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This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently v

This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently very sensitive too. It makes me wonder what happened - as given his lack of evidence - it appears to be an emotional reaction rather than a logical one. As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wondered if that might be due to a change in the cost of university education, which means universities are more akin to businesses servicing clients. And the first thing you’ll always hear in a client-facing business is… _”Don’t piss off your customers”._ A sad commercial reality because a diversity of opinion in education is valuable.

phillipcarter 5y ago
I have a far less positive view of education and many of the professors who have traditionally occupied it in the US. A whole lot of entrenched people with tenure who have formal authority over people (grad students) without even a hint of manager training and it really shows. Many of these people are downright childish, intentionally put blinders on the world immediately around them, and cause countless students unnecessary pain just so that their own eccentric personalities are accommodated.
ryanobjc 5y ago
I’ve looked at some of these academic circumstances and the ones I looked at were very misleading. Often times the only account we have is from the fired person, who is obviously going to push the most favorable narrative. When you dig in, there is something else amiss. But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.
- byecomputer 5y ago
  > There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. Unless we're including religious colleges, this seems hyperbolic. While I did find this[1], which appears to support the idea that left-wing voices are more likely to get fired/kicked out of universities for their speech (though not by a magnitude), I have no idea how that study split up which speech was 'censored by right'/'censored by left', because when I tried to do so myself with the dataset[2], the results were closer to 55/45 (left-wing firing/right-wing firing) for 2015-2017, which was the years the study chose to focus on, but almost exactly 50/50 for the entire 2006-2020 dataset. [1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3sVBuRAG1LzIZnsq6LB50NUHk/edit#gid=122618086 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...
- Biologist123 5y ago
  It’s a good point you make. I’m thinking of all the heterodox economists who don’t get hired - ie the throttle is applied at a different layer.
- kemayo 5y ago
  > But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases. If you're looking for a parallel that applies to cancelling the left, albeit outside the academy, union-busting is very common and tends to involve doing your very best to fire people who're speaking up about wanting to form a union. Such speech is pretty unambiguously treated as a "heresy" (in the Graham sense) by business owners.
- imgabe 5y ago
  > There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. Where? Which colleges? Can you give a single example of someone being fired from a college or university for a left wing position?
ss108 5y ago
I am not generally pro cancel culture, but a lot of the opposition to it is certainly whiney and low on evidence. For example, there's this notion that the advancement of knowledge is somehow being suppressed and that naked, barely-regulated free speech has been essential to Western dominance, and that, accordingly, to backpedal on the principle would have some material affect on society. However, no nexus between the kinds of speech and people being "cancelled" and any sort of practical benefit of the speech is ever identified. Nor do they consider the fact that the proper result of intellectual discourse is that some ideas get discarded, and that to constantly have to rehash debates, reestablish the credibility of basic authorities, etc, drags down intellectual discourse and in fact moves us backwards.
- waqf 5y ago
  But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others. Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.
  - ss108 5y ago
    > But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others. I (for the most part) agree; like I said, I am not generally a fan of contemporary cancel culture. Are you Muslim btw, or is your username a coincidence?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    > But in actual intellectual discourse Well, where is that? I live my life surrounded by "discredited" ideas with much popularity and power. I don't know shit about intellectual discourse, can it get the police to stop killing my friends? Can it get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law? If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.
dnfa 5y ago
> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here Yeah this bothered me. His stance on this seems so defensive and personal and he gives very few examples of heretical ideas. It makes this essay more of a boomer diatribe than anything else imo.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  It allows anybody who reads the piece to apply their own specifics to it. It means that if they hold any "heretical" beliefs, they can assume that PG supports them.
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Or on the flip side, it means that the reader can assume that PG holds whatever unflattering "heretical" beliefs they are opposed to.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. There's enough insinuation here that I don't think that my grandma would assume PG is advocating for anti-religiosity, for example.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    On the other hand, you can spot Andreessen, Haidt, and Lehmann as his reviewers (and similar personalities on previous articles) and have a pretty good idea what views he's actually talking about.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?s=20&t=-UQcLczFZ1Hr759ygi1CNg https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    Not even 500px away from here, there's this exchange from you, contradicting your clever tweet: > Can [ignoring ideas I don't like] get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law? > If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them. [Context: "We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others."]
sicromoft 5y ago
> This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence That's putting it mildly. It's littered with straw men and other logical fallacies. He asserts, without any proof (because it's a faulty generalization that can't be proven), 'when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion'. He then wastes a bunch of time explaining the implications of his straw man.
- Biologist123 5y ago
  I do tend to read his essays when I see them circulating and I must confess that I find them fascinating. I’ve wondered if Graham himself doesn’t entirely understand why he’s been so successful or what he’s achieved in creating - and indeed whether he’s aware of the deficit. When future historians of our increasingly interesting and shocking epoch are trying to work out what happened, I feel Graham’s essays will provide useful insights into the preoccupations and delusions of billionaire think: from arguably the most powerful clique ever to have lived. In that sense I’m thankful that he writes.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    This is an incredibly useful viewpoint to apply to this essay. As the person you are responding to, I also dismissed it as fallacy ridden bullshit written by someone who is upset that rich and/or conservative people are facing consequences for having odious beliefs and stating them publicly, but this lens of understanding their delusions is a better approach.
    - KerrAvon 5y ago
      Same; thank you both for the insight. This is a better way to understand Graham — without having to roll your eyes and point people at the Dabblers and Blowhards essay. edit: missing word
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        I always thought that Blub Languages was the most perfect distillation, though it doesn't have the additional fun of being applied to an ecosystem entirely outside of PG's expertise. The essay sets up people he disagrees with to be definitionally wrong and sets himself up to be definitionally correct and so much more enlightened then those pedestrian "blub" programmers.
telchior 5y ago
Trying to give it the article a more positive reading: at least for myself, I can imagine several opinions I could express in the United States which would count as "heresy". I'd imagine that if those opinions were said out loud (whether or not I really believed them) my employers would fire me, friends would unfriend me, etc. But, I can't really think of any supporting real-world stories where that reaction wouldn't be justified. There are two that come to mind: - Justine Sacco, the woman who was fired for tweeting a joke that she hoped she wouldn't get AIDS on her trip to Africa. I don't think the joke is necessarily indicative of some deep inner evil, but the lady was a PR exec; it does tend to indicate that she was probably dangerously incompetent at her actual job. Firing seems like the right response. - Amy Cooper, the lady in New York who called the police on "an African American man threatening my life" in Central Park. He was a bird-watcher asking her to keep her unleashed dogs under control. Widely reported that she was fired for racism. But again, is this really a case of being fired for heresy? Or could it have perhaps just a case of the employer realizing their employee is a dishonest sack of crap? God knows what kind of havoc a person like this might wreak inside a company. Those two are probably the most widely reported in the past few years. People here are referencing firings in academia; maybe those would give more nuance.
- knorker 5y ago
  Neither was fired for work performance. I think anything else is a distracting justification, not a reason. James Damore was fired by a mob who boldly proclaimed "I didn't read his manifesto. I didn't have to". None of these firings were for honest reasons, but all just to appease the mob. A mob who at least in the last case didn't bother to even find out what he said. There are many more examples. I could list them on and on, but I'm surprised you've only heard of the two. There was the lady who appeared to scream in a cemetery If those two are truly the only ones you can think of then I'd recommend you google this a bit better, and to read "So you've been publicly shamed". Hell, a year ago you'd be kicked off the internet (social media platforms) as a racist (wat?) for saying the lab leak theory was plausible. And of course then there's the chilling effect.
  - prezjordan 5y ago
nojs 5y ago
> somewhat low on evidence Paul did address this though: > I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era. > And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific heresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded will always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All they need is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the current one will be the last.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

