8 ms·

The behavior he's calling "heresy" here cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; these kinds of statements are all contextual, ESPECIALLY hinging on who is saying them.

by Osmose 5y ago

The behavior he's calling "heresy" here cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; these kinds of statements are all contextual, ESPECIALLY hinging on who is saying them. And the reason that is the case is because the consequences of saying something are different depending on who says them. Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is judged in a harsher light because those words have a much stronger effect than if, say, some L2 software engineer on Twitter said them. If PG says something that _could_ be interpreted as racist, it threatens to normalize believing that in the minds of the people who follow him. If L2 says something that is on the fence, at worst some of their immediate friends will pile on to them about how uncool that was (barring the rare occasions of people going viral for bad takes, which is an outlier). I think that's reasonable social policing to keep our discourse healthy. Having that influence over people demands a price in return. If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game. No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.
- Osmose 5y ago
  I mean, I agree that practically PG will never feel any serious repercussions for saying whatever he wants _because_ of his wealth and influence. I don't think that's healthy (as wealth and influence are often afforded to people due to privilege or luck instead of ability, wisdom, or empathy) but it is how the world is currently. The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it.
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    > The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it. Since only people with wealth and privilege are in a position to denounce it, they must have questionable ulterior motives? You argue dishonestly and incoherently.
    - lc9er 5y ago
      Or more likely, they can’t believe mere mortals would dare push back against them.
  - alfor 5y ago
    You can test if it’s a boogeyman by saying something awful and true about a ’victim’ group at your job. For good measure you can also say something awful and true about white man. See what is the response.
  - prepend 5y ago
    > The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it. I don’t think that’s true as there are many examples of people’s loves being destroyed, mainly through careers ended. For example, Nobel-prize winning scientist Tim Hunt [0]. He’s famous and lost his job, for saying something stupid. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8764901/tim-hunt-sexist-remarks-resigns https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8764901/tim-hunt-sexist-r...
pen2l 5y ago
Is it a good thing that filters of all sorts are eradicated? Never before has a thought been able to travel as freely as it can now, 5 of the 8 billion people in the world have the internet, in a few seconds a thought you utter is potentially accessible to half of humanity. But this thought forgoes the chance to be interpreted, re-interpreted by mentors and participants in your community, your parents, peer-reviewed in some manner, honed, reconsidered before meeting the wider public. Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.
teakettle42 5y ago
You have invented a “harm principle” to be used when evaluating truth, and the fact that you think this is a cogent argument is scarier than anything Paul Graham might have said. One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.
- Osmose 5y ago
  If I'm following you correctly, you're implying that in order to debate with others to determine what truth is, you must have the freedom to say things without being bound by how the act of saying them would affect other people, right? And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.
  - the8472 5y ago
    Truth is harmful and people need to be shielded from it? If we hold the speakers responsible, rather the people who take up their words and turn them into actions? Then isn't that incompatible with democracy which relies on informed citizens that aren't easily captured?
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    wow. I guess we should just stop speaking altogether
  - wrren 5y ago
    Your conflating harming people with causing them anger is very much part of the problem. 'Harm' used to mean something much more severe; now it basically means anything at or above pissing someone off. The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'. It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.
pen2l 5y ago
Test. (Please downvote me).
- j-bos 5y ago
  Sorry, don't have enough points.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Heresy! Burn the witch! /s
  - pen2l 5y ago
zozbot234 5y ago
James Damore was a lowly software engineer and that did not save him from being canceled by the mob and losing his job. All the more outrageous because his working paper was an honest and forthright - and broadly accurate - response to an express request for feedback about how to improve working conditions. Shades of "let a thousand flowers bloom".
- erikpukinskis 5y ago
  Is "honest and forthright" really the only qualification for working at Google? What about being professional? Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you? I can totally imagine a workplace where "It's not your problem if other people hate you" is the norm. And I'm happy for people who find an employer like that and enjoy that. But does every workplace need to be like that? What's wrong with a workplace saying "you need to be clued in to how your colleagues are affected by you"? For me, that's table stakes in being a profesional.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you? "Making other people hate you"? Blaming a victim of vicious abuse for what his abusers were doing is very much not cool.
    - derevaunseraun 5y ago
      But they aren't abusers. How would you feel if you were a female SWE and had to work with someone who considers you "biologically inferior"? IMO Google did right by firing him
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        > How would you feel if you were a female SWE and had to work with someone who considers you "biologically inferior"? A good example of something Damore did not say. Even wrt. engineering skills in the narrowest sense, it's quite possible for women to meet the same standards as men; there will just be many fewer of them since a mixture of biological and cultural factors make for a significantly bigger pipeline on the male compared to the female side. Damore suggested ways to make the job more appealing to women and reduce this disparity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
faichai 5y ago
I mean, he didn’t say it, but this identity politics driven perspective is entirely the current thing wrong with the left. I say this as a moderate. Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine. This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis. A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.
- ss108 5y ago
  We just had 4 years of an identity politics Republican president (which party has totally succumbed to its idiotic, tribalist, identity-driven, populist base, discarding a lot of good conservative ideas and values in the process), so your spin on this as being "entirely the current thing wrong with the left" is disingenuous. Dems are holding the line far better, though they too will fail, and the progressive wing will take over the party, and I'm personally not keen on that, even though I agree with them on some things.
  - faichai 5y ago
    The left has already gone too far, in my view. From a free speech perspective the right seems to be more pro-principle and less identity-based cancellation hysteria, but they do so on the back of white, Christian nationalism and rampant hypocrisy which is a slightly different problem than heresy as per the original article. Calling me disingenuous a bit of a reach.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > white, Christian nationalism How could this possibly not be seen as identity politics?
jimkleiber 5y ago
I read it as he wants pushback—that he wants to engage in a back and forth discussion, almost like two people in a fight pushing each other, not a fight where people push each other for a minute and then the other pulls out a gun. I understood his definition of heresy as a tool for wanting to end debate, not deepen it.
- alanlammiman 5y ago
  Well, to take the analogy a step further, if you go out on the street and start pushing people around, and one of them pulls out a baseball bat and beats you to a pulp, should you really complain that they didn't just push back? Nope. You just had it coming, and if you are such a macho street-fighter you should accept you got owned that time. Sure, if you were in a dojo practicing martial arts - an environment that is safe where engagement has clear rules and often a judge - then it's a fair point to make. So if you are in a very specific context that is intended and structured for open and fair debate (e.g. a debate club), that's a fair argument. That begs the question of whether a university is such a place. Undoubtedly some of it is. But I do not think all of the university, all of the time, is. Just as going into a gym and doing a judo throw on someone in the middle of their yoga class is not right, even if the gym has judo classes.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I like how you took it further. I agree that there may be fewer rules in interacting outside of such a dojo, but there are still some rules. For example, laws governing self-defense that often say people cannot respond to a push by beating the person to a pulp with a bat, lest they get charged for assault and maybe more. And beyond law, just norms on how we agree people should or should not fight fairly. So I think there is a spectrum from all rules to no rules and that most, if not all, places of human interaction have some level of formal and informal rules on how we expect others to behave.
    - alanlammiman 5y ago
      Indeed - I'm all for common sense and rules. So, whether you/the OP like it or not, the present 'formal and informal rules' of intellectual street-fighting do allow for the baseball bat of cancellation, rather than mere 'pushing-back', to be used against the 'push' of perceived prejudice. So if that is the 'push' one wants to make, better find an intellectual dojo that only allows pushing, not complain that your opponent didn't behave as you wanted them to.
Turing_Machine 5y ago
> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line No one appointed you, or some random Twitter mob, to speak for "society".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by Osmose 5y ago

