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What is actually a heretical view?

57 points by jger15 5y ago

jmercouris 5y ago
I don’t believe the question is actually answered! Just a list of heretical views and why they may be considered heretical. Fascinating article.
- bediger4000 5y ago
  I think you're correct: Cowen never answers the question. He does do the philosophy thing, and try to provide categories of heresy. I'm tempted to be snarky and try to tie Cowen's "economics curmudgeon" reputation into this and say that Cowen is just trying to toot his own horn, like the "Intellectual Dark Web" folks did, but that's uncharitable. How about "heresy is a canon law thing and doesn't make sense outside of some rigid system of religious authority" as a take? I mean, Triclavianism is (maybe) a Catholic heresy, but virtually all the world's population would either shrug it off, or laugh. Of course Triclavianism is in Cowen's #3, Not globally heretical.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  How can the question be answered without first defining "heretical"? TFA seems to use the term to mean "mainstream" or "popular"? I'm sure it doesn't mean "sanctioned by the Catholic Church", which is the meaning I had associated with that term before thinking about it.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Yes it seems to mean "unconventional" rather than against some established orthodoxy such as Catholicism. That lowers the bar considerably, plus it opens it up to things that are merely unlikely: Man Utd will win the premier league this year, world war 3 will break out in Ukraine, Trump will be restored.
renewiltord 5y ago
Ultimately, almost no view is universally heretical since it has to be entirely novel and few people are capable of that. A truly universal idea that is heretical to start with rapidly gets a cult following because of human novelty impulses and our meme replication ability. Therefore, most useful heretical ideas likely are/were heretical in some place at some time. The lab leak hypothesis earlier on. Kneeling at a football game. Things like that. In a temporal sense, interesting heretical ideas suffer from either the Seinfeld isn’t funny effect or from othering different cultures. I would contend that I have a truly unique heretical idea for the domestic US at this specific time. I hope to build an organ sale marketplace where people sell their own organs at their death. I think this will improve humanity. I know of very few people who agree with me, but none for any reason that stands scrutiny.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  I'm not quite sure I'd interchange heretical with controversial as you've done here. It doesn't really sound right. You have kneeling at a sports game and talking about a probable lab leak that killed millions in the same list of examples. Personally the word heresy should be reserved for religious contraries or at least when an extreme is needing to be denoted. It was forbidden or taboo to talk about the lab leaky. It was controversial for players to bring politics into sports. I'd view controversial as a lesser as you could still speak dissent. If one view is "heretical", generally the other side wouldn't be "heretical" as well. Which is what you get if you interchange controversial. It was controversial to be against kneeling in football as well. It wasn't controversial to be against the lab leak censor, because you couldn't talk about it at all.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Controversial and heretical are not interchangeable. I agree. But perhaps this is merely my bubble. My view of this is that kneeling was decried but that it wasn’t controversial to be against kneeling and that at some point it switched and being against kneeling is now the impermissible violation of norms. And my view wasn’t that the lab leak thing was suppressed at all since I heard people talk about the idea frequently. It was just dismissed outright. However, I do agree with you that simple controversy does not imply heresy. Though I do believe that anything truly heretical will result in widespread condemnation. And because of the rapidity of meme replication in humans, it will have parties that adopt it rapidly if it has some value, and will appear as controversy.
pmarreck 5y ago
Relevant PG post: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
motohagiography 5y ago
This is a favourite topic! Arguably, a true heresy is sort of like an optical illusion, where you can both view the same thing and see something completely different. The "what color is this dress" meme is an example, where each perspective would be the complementary heresy to the other if an authority decided one was going to be the orthodox color. To have a heresy, you need an official orthodoxy for it to be against, but an official orthodoxy is an enforced belief - which means it is not necessarily willing, which further means the orthodoxy is not a belief in truth at all, but the effect of compliance. Heresy is a non-compliant view. However, the classic heretic error is they think other people are ignorant of what's going on, when they're really just trying to hide any doubt that would set them up for exile. It's the Assange/wikileaks view of "if only people knew how sausage was made, they would revolt!" without realizing the reason all those people are climbing over each other to parrot absurditiies is because they don't want to be the ones left without sausage. Also, not all heresies are true, but they must be logically equivalent to be the true counter-point of an orthodoxy. The crappier the logic of the orthodoxy, the more broad and absurd the heresies. This is where you get into Big Lie territory, where Kim Jong Un hitting 11 holes in one on the golf course is the absurd orthodoxy that makes all truth that deviate from it heresy, and that's a filter to catch people who can't sustain the dissonance and submission. I'm optimistic that few people really believe strongly in absurd orthodoxies, but we align with them because it's strategic or wise to stay out of the way of the enforcers. Stalin's totalitarianism was based on millions of people knowing everything authorities said was absurd but still competing with each other in the zero sum attrition game of staying ahead of those who could not sustain the dissonance. It's trivial to set up. You put an absurdity at one end, and a plausible or merely spectacular threat of violence on the other, and give people the option of compliance or exile/death, and their fear will drive them to compete with each other to demonstrate their alignment to the absurdity. The minority who cling to truth even at the risk of the violence become an internal enemy, as the ones competing at being absurd need a flow of people to sacrifice behind them, and you get a snitch culture. This is basically a playbook. To absurdity, everything is heretical. Given this logical relationship between an orthodoxy and a heresy, it's less interesting what a given herectical idea might be than it is whether the quality of its logic is equivalent to that of the orthodoxy it is in reaction to.
