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Can somebody list “heresies” which we are not allowed to say but they are ok? I cannot find a single one. But maybe I’m missing something.

by tlogan 5y ago

xqcgrek2 5y ago
A simple one is that evolution doesn't stop at the neck.
3qz 5y ago
It just means not having the right opinion on the current issue of the month. Or anything about the groups of people you’re not allowed to criticize.
- tlogan 5y ago
  Can you please be more specific? I really do not know what would be “heresy” now. Maybe I’m tweeting something which is “heresy” (and knowing that since nobody reads my tweets).
  - gonehome 5y ago
    David Shor’s firing is the common example since it’s the most egregious case (getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements). See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... Nastiness directed at JK Rowling and Jesse Singal because of trans stuff [0][1]. I’d add Bari Weiss to this list too. [2] If the mob could destroy these people and get them fired they would. As it is the pressure from the mob makes things unpleasant for them. Most people would not continue to fight back against it. Sam Harris gets a similar level of hostility for what are very nuanced conversations and it’s why he has his own platform. James Demore at Google is another more controversial case (actually read the memo - it’s way more benign then you’d think from the meta conversation and imo a reasonable thing to discuss). AGM wrote chaos monkeys and comes across as an ass in it so he had his offer rescinded from apple - I personally don’t care as much about this one since there’s some risk here with what you write and how it represents you when it comes to a hiring decision (though Apple handled it poorly). Depending on where you work not adhering to Kendi style anti-racism can also be heretical. Then there are pressures for other things like being forced to state pronouns in tech interviews or be unlikely to move forward. The song and dance around land acknowledgements (I think they're dumb, but that's likely a heretical view in these circles). Being given side eye or “corrected” if you don’t say “Latinx” at work. There are lists of stuff like this at work, told not to say “sanity check” because it offends insane people, don’t say “left hand side” because it hurts one handed people. If you don't agree you can find yourself labeled ableist, racist, transphobe, etc. specific arguments from you are then ignored and your job can be at risk. Lots of stupid shit imo and pushing back against it will often have harmful career consequences so you have to be quiet about it. Most of the people loudly complaining about this stuff are on the right, but it affects a lot of people across the political spectrum. I suspect the right complains the most about it because they paradoxically have the least to lose (they're just in a separate tribe anyway with their own political support structures). The people that get hurt by this the most imo are earnest people that are interested in things that are true despite tribal affiliation, they're more exposed. This permeates the culture and makes it hard to have interesting conversations about anything that comes anywhere close to a third rail topic. It also makes it harder to understand what’s true. I find Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander, Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Coleman Hughes, Kmele, to be good examples of people engaging on this stuff in a nuanced way across the political spectrum. For what it's worth this is a comment I would not have historically been comfortable writing before getting a new job where the risk from this kind of thing blowing up and having career consequences is reduced. That's likely the most common negative affect of this kind of heresy. When you put penalties on sharing ideas sure you block some truly horrible stuff, but you also snuff out anything that doesn't align with the current cultural beliefs about what is correct and true. The issue with that is what's currently believed to be true is almost certainly not 100% correct and rigidly enforcing cultural beliefs will slow down our ability to struggle closer towards things that are more correct. That's why holding free speech up as a virtue is better on net (and engaging in in-good-faith discourse on difficult topics is a good thing). When you limit speech you put a subset of people in the position to choose which speech to limit - even those with the best intentions will do this poorly, it's better to have robust systems that don't require this centralized speech control. The promise of the web was to enable this (and in a lot of ways it has), but the failure of the web is that problems with our computing stack incentivize centralized services that bring this problem back. Either way, mobs pushing to silence/fire people that disagree with them is probably something we should work to avoid. [0]: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY [2]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-win/id1570872415?i=1000553066075 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-wi...
  - umvi 5y ago
    The following opinions will be labelled as heresy by the left (note there are plenty of heresies labeled by the right as well): - Transgenderism is a mental illness - Trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete athletically with cis women - Kids under age 8 shouldn't be taught LGBT concepts such as gender identity in elementary schools (read: "Don't Say Gay Bill") - Code of Conducts in software projects are dumb and ineffective - Biden shouldn't have used affirmative action to assign a SCOTUS justice - Forced corporate DEI is dumb and ineffective
  - darepublic 5y ago
    If you use master branch on git you are racist. Inexplicably the word is still ok in other contexts like chess master. Although maybe that needs to be updated too. What's the harm in changing the term to chess expert I ask you? Are you going to get so hung up defending the use of a word?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Which groups are deserving of criticism that they're currently protected from?
  - 3qz 5y ago
    For example, almost everything I’ve ever heard about white privilege is also true for Jewish people but it would be a career ending mistake to talk about the over representation of Jewish people in positions of power.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Jewish people are white though - and "white privilege" as a concept is primarily about how white people don't have to overcome racism or adapt their behaviour to the dominant culture to get ahead. It does connect with issues of diversity but it's not a direct explanation.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        > Jewish people are white though No, this isn't true. Jewish is an ethnicity that crosses multiple "race" backgrounds.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        I agree, but if we're talking about the Jewish people who OP was talking about (in relation to overrepresentation), that's white Jewish people.
      - 3qz 5y ago
        “In positions of power” is the important thing here. I’m not talking about diversity, I mean statements like “a small number of extremely wealthy white men have a disproportionate influence in the media, government, financial system, some specific company, etc” is a common left wing opinion for why systems work against the interests of racialized people. It’s even more accurate if you add “Jewish” after the word white, but that’s not something we’re allowed to talk about.