phillipcarter 5y ago

I have a far less positive view of education and many of the professors who have traditionally occupied it in the US. A whole lot of entrenched people with tenure who have formal authority over people (grad students) without even a hint of manager training and it really shows. Many of these people are downright childish, intentionally put blinders on the world immediately around them, and cause countless students unnecessary pain just so that their own eccentric personalities are accommodated.

ryanobjc 5y ago

I’ve looked at some of these academic circumstances and the ones I looked at were very misleading. Often times the only account we have is from the fired person, who is obviously going to push the most favorable narrative. When you dig in, there is something else amiss. But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.

byecomputer 5y ago
> There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. Unless we're including religious colleges, this seems hyperbolic. While I did find this[1], which appears to support the idea that left-wing voices are more likely to get fired/kicked out of universities for their speech (though not by a magnitude), I have no idea how that study split up which speech was 'censored by right'/'censored by left', because when I tried to do so myself with the dataset[2], the results were closer to 55/45 (left-wing firing/right-wing firing) for 2015-2017, which was the years the study chose to focus on, but almost exactly 50/50 for the entire 2006-2020 dataset. [1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3sVBuRAG1LzIZnsq6LB50NUHk/edit#gid=122618086 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...
Biologist123 5y ago
It’s a good point you make. I’m thinking of all the heterodox economists who don’t get hired - ie the throttle is applied at a different layer.
kemayo 5y ago
> But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases. If you're looking for a parallel that applies to cancelling the left, albeit outside the academy, union-busting is very common and tends to involve doing your very best to fire people who're speaking up about wanting to form a union. Such speech is pretty unambiguously treated as a "heresy" (in the Graham sense) by business owners.
imgabe 5y ago
> There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. Where? Which colleges? Can you give a single example of someone being fired from a college or university for a left wing position?

ss108 5y ago

I am not generally pro cancel culture, but a lot of the opposition to it is certainly whiney and low on evidence. For example, there's this notion that the advancement of knowledge is somehow being suppressed and that naked, barely-regulated free speech has been essential to Western dominance, and that, accordingly, to backpedal on the principle would have some material affect on society. However, no nexus between the kinds of speech and people being "cancelled" and any sort of practical benefit of the speech is ever identified. Nor do they consider the fact that the proper result of intellectual discourse is that some ideas get discarded, and that to constantly have to rehash debates, reestablish the credibility of basic authorities, etc, drags down intellectual discourse and in fact moves us backwards.

waqf 5y ago
But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others. Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.
- ss108 5y ago
  > But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others. I (for the most part) agree; like I said, I am not generally a fan of contemporary cancel culture. Are you Muslim btw, or is your username a coincidence?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  > But in actual intellectual discourse Well, where is that? I live my life surrounded by "discredited" ideas with much popularity and power. I don't know shit about intellectual discourse, can it get the police to stop killing my friends? Can it get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law? If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.

dnfa 5y ago

> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here Yeah this bothered me. His stance on this seems so defensive and personal and he gives very few examples of heretical ideas. It makes this essay more of a boomer diatribe than anything else imo.

