the traditional or generally accepted rules or beliefs of a religion, philosophy, or practice." Well nowadays the non-traditional views are trending, and shutting down the traditional views. So the "orthodox privilege" actually belongs to the NON-ORTHODOX folks who like to push their opinions to everyone else, and have the backing of major media, and academia behind them. That is the reason why freedom of speech is dying in society today, and is being replaced with conformance, and silence. This is dangerous, and bad for democracy. Democracies require an open, respectful sharing of people's views. When those views are persecuted, the people are cancelled, the companies are boycotted, we have a problem. That problem is UN-ORTHODOX PRIVILEGE.