- 5y ago
g8oz 5y ago
The way that Tyler Cowen had it in for David Graeber convinced me that the latter was an actual heretic.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Graeber is like Howard Zinn, a good writer but sloppy with details and not original.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Like Graeber's assertion that Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBM employees?
goto11 5y ago
It seems "heretical" is mostly just used for ideas which are controversial and not generally accepted. But "heretical" have positive connotations, implying the idea is suppressed for dogmatic reasons. So you use the term heretical for non-mainstream views you like.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Technically "heresy" means exactly "serious deviation from set beliefs" [1]. It's indeed interesting indeed how the meaning moved from the "dangerous mistaken beliefs held despite firm evidence" (today this could be antivaxers) to "challenging mainstream views in interesting and possibly productive ways" (a century ago that would be quantum physics). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
- colechristensen 5y ago
  I don’t know, if you look back into the history of heresy especially the origins of the usage of the word it really seems like mutually ignorant people having bike shed arguments about mostly inane differences about the meaning of one abstraction or another and abusing each other as a result. Heresy is about elevating your opinions into moral imperatives so you can say people that disagree with you are evil, with the added note that the opinions would usually be entirely inconsequential if you were more relaxed about the whole thing. (I’m looking at you, people who killed each other over the “real meaning” of the holy trinity) Heresy isn’t about the mainstream, but about fanatics in power obsessively gibbering over details to try to own concepts, or just to keep up their power.
cammikebrown 5y ago
When people called Monty Python’s Life of Brian blasphemous, Terry Jones said: “I took the view it wasn't blasphemous. It was heretical because it criticised the structure of the church and the way it interpreted the Gospels. At the time religion seemed to be on the back burner and it felt like kicking a dead donkey. It has come back with a vengeance and we'd think twice about making it now."
- hammock 5y ago
  What year is that quote from? I feel like religion is back on the out again.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Seems to be from the 10 October 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/10/life-of-brian-terry-jones https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/10/life-of-brian-t...
- gweinberg 5y ago
  When did he say that? Today you couldn't make Life of Brian because it makes fun of the transgendered.
  - djur 5y ago
    It's not like those jokes are the core of Life of Brian. They're incidental, part of the comedy culture of the time. It is impossible for comedy to be truly timeless. If someone was making a movie like Life of Brian today, some of the jokes would be different, sure. But that's true of anything.
  - ryanmcbride 5y ago
    right because there's no examples of modern comedy that uses trans people as the butt of their jokes... None at all. Certainly no massively successful Netflix standup specials or anything like that.
    - 5y ago
steelstraw 5y ago
> American TV was much better in the 1960s and 1970s. Does anyone believe this one and have a strong argument for it?
- clord 5y ago
  Well, perhaps the question is: better for who? I can't watch most mainstream TV shows with my little kids. Witcher, GoT, etc. Perhaps mainstream TV of the 70s was forced to be better for a broader audience. The shows are better for me, more entertaining, more exciting, etc, but not better for everyone in the house. The sharding of entertainment into different age groups leads to people not sitting together and watching a show together, and instead we're all in different rooms with headphones. imo that's worse.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    You can watch shows that your kids will enjoy and are appropriate for them. After all, such shows exist. You just don't want to. Meanwhile, I can watch shows with violence, nudity and adult themes because there aren't only three channels and not everything has to be child appropriate. That seems better to me.
- nineplay 5y ago
  I suppose it could be argued that the streaming services don't count as "American TV". They aren't exclusivly American and the bulk of their content doesn't follow any sort of TV format. So if we were looking specifically at the major broadcast channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS, then I think the TV of the 60s/70s is probably easily much better.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  A lot of people of a certain age think this. It's the old "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12" effect. People just have subjective fondness for TV, movies, and music from their youth. Later generations may just find them cheesy.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  Americans used to all get the same news from the big 3 TV networks. That's very different now. Not only are broadcast TV news stations more or less party propaganda for one party or another, but many other news sources are even more divisive. There are strong arguments that the change in media since that time has led us to and/or fuels the division in the US over all kinds of issues.
hellothere1337 5y ago
Looking at how communication broke down in the past few years on different social media websites I can firmly proclaim that most people consider a view heretical if it doesnt align perfectly with their own view.
notfed 5y ago
> thinking that UFOs are of alien origin ... is now presented with a straight face by former presidents and CIA heads, so it is not heretical any more. I believe this is referring to Obama's semi-recent admission that we've captured aerial footage of phenomena that the government can't explain. Some officials, but not all, have convinced themselves: therefore aliens. But "therefore aliens" is just the "fun" answer. It's not the rational answer. There are many other more likely explanations, all too boring to be click-bait-worthy, and therefore news of these explanations spreads slower.