kspacewalk2 5y ago

> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game. No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.

Osmose 5y ago
I mean, I agree that practically PG will never feel any serious repercussions for saying whatever he wants _because_ of his wealth and influence. I don't think that's healthy (as wealth and influence are often afforded to people due to privilege or luck instead of ability, wisdom, or empathy) but it is how the world is currently. The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  > The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it. Since only people with wealth and privilege are in a position to denounce it, they must have questionable ulterior motives? You argue dishonestly and incoherently.
  - lc9er 5y ago
    Or more likely, they can’t believe mere mortals would dare push back against them.
- alfor 5y ago
  You can test if it’s a boogeyman by saying something awful and true about a ’victim’ group at your job. For good measure you can also say something awful and true about white man. See what is the response.
- prepend 5y ago
  > The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it. I don’t think that’s true as there are many examples of people’s loves being destroyed, mainly through careers ended. For example, Nobel-prize winning scientist Tim Hunt [0]. He’s famous and lost his job, for saying something stupid. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8764901/tim-hunt-sexist-remarks-resigns https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8764901/tim-hunt-sexist-r...

pen2l 5y ago

Is it a good thing that filters of all sorts are eradicated? Never before has a thought been able to travel as freely as it can now, 5 of the 8 billion people in the world have the internet, in a few seconds a thought you utter is potentially accessible to half of humanity. But this thought forgoes the chance to be interpreted, re-interpreted by mentors and participants in your community, your parents, peer-reviewed in some manner, honed, reconsidered before meeting the wider public. Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.

teakettle42 5y ago

You have invented a “harm principle” to be used when evaluating truth, and the fact that you think this is a cogent argument is scarier than anything Paul Graham might have said. One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.