UncleMeat 5y ago
It allows anybody who reads the piece to apply their own specifics to it. It means that if they hold any "heretical" beliefs, they can assume that PG supports them.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  Or on the flip side, it means that the reader can assume that PG holds whatever unflattering "heretical" beliefs they are opposed to.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. There's enough insinuation here that I don't think that my grandma would assume PG is advocating for anti-religiosity, for example.
- morelisp 5y ago
  On the other hand, you can spot Andreessen, Haidt, and Lehmann as his reviewers (and similar personalities on previous articles) and have a pretty good idea what views he's actually talking about.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?s=20&t=-UQcLczFZ1Hr759ygi1CNg https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
- paisawalla 5y ago
  Not even 500px away from here, there's this exchange from you, contradicting your clever tweet: > Can [ignoring ideas I don't like] get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law? > If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them. [Context: "We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others."]

sicromoft 5y ago

> This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence That's putting it mildly. It's littered with straw men and other logical fallacies. He asserts, without any proof (because it's a faulty generalization that can't be proven), 'when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion'. He then wastes a bunch of time explaining the implications of his straw man.

Biologist123 5y ago
I do tend to read his essays when I see them circulating and I must confess that I find them fascinating. I’ve wondered if Graham himself doesn’t entirely understand why he’s been so successful or what he’s achieved in creating - and indeed whether he’s aware of the deficit. When future historians of our increasingly interesting and shocking epoch are trying to work out what happened, I feel Graham’s essays will provide useful insights into the preoccupations and delusions of billionaire think: from arguably the most powerful clique ever to have lived. In that sense I’m thankful that he writes.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  This is an incredibly useful viewpoint to apply to this essay. As the person you are responding to, I also dismissed it as fallacy ridden bullshit written by someone who is upset that rich and/or conservative people are facing consequences for having odious beliefs and stating them publicly, but this lens of understanding their delusions is a better approach.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    Same; thank you both for the insight. This is a better way to understand Graham — without having to roll your eyes and point people at the Dabblers and Blowhards essay. edit: missing word
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      I always thought that Blub Languages was the most perfect distillation, though it doesn't have the additional fun of being applied to an ecosystem entirely outside of PG's expertise. The essay sets up people he disagrees with to be definitionally wrong and sets himself up to be definitionally correct and so much more enlightened then those pedestrian "blub" programmers.

telchior 5y ago

Trying to give it the article a more positive reading: at least for myself, I can imagine several opinions I could express in the United States which would count as "heresy". I'd imagine that if those opinions were said out loud (whether or not I really believed them) my employers would fire me, friends would unfriend me, etc. But, I can't really think of any supporting real-world stories where that reaction wouldn't be justified. There are two that come to mind: - Justine Sacco, the woman who was fired for tweeting a joke that she hoped she wouldn't get AIDS on her trip to Africa. I don't think the joke is necessarily indicative of some deep inner evil, but the lady was a PR exec; it does tend to indicate that she was probably dangerously incompetent at her actual job. Firing seems like the right response. - Amy Cooper, the lady in New York who called the police on "an African American man threatening my life" in Central Park. He was a bird-watcher asking her to keep her unleashed dogs under control. Widely reported that she was fired for racism. But again, is this really a case of being fired for heresy? Or could it have perhaps just a case of the employer realizing their employee is a dishonest sack of crap? God knows what kind of havoc a person like this might wreak inside a company. Those two are probably the most widely reported in the past few years. People here are referencing firings in academia; maybe those would give more nuance.

knorker 5y ago
Neither was fired for work performance. I think anything else is a distracting justification, not a reason. James Damore was fired by a mob who boldly proclaimed "I didn't read his manifesto. I didn't have to". None of these firings were for honest reasons, but all just to appease the mob. A mob who at least in the last case didn't bother to even find out what he said. There are many more examples. I could list them on and on, but I'm surprised you've only heard of the two. There was the lady who appeared to scream in a cemetery If those two are truly the only ones you can think of then I'd recommend you google this a bit better, and to read "So you've been publicly shamed". Hell, a year ago you'd be kicked off the internet (social media platforms) as a racist (wat?) for saying the lab leak theory was plausible. And of course then there's the chilling effect.
- prezjordan 5y ago

nojs 5y ago

> somewhat low on evidence Paul did address this though: > I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era. > And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific heresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded will always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All they need is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the current one will be the last.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]