- msla 5y ago
  "We don't know, therefore my preferred theory is true" is just the argument from ignorance fallacy. Plus, of course, "UFO" is a badly-defined term: It either means an unidentified flying object, or it means a spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrial beings, and that poisons the whole discussion around them. There's nothing you can talk about in regards to UFOs as long as people refuse to agree to a single basic definition.
beaconstudios 5y ago
It's curious how rationalist blogs often rapidly devolve into far right comment sections.
- notRacistSir 5y ago
- lanstin 5y ago
  seriously, that comment section reaffirmed my liking hacker news. and all this analysis of things in an ad hominem way instead of seeking truth, as relative and contextual as it may be, is tedious. Shocking the bourgoisie or the parents is a very boring way to live. We live in a relatively un-hegemic time, with the intellectual power of orthodoxy at all time lows (not alas, the financial and legal power); trying to find shocking things to say is essentially a solved problem. Trying to discover truth, and motivate ourselves and our peers to do what truthfully needs doing, that has not gotten old, nor made trivially solvable.
karaterobot 5y ago
A truly heretical idea is probably defined by how much of a shock it is to you if you hear it for the first time. Ideas like "the scientific method is wrong" or "people should not be treated as equals" are heretical in the sense that they go against the orthodoxy, but they are not new ideas, and we have solid responses to them. In a sense, they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ. They are accounted for in the orthodoxy, and don't present any real challenge to it. Those kinds of ideas aren't really heretical, they're actually kind of bland and non-threatening, philosophically. At the very least, not challenging. In order to find a heretical idea, you'd really have to find something shocking. Not just distasteful, unfashionable, or rude, but alien and disturbing. Something that must be destroyed (or at least reckoned with) in order for you to avoid losing a lot of sleep, or having a major crisis of identity. By definition, those are not ideas you and I can sit here and list off.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  Not all novel things are "shocking." But all the edgey rubbish people think will get them unjustly cancelled are not novel at all. As you say "they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ." Which evidently a lot of people do not read. These ideas can be disturbing, or alien. But they can also be just unexpected.
- martythemaniak 5y ago
  I wish more people made this distinction. Despite endless debates over "cancel culture" I can't think of a single shocking idea that's come out of it, it's just endlessly recycling old ideas.
- jl6 5y ago
  Sure, it’s easy to not be shocked by something you’ve heard before, but there are plenty of people who haven’t heard plenty of things before (cf. “today’s lucky 10,000”), so many people must still be regularly encountering ideas that seem heretical to them.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  I don't understand the distinction this comment is making. Can somebody give examples to show why it's useful? If it's not something you can list off, examples of past heresies and non-heresies would be OK.
Mikhail_Edoshin 5y ago
At its core heretical means contradicting the knowledge received through a revelation (epiphany, enlightenment, conversion, etc.). To know what is heretical one needs to know what is true.
jquery 5y ago
- xyzzyz 5y ago
- NoahTheDuke 5y ago
  For all their sneering at traditional philosophy, rationalists (and specifically the Less Wrong community) love to rewrite traditional philosophy in techy terms while missing most of the underlying meaning and depth. For examples, large portions of The Sequences are Plato’s The Republic but worse or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but worse.
- msla 5y ago
  You sound like you're using the word "rationalist" in a way which is at odds with the usual meaning of the term. How do you define it, and why do you define it that way?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Sounds to me like GP is drawing from personal experience consuming a variety of rationalist venues online, and making generalizations from there. Thus, they're applying a descriptivist methodology. I'm not sure that your prescriptivist methodology, working from a definition of rationalism, will produce a satisfactory conclusion. When folks approach an issue with an inherent disagreement about descriptive/prescriptive approaches, the most common outcome seems to be a spiral towards "no true scottsman."
    - msla 5y ago
      I'm not trying for a prescriptivist approach, merely one based on my own experience with the term "rational" and similar.
      - klyrs 5y ago
twoquestions 5y ago
I was kind of disappointed to be honest. I was expecting either weirder ideas, or at least defenses of past policies deemed atrocities today, like "the Holodomor was justified", or we should do more research into performance enhancing implants or drugs. Here's something that might actually be heretical: Jesus died for nothing, He wasn't intended as some sort of sacrifice, we killed Him before He could complete His work. Now we're damned forever, with no hope of salvation from a justifiably merciless God. If you really want to see some shit that will likely ruin your day, boot up Wargame: Red Dragon and read General chat. There's some truly awful and weird takes in there, last I played. Instead we mostly got mainstream 2022 conservatism. I mean there's a nugget of good idea in there, I just really wish it was expressed better before tribal chants kicked in.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  You made me curious, what's so special about "Wargame: Red Dragon"? Won't you get the same chats as in any other online game for some reason?
  - twoquestions 5y ago
    To be honest I haven't the slightest idea. If forced to guess, I'd say it was the quasi-realistic wargame simulation of a potential conflict within living memory awakens violent nationalist rhetoric in people? Either way, it's very much not the same as the "your mother" type insults you see in a stereotypical Call of Duty match, it's a whole different dimension of shitposting. Paradox grand strategy games also have this effect, but that community is better about shutting down their edgelords.
- krapp 5y ago