Osmose 5y ago
If I'm following you correctly, you're implying that in order to debate with others to determine what truth is, you must have the freedom to say things without being bound by how the act of saying them would affect other people, right? And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.
- the8472 5y ago
  Truth is harmful and people need to be shielded from it? If we hold the speakers responsible, rather the people who take up their words and turn them into actions? Then isn't that incompatible with democracy which relies on informed citizens that aren't easily captured?
- convolvatron 5y ago
  wow. I guess we should just stop speaking altogether
- wrren 5y ago
  Your conflating harming people with causing them anger is very much part of the problem. 'Harm' used to mean something much more severe; now it basically means anything at or above pissing someone off. The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'. It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.

pen2l 5y ago

Test. (Please downvote me).

j-bos 5y ago
Sorry, don't have enough points.
zozbot234 5y ago
Heresy! Burn the witch! /s
- pen2l 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

James Damore was a lowly software engineer and that did not save him from being canceled by the mob and losing his job. All the more outrageous because his working paper was an honest and forthright - and broadly accurate - response to an express request for feedback about how to improve working conditions. Shades of "let a thousand flowers bloom".

erikpukinskis 5y ago
Is "honest and forthright" really the only qualification for working at Google? What about being professional? Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you? I can totally imagine a workplace where "It's not your problem if other people hate you" is the norm. And I'm happy for people who find an employer like that and enjoy that. But does every workplace need to be like that? What's wrong with a workplace saying "you need to be clued in to how your colleagues are affected by you"? For me, that's table stakes in being a profesional.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you? "Making other people hate you"? Blaming a victim of vicious abuse for what his abusers were doing is very much not cool.
  - derevaunseraun 5y ago
    But they aren't abusers. How would you feel if you were a female SWE and had to work with someone who considers you "biologically inferior"? IMO Google did right by firing him
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > How would you feel if you were a female SWE and had to work with someone who considers you "biologically inferior"? A good example of something Damore did not say. Even wrt. engineering skills in the narrowest sense, it's quite possible for women to meet the same standards as men; there will just be many fewer of them since a mixture of biological and cultural factors make for a significantly bigger pipeline on the male compared to the female side. Damore suggested ways to make the job more appealing to women and reduce this disparity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

faichai 5y ago

I mean, he didn’t say it, but this identity politics driven perspective is entirely the current thing wrong with the left. I say this as a moderate. Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine. This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis. A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.

ss108 5y ago
We just had 4 years of an identity politics Republican president (which party has totally succumbed to its idiotic, tribalist, identity-driven, populist base, discarding a lot of good conservative ideas and values in the process), so your spin on this as being "entirely the current thing wrong with the left" is disingenuous. Dems are holding the line far better, though they too will fail, and the progressive wing will take over the party, and I'm personally not keen on that, even though I agree with them on some things.
- faichai 5y ago
  The left has already gone too far, in my view. From a free speech perspective the right seems to be more pro-principle and less identity-based cancellation hysteria, but they do so on the back of white, Christian nationalism and rampant hypocrisy which is a slightly different problem than heresy as per the original article. Calling me disingenuous a bit of a reach.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > white, Christian nationalism How could this possibly not be seen as identity politics?

jimkleiber 5y ago

I read it as he wants pushback—that he wants to engage in a back and forth discussion, almost like two people in a fight pushing each other, not a fight where people push each other for a minute and then the other pulls out a gun. I understood his definition of heresy as a tool for wanting to end debate, not deepen it.

alanlammiman 5y ago
Well, to take the analogy a step further, if you go out on the street and start pushing people around, and one of them pulls out a baseball bat and beats you to a pulp, should you really complain that they didn't just push back? Nope. You just had it coming, and if you are such a macho street-fighter you should accept you got owned that time. Sure, if you were in a dojo practicing martial arts - an environment that is safe where engagement has clear rules and often a judge - then it's a fair point to make. So if you are in a very specific context that is intended and structured for open and fair debate (e.g. a debate club), that's a fair argument. That begs the question of whether a university is such a place. Undoubtedly some of it is. But I do not think all of the university, all of the time, is. Just as going into a gym and doing a judo throw on someone in the middle of their yoga class is not right, even if the gym has judo classes.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I like how you took it further. I agree that there may be fewer rules in interacting outside of such a dojo, but there are still some rules. For example, laws governing self-defense that often say people cannot respond to a push by beating the person to a pulp with a bat, lest they get charged for assault and maybe more. And beyond law, just norms on how we agree people should or should not fight fairly. So I think there is a spectrum from all rules to no rules and that most, if not all, places of human interaction have some level of formal and informal rules on how we expect others to behave.
  - alanlammiman 5y ago
    Indeed - I'm all for common sense and rules. So, whether you/the OP like it or not, the present 'formal and informal rules' of intellectual street-fighting do allow for the baseball bat of cancellation, rather than mere 'pushing-back', to be used against the 'push' of perceived prejudice. So if that is the 'push' one wants to make, better find an intellectual dojo that only allows pushing, not complain that your opponent didn't behave as you wanted them to.

Turing_Machine 5y ago

> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line No one appointed you, or some random Twitter mob, to speak for "society".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]