  Every now and then we get a thread here asking people for their most controversial or unorthodox beliefs, and it's almost entirely conservatives thinking their belief in only two genders or racial realism is somehow radical. Even most conspiracy theorists are tediously mainstream - ranting about globalist elites and Marxists and how COVID was engineered and everything is manufactured consent blah blah blah. Many people believe themselves to be more radical and iconoclastic than they are because those beliefs tend to be nurtured in reality bubbles which assume the rest of the world to be far more rigidly dogmatic than it is.
newsbinator 5y ago
Ideas like "ESP works" don't seem that heretical, because we'd all be thrilled if anybody could prove they're true.
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golemotron 5y ago
A heretical idea is any idea that people are scared of and suspect is true. If they didn't suspect it is true, they'd have no reason to be scared.
- dpratt71 5y ago
  Some ideas that I suspect are true do indeed scare me. But I'm more scared of ideas that I strongly suspect are false, but I think other people may not agree.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    what are such ideas that you suspect are true?
antiquark 5y ago
Saying "women are not men" will get you in trouble in some places.
- leephillips 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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hidudeurcool 5y ago
epgui 5y ago
I’ll just come out and say it— I don’t think “heresy” is an interesting or useful concept today. I think it’s mostly useful in historical context. Why do I say that? Because we don’t _need_ the type of strongly held beliefs, or mythology, that we had in the past: we have science to guide us through what we know we know and what we know we don’t know. Sure, in practice people will believe all sorts of ridiculous things, but the separation of church and state went a long way towards making the concept less useful.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  I think we do need heresy if you look at science as a belief system. In that case, anti-scientific views would fairly be called heretical to science, right?
  - epgui 5y ago
    The problem is that “heretical” doesn’t seem to map well onto that case. Anti-scientific views usually come from a place of ignorance rather than new knowledge. They’re not novel ideas, they’re usually demonstrably false, or unfalsifiable views. In the former case the ideas are just wrong (note that this is not a moral judgment), and in the latter case they fall outside the realm of science, meaning the two can probably be reconciled with enough mental gymnastics. I think there are more suitably nuanced words we can use than “heresy” to more accurately describe ideas in this context.
bobthechef 5y ago
What would make this post and any comments substantive is to actually look to the historical and technical[0] meaning instead of drawing on vague popular sentiments. A good first step is to look at the etymology which brings us to the Greek "hairein" or "to choose". Thus a heretic is one who, given a sum total of truths, picks and chooses what he pleases (the causes behind his picking and choosing are variable, so we may speak of formal and material heresy, the former of which is the graver condition since it involves obstinacy and not mere error). This is rather clear in the original religious context[0]. In other contexts, like the case of science or popular opinion, it does not seem to make sense to speak of heresy. It would be odd for me to deny something rather well-established without giving substantive reasons for my denial, but it would not constitute heresy. But perhaps something analogous to the spirit of heresy can be said to exist in principle when someone has an attitude of selectivity where truths in general are concerned. The article is, in this sense, using the common figurative meaning of "heresy", and not the technical meaning, which is to say a belief that contradicts something not only widely held, but dearly held within some milieu. This is why lately people have spoken of cancel culture as the excommunication of heretics for breaking ranks with the prevailing orthodoxy. At the same time, one is tempted to conclude that the use of "heresy" is not so figurative as one might imagine, even if not bona fide heresy[1]. The ideologies that underpin cancel culture, for example, are functionally religious (all men are religious in this sense since all men construe something to be the highest good, which is to say their god or rather idol, and thus that which they worship and order their lives in accordance with). Now, if you do not accept these ideologies, then you cannot be said to be a heretic, only an infidel. But within the group that holds to a general common ground (in this case, "the Left"), those within the ranks who depart from the reigning ideology are something like heretics. Those who migrate to "the Right" are thus something like apostates. [0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm [1] Bona fide in the sense that in order for something to be heretical, it must pick and choose from a body of doctrine that is true and not merely held as true. If a body of doctrine is riddled with error, picking the truths out of the whole is not heretical in any objective sense, though in a relative sense (that is, as merely seen by those who hold that body of doctrine to be fully correct), we often say that such people are heretics vis-a-vis that body of doctrine.
tlb 5y ago
A strange mix of ideas. Some (“ESP works”) are matters of fact: either true or false, and the scientific method can improve our confidence in the answer. Some (eugenics) are a matter of values. Heretical values are interesting because they allow you to explore things the establishment ignores. While heretical facts are probably just wrong.
- msla 5y ago
  Eugenics is a matter of fact depending on what trait you're trying to bring out. If it isn't genetic, you're wasting your time. Also, when it comes to time, humans are the wrong species to supervise the selective breeding of humans, if only because it has to be multi-generational from the perspective of the experimentalists as well as the experimental subjects, and it's very hard to ensure an experiment runs to completion if it has to go on for multiple human lifetimes. But mostly, it's the fact actual eugenicists have all been deeply ignorant of genetics and allowed pure, baseless prejudice to drive their whole programs. Unless we consider Dor Yeshorim to be eugenicist, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim
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CrimsonCape 5y ago

57 points by jger15 5y ago

I don’t believe the question is actually answered! Just a list of heretical views and why they may be considered heretical. Fascinating article.

bediger4000 5y ago
I think you're correct: Cowen never answers the question. He does do the philosophy thing, and try to provide categories of heresy. I'm tempted to be snarky and try to tie Cowen's "economics curmudgeon" reputation into this and say that Cowen is just trying to toot his own horn, like the "Intellectual Dark Web" folks did, but that's uncharitable. How about "heresy is a canon law thing and doesn't make sense outside of some rigid system of religious authority" as a take? I mean, Triclavianism is (maybe) a Catholic heresy, but virtually all the world's population would either shrug it off, or laugh. Of course Triclavianism is in Cowen's #3, Not globally heretical.
wombatmobile 5y ago
How can the question be answered without first defining "heretical"? TFA seems to use the term to mean "mainstream" or "popular"? I'm sure it doesn't mean "sanctioned by the Catholic Church", which is the meaning I had associated with that term before thinking about it.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Yes it seems to mean "unconventional" rather than against some established orthodoxy such as Catholicism. That lowers the bar considerably, plus it opens it up to things that are merely unlikely: Man Utd will win the premier league this year, world war 3 will break out in Ukraine, Trump will be restored.

renewiltord 5y ago

Ultimately, almost no view is universally heretical since it has to be entirely novel and few people are capable of that. A truly universal idea that is heretical to start with rapidly gets a cult following because of human novelty impulses and our meme replication ability. Therefore, most useful heretical ideas likely are/were heretical in some place at some time. The lab leak hypothesis earlier on. Kneeling at a football game. Things like that. In a temporal sense, interesting heretical ideas suffer from either the Seinfeld isn’t funny effect or from othering different cultures. I would contend that I have a truly unique heretical idea for the domestic US at this specific time. I hope to build an organ sale marketplace where people sell their own organs at their death. I think this will improve humanity. I know of very few people who agree with me, but none for any reason that stands scrutiny.

hunterb123 5y ago
I'm not quite sure I'd interchange heretical with controversial as you've done here. It doesn't really sound right. You have kneeling at a sports game and talking about a probable lab leak that killed millions in the same list of examples. Personally the word heresy should be reserved for religious contraries or at least when an extreme is needing to be denoted. It was forbidden or taboo to talk about the lab leaky. It was controversial for players to bring politics into sports. I'd view controversial as a lesser as you could still speak dissent. If one view is "heretical", generally the other side wouldn't be "heretical" as well. Which is what you get if you interchange controversial. It was controversial to be against kneeling in football as well. It wasn't controversial to be against the lab leak censor, because you couldn't talk about it at all.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Controversial and heretical are not interchangeable. I agree. But perhaps this is merely my bubble. My view of this is that kneeling was decried but that it wasn’t controversial to be against kneeling and that at some point it switched and being against kneeling is now the impermissible violation of norms. And my view wasn’t that the lab leak thing was suppressed at all since I heard people talk about the idea frequently. It was just dismissed outright. However, I do agree with you that simple controversy does not imply heresy. Though I do believe that anything truly heretical will result in widespread condemnation. And because of the rapidity of meme replication in humans, it will have parties that adopt it rapidly if it has some value, and will appear as controversy.

pmarreck 5y ago

Relevant PG post: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

motohagiography 5y ago

This is a favourite topic! Arguably, a true heresy is sort of like an optical illusion, where you can both view the same thing and see something completely different. The "what color is this dress" meme is an example, where each perspective would be the complementary heresy to the other if an authority decided one was going to be the orthodox color. To have a heresy, you need an official orthodoxy for it to be against, but an official orthodoxy is an enforced belief - which means it is not necessarily willing, which further means the orthodoxy is not a belief in truth at all, but the effect of compliance. Heresy is a non-compliant view. However, the classic heretic error is they think other people are ignorant of what's going on, when they're really just trying to hide any doubt that would set them up for exile. It's the Assange/wikileaks view of "if only people knew how sausage was made, they would revolt!" without realizing the reason all those people are climbing over each other to parrot absurditiies is because they don't want to be the ones left without sausage. Also, not all heresies are true, but they must be logically equivalent to be the true counter-point of an orthodoxy. The crappier the logic of the orthodoxy, the more broad and absurd the heresies. This is where you get into Big Lie territory, where Kim Jong Un hitting 11 holes in one on the golf course is the absurd orthodoxy that makes all truth that deviate from it heresy, and that's a filter to catch people who can't sustain the dissonance and submission. I'm optimistic that few people really believe strongly in absurd orthodoxies, but we align with them because it's strategic or wise to stay out of the way of the enforcers. Stalin's totalitarianism was based on millions of people knowing everything authorities said was absurd but still competing with each other in the zero sum attrition game of staying ahead of those who could not sustain the dissonance. It's trivial to set up. You put an absurdity at one end, and a plausible or merely spectacular threat of violence on the other, and give people the option of compliance or exile/death, and their fear will drive them to compete with each other to demonstrate their alignment to the absurdity. The minority who cling to truth even at the risk of the violence become an internal enemy, as the ones competing at being absurd need a flow of people to sacrifice behind them, and you get a snitch culture. This is basically a playbook. To absurdity, everything is heretical. Given this logical relationship between an orthodoxy and a heresy, it's less interesting what a given herectical idea might be than it is whether the quality of its logic is equivalent to that of the orthodoxy it is in reaction to.

5y ago

g8oz 5y ago

The way that Tyler Cowen had it in for David Graeber convinced me that the latter was an actual heretic.

selimthegrim 5y ago
Graeber is like Howard Zinn, a good writer but sloppy with details and not original.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Like Graeber's assertion that Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBM employees?

goto11 5y ago

It seems "heretical" is mostly just used for ideas which are controversial and not generally accepted. But "heretical" have positive connotations, implying the idea is suppressed for dogmatic reasons. So you use the term heretical for non-mainstream views you like.

nine_k 5y ago
Technically "heresy" means exactly "serious deviation from set beliefs" [1]. It's indeed interesting indeed how the meaning moved from the "dangerous mistaken beliefs held despite firm evidence" (today this could be antivaxers) to "challenging mainstream views in interesting and possibly productive ways" (a century ago that would be quantum physics). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
colechristensen 5y ago
I don’t know, if you look back into the history of heresy especially the origins of the usage of the word it really seems like mutually ignorant people having bike shed arguments about mostly inane differences about the meaning of one abstraction or another and abusing each other as a result. Heresy is about elevating your opinions into moral imperatives so you can say people that disagree with you are evil, with the added note that the opinions would usually be entirely inconsequential if you were more relaxed about the whole thing. (I’m looking at you, people who killed each other over the “real meaning” of the holy trinity) Heresy isn’t about the mainstream, but about fanatics in power obsessively gibbering over details to try to own concepts, or just to keep up their power.

cammikebrown 5y ago

When people called Monty Python’s Life of Brian blasphemous, Terry Jones said: “I took the view it wasn't blasphemous. It was heretical because it criticised the structure of the church and the way it interpreted the Gospels. At the time religion seemed to be on the back burner and it felt like kicking a dead donkey. It has come back with a vengeance and we'd think twice about making it now."

hammock 5y ago
What year is that quote from? I feel like religion is back on the out again.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Seems to be from the 10 October 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/10/life-of-brian-terry-jones https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/10/life-of-brian-t...
gweinberg 5y ago
When did he say that? Today you couldn't make Life of Brian because it makes fun of the transgendered.
- djur 5y ago
  It's not like those jokes are the core of Life of Brian. They're incidental, part of the comedy culture of the time. It is impossible for comedy to be truly timeless. If someone was making a movie like Life of Brian today, some of the jokes would be different, sure. But that's true of anything.
- ryanmcbride 5y ago
  right because there's no examples of modern comedy that uses trans people as the butt of their jokes... None at all. Certainly no massively successful Netflix standup specials or anything like that.
  - 5y ago

steelstraw 5y ago

> American TV was much better in the 1960s and 1970s. Does anyone believe this one and have a strong argument for it?

clord 5y ago
Well, perhaps the question is: better for who? I can't watch most mainstream TV shows with my little kids. Witcher, GoT, etc. Perhaps mainstream TV of the 70s was forced to be better for a broader audience. The shows are better for me, more entertaining, more exciting, etc, but not better for everyone in the house. The sharding of entertainment into different age groups leads to people not sitting together and watching a show together, and instead we're all in different rooms with headphones. imo that's worse.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  You can watch shows that your kids will enjoy and are appropriate for them. After all, such shows exist. You just don't want to. Meanwhile, I can watch shows with violence, nudity and adult themes because there aren't only three channels and not everything has to be child appropriate. That seems better to me.
nineplay 5y ago
I suppose it could be argued that the streaming services don't count as "American TV". They aren't exclusivly American and the bulk of their content doesn't follow any sort of TV format. So if we were looking specifically at the major broadcast channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS, then I think the TV of the 60s/70s is probably easily much better.
jhbadger 5y ago
A lot of people of a certain age think this. It's the old "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12" effect. People just have subjective fondness for TV, movies, and music from their youth. Later generations may just find them cheesy.
drewcoo 5y ago
Americans used to all get the same news from the big 3 TV networks. That's very different now. Not only are broadcast TV news stations more or less party propaganda for one party or another, but many other news sources are even more divisive. There are strong arguments that the change in media since that time has led us to and/or fuels the division in the US over all kinds of issues.

hellothere1337 5y ago

Looking at how communication broke down in the past few years on different social media websites I can firmly proclaim that most people consider a view heretical if it doesnt align perfectly with their own view.

notfed 5y ago

> thinking that UFOs are of alien origin ... is now presented with a straight face by former presidents and CIA heads, so it is not heretical any more. I believe this is referring to Obama's semi-recent admission that we've captured aerial footage of phenomena that the government can't explain. Some officials, but not all, have convinced themselves: therefore aliens. But "therefore aliens" is just the "fun" answer. It's not the rational answer. There are many other more likely explanations, all too boring to be click-bait-worthy, and therefore news of these explanations spreads slower.

msla 5y ago
"We don't know, therefore my preferred theory is true" is just the argument from ignorance fallacy. Plus, of course, "UFO" is a badly-defined term: It either means an unidentified flying object, or it means a spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrial beings, and that poisons the whole discussion around them. There's nothing you can talk about in regards to UFOs as long as people refuse to agree to a single basic definition.

beaconstudios 5y ago

It's curious how rationalist blogs often rapidly devolve into far right comment sections.

notRacistSir 5y ago
lanstin 5y ago
seriously, that comment section reaffirmed my liking hacker news. and all this analysis of things in an ad hominem way instead of seeking truth, as relative and contextual as it may be, is tedious. Shocking the bourgoisie or the parents is a very boring way to live. We live in a relatively un-hegemic time, with the intellectual power of orthodoxy at all time lows (not alas, the financial and legal power); trying to find shocking things to say is essentially a solved problem. Trying to discover truth, and motivate ourselves and our peers to do what truthfully needs doing, that has not gotten old, nor made trivially solvable.

karaterobot 5y ago

A truly heretical idea is probably defined by how much of a shock it is to you if you hear it for the first time. Ideas like "the scientific method is wrong" or "people should not be treated as equals" are heretical in the sense that they go against the orthodoxy, but they are not new ideas, and we have solid responses to them. In a sense, they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ. They are accounted for in the orthodoxy, and don't present any real challenge to it. Those kinds of ideas aren't really heretical, they're actually kind of bland and non-threatening, philosophically. At the very least, not challenging. In order to find a heretical idea, you'd really have to find something shocking. Not just distasteful, unfashionable, or rude, but alien and disturbing. Something that must be destroyed (or at least reckoned with) in order for you to avoid losing a lot of sleep, or having a major crisis of identity. By definition, those are not ideas you and I can sit here and list off.

Zigurd 5y ago
Not all novel things are "shocking." But all the edgey rubbish people think will get them unjustly cancelled are not novel at all. As you say "they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ." Which evidently a lot of people do not read. These ideas can be disturbing, or alien. But they can also be just unexpected.
martythemaniak 5y ago
I wish more people made this distinction. Despite endless debates over "cancel culture" I can't think of a single shocking idea that's come out of it, it's just endlessly recycling old ideas.
jl6 5y ago
Sure, it’s easy to not be shocked by something you’ve heard before, but there are plenty of people who haven’t heard plenty of things before (cf. “today’s lucky 10,000”), so many people must still be regularly encountering ideas that seem heretical to them.
ogogmad 5y ago
I don't understand the distinction this comment is making. Can somebody give examples to show why it's useful? If it's not something you can list off, examples of past heresies and non-heresies would be OK.

Mikhail_Edoshin 5y ago

At its core heretical means contradicting the knowledge received through a revelation (epiphany, enlightenment, conversion, etc.). To know what is heretical one needs to know what is true.

jquery 5y ago

xyzzyz 5y ago
NoahTheDuke 5y ago
For all their sneering at traditional philosophy, rationalists (and specifically the Less Wrong community) love to rewrite traditional philosophy in techy terms while missing most of the underlying meaning and depth. For examples, large portions of The Sequences are Plato’s The Republic but worse or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but worse.
msla 5y ago
You sound like you're using the word "rationalist" in a way which is at odds with the usual meaning of the term. How do you define it, and why do you define it that way?
- klyrs 5y ago
  Sounds to me like GP is drawing from personal experience consuming a variety of rationalist venues online, and making generalizations from there. Thus, they're applying a descriptivist methodology. I'm not sure that your prescriptivist methodology, working from a definition of rationalism, will produce a satisfactory conclusion. When folks approach an issue with an inherent disagreement about descriptive/prescriptive approaches, the most common outcome seems to be a spiral towards "no true scottsman."
  - msla 5y ago
    I'm not trying for a prescriptivist approach, merely one based on my own experience with the term "rational" and similar.
    - klyrs 5y ago

twoquestions 5y ago

I was kind of disappointed to be honest. I was expecting either weirder ideas, or at least defenses of past policies deemed atrocities today, like "the Holodomor was justified", or we should do more research into performance enhancing implants or drugs. Here's something that might actually be heretical: Jesus died for nothing, He wasn't intended as some sort of sacrifice, we killed Him before He could complete His work. Now we're damned forever, with no hope of salvation from a justifiably merciless God. If you really want to see some shit that will likely ruin your day, boot up Wargame: Red Dragon and read General chat. There's some truly awful and weird takes in there, last I played. Instead we mostly got mainstream 2022 conservatism. I mean there's a nugget of good idea in there, I just really wish it was expressed better before tribal chants kicked in.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
You made me curious, what's so special about "Wargame: Red Dragon"? Won't you get the same chats as in any other online game for some reason?
- twoquestions 5y ago
  To be honest I haven't the slightest idea. If forced to guess, I'd say it was the quasi-realistic wargame simulation of a potential conflict within living memory awakens violent nationalist rhetoric in people? Either way, it's very much not the same as the "your mother" type insults you see in a stereotypical Call of Duty match, it's a whole different dimension of shitposting. Paradox grand strategy games also have this effect, but that community is better about shutting down their edgelords.
krapp 5y ago
Every now and then we get a thread here asking people for their most controversial or unorthodox beliefs, and it's almost entirely conservatives thinking their belief in only two genders or racial realism is somehow radical. Even most conspiracy theorists are tediously mainstream - ranting about globalist elites and Marxists and how COVID was engineered and everything is manufactured consent blah blah blah. Many people believe themselves to be more radical and iconoclastic than they are because those beliefs tend to be nurtured in reality bubbles which assume the rest of the world to be far more rigidly dogmatic than it is.

newsbinator 5y ago

Ideas like "ESP works" don't seem that heretical, because we'd all be thrilled if anybody could prove they're true.

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golemotron 5y ago

A heretical idea is any idea that people are scared of and suspect is true. If they didn't suspect it is true, they'd have no reason to be scared.

dpratt71 5y ago
Some ideas that I suspect are true do indeed scare me. But I'm more scared of ideas that I strongly suspect are false, but I think other people may not agree.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  what are such ideas that you suspect are true?

antiquark 5y ago

Saying "women are not men" will get you in trouble in some places.

leephillips 5y ago
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hidudeurcool 5y ago

epgui 5y ago

I’ll just come out and say it— I don’t think “heresy” is an interesting or useful concept today. I think it’s mostly useful in historical context. Why do I say that? Because we don’t _need_ the type of strongly held beliefs, or mythology, that we had in the past: we have science to guide us through what we know we know and what we know we don’t know. Sure, in practice people will believe all sorts of ridiculous things, but the separation of church and state went a long way towards making the concept less useful.

voakbasda 5y ago
I think we do need heresy if you look at science as a belief system. In that case, anti-scientific views would fairly be called heretical to science, right?
- epgui 5y ago
  The problem is that “heretical” doesn’t seem to map well onto that case. Anti-scientific views usually come from a place of ignorance rather than new knowledge. They’re not novel ideas, they’re usually demonstrably false, or unfalsifiable views. In the former case the ideas are just wrong (note that this is not a moral judgment), and in the latter case they fall outside the realm of science, meaning the two can probably be reconciled with enough mental gymnastics. I think there are more suitably nuanced words we can use than “heresy” to more accurately describe ideas in this context.

bobthechef 5y ago

What would make this post and any comments substantive is to actually look to the historical and technical[0] meaning instead of drawing on vague popular sentiments. A good first step is to look at the etymology which brings us to the Greek "hairein" or "to choose". Thus a heretic is one who, given a sum total of truths, picks and chooses what he pleases (the causes behind his picking and choosing are variable, so we may speak of formal and material heresy, the former of which is the graver condition since it involves obstinacy and not mere error). This is rather clear in the original religious context[0]. In other contexts, like the case of science or popular opinion, it does not seem to make sense to speak of heresy. It would be odd for me to deny something rather well-established without giving substantive reasons for my denial, but it would not constitute heresy. But perhaps something analogous to the spirit of heresy can be said to exist in principle when someone has an attitude of selectivity where truths in general are concerned. The article is, in this sense, using the common figurative meaning of "heresy", and not the technical meaning, which is to say a belief that contradicts something not only widely held, but dearly held within some milieu. This is why lately people have spoken of cancel culture as the excommunication of heretics for breaking ranks with the prevailing orthodoxy. At the same time, one is tempted to conclude that the use of "heresy" is not so figurative as one might imagine, even if not bona fide heresy[1]. The ideologies that underpin cancel culture, for example, are functionally religious (all men are religious in this sense since all men construe something to be the highest good, which is to say their god or rather idol, and thus that which they worship and order their lives in accordance with). Now, if you do not accept these ideologies, then you cannot be said to be a heretic, only an infidel. But within the group that holds to a general common ground (in this case, "the Left"), those within the ranks who depart from the reigning ideology are something like heretics. Those who migrate to "the Right" are thus something like apostates. [0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm [1] Bona fide in the sense that in order for something to be heretical, it must pick and choose from a body of doctrine that is true and not merely held as true. If a body of doctrine is riddled with error, picking the truths out of the whole is not heretical in any objective sense, though in a relative sense (that is, as merely seen by those who hold that body of doctrine to be fully correct), we often say that such people are heretics vis-a-vis that body of doctrine.

tlb 5y ago

A strange mix of ideas. Some (“ESP works”) are matters of fact: either true or false, and the scientific method can improve our confidence in the answer. Some (eugenics) are a matter of values. Heretical values are interesting because they allow you to explore things the establishment ignores. While heretical facts are probably just wrong.

msla 5y ago
Eugenics is a matter of fact depending on what trait you're trying to bring out. If it isn't genetic, you're wasting your time. Also, when it comes to time, humans are the wrong species to supervise the selective breeding of humans, if only because it has to be multi-generational from the perspective of the experimentalists as well as the experimental subjects, and it's very hard to ensure an experiment runs to completion if it has to go on for multiple human lifetimes. But mostly, it's the fact actual eugenicists have all been deeply ignorant of genetics and allowed pure, baseless prejudice to drive their whole programs. Unless we consider Dor Yeshorim to be eugenicist, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim

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CrimsonCape 5y ago