wooque 5y ago
Some dog breeds are smarter than the others and it's not because of purely economic factors
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
beaconstudios 5y ago
Yeah I often see this kind of vague posting about cancel culture, but generally speaking people are being cancelled (which can either just mean being criticised, or the more legitimate problem of people contacting employers) for either directly saying things that are offensive (the aforementioned -isms) or are implications that directly lead to -ist conclusions. My understanding is that the underlying complaint is that the social left has cultural power right now - conservatives are equally likely to "cancel" people for atheism or being gay or having an abortion, but when they are on the back foot use the free speech argument as a wedge against the same behaviour from the other side.
- tlogan 5y ago
  Can you please be more specific? What is said which is considered ok but person got canceled? I’m definitely not left wing so I’m really confused with this GP post. Is he defending racists? Is he defending sexists people? Nazis? I doubt so. I understand that you cannot be Republican if you do not believe in gun rights. But these are political affiliations: nobody forced you to be Rebulican.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I'm agreeing with you. I think people complaining vaguely about cultural issues is unhelpful at best. Equating civil rights issues with religious persecution is quite a dodgy implication too. Edit: As for who he's defending: I don't think he's defending any of those groups. Honestly I don't understand why so many people get upset about the US getting more accepting given they don't seem to be socially reactionary themselves.
skellington 5y ago
You must be pretty asleep to not be aware of the hot button topics now. How about statements like: - people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants - there are two biological genders - the US is not structurally racist - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) - math is not racist
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  Since when are those things not allowed to be said? I see tons of people saying things like that without any consequences. Often, it even results in them being elected to high office. If the worst punishment is people yelling at you on Twitter, then I think the heresy metaphor has been stretched too far.
- tlogan 5y ago
  - people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines Not heresy. - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants Not heresy. - there are two biological genders Bad - this sentence is telling part of population should just kill themself since they don’t exist. - the US is not structurally racist No heresy. This sentence needs to be context. - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites Not sure. The sentence needs be in context. - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) Bad. This sentence is implicitly claiming than being gay is not ok (being gay makes you “ controversial “ human - better not exist). - math is not racist Bad. This sentence implicitly claims that girls are stupid. (Mistake I read this is as “math is not sexist”) As you can see in you cannot say that certan type of people are less of a human. But I that think WW2 kinda solved this.
  - trash99 5y ago
  - skellington 5y ago
    You prove my point by most of your answers. You can't say a bunch of things without being a heretic. Non of your bizarre interpretations are part of the statements. They are a weird extended interpretation based on your internal fantasies. You might as well as just pointed to a strange woman and yelled WITCH. You religious fanatics are all the same.
emerged 5y ago
By saying any of them, commenters must subject themselves to the witch hunt panel right here in front of our very eyes. Is that what you’re hoping for? “Anyone who is sick of being called a witch, come forward” (demanded while erecting the stake)
leephillips 5y ago
(1) The concept of an inherent “gender” makes no biological nor logical sense. You can’t have been born in the “wrong body.” (2) Socrates was mostly right about democracy. (3) Seriously violent criminals, once convicted, should never bet let out of prison. (4) The US (and all nations) should have essentially open borders. (5) The US should make health insurance illegal and provide health care as a function of government, the way they provide national defense. (6) All gun control is against the US constitution and poor public policy. These are all my sincere opinions, and, although I think most of them are clearly, sometimes self-evidently true, most of them are heresies.
- noelsusman 5y ago
  The only one of these that could fit Graham's definition of a heresy is the first one, and even then it would depend on what exactly you mean.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Some are surely more heretical than others. The reason I think most of them are heresies is because of the hysterical reactions they cause when I utter them.
    - noelsusman 5y ago
      Heresies are not merely unpopular opinions. They're unpopular opinions that will also get you aggressively ostracized and fired from your job.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Doesn't everybody think their ideas are self evident? As for the gender one: imagine you woke up in the body of somebody of the opposite sex tomorrow. Wouldn't you be in the wrong body? My understanding is that the "wrong body" argument is actually not an accurate explanation of trans people's experience though.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blindmute 5y ago
"Despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks make up 52% of crimes."
alfor 5y ago
- US is one of the least racist country the world has ever seen - Climate change is not as bad as show in the news - Most womans prefer to work in somethings else than engineering - Most womans will find more satisfaction in raising kids than a job - A father and a mother is what is the best for kids - Trump wasn’t worse president than Obama - The press and big tech is 90% democrat thus they push the narrative they believe on other (some people call that deep state, other stolen election)

Can somebody list “heresies” which we are not allowed to say but they are ok? I cannot find a single one. But maybe I’m missing something.

by tlogan 5y ago

Can somebody list “heresies” which we are not allowed to say but they are ok? I cannot find a single one. But maybe I’m missing something.

xqcgrek2 5y ago

A simple one is that evolution doesn't stop at the neck.

3qz 5y ago

It just means not having the right opinion on the current issue of the month. Or anything about the groups of people you’re not allowed to criticize.

tlogan 5y ago
Can you please be more specific? I really do not know what would be “heresy” now. Maybe I’m tweeting something which is “heresy” (and knowing that since nobody reads my tweets).
- gonehome 5y ago
  David Shor’s firing is the common example since it’s the most egregious case (getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements). See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... Nastiness directed at JK Rowling and Jesse Singal because of trans stuff [0][1]. I’d add Bari Weiss to this list too. [2] If the mob could destroy these people and get them fired they would. As it is the pressure from the mob makes things unpleasant for them. Most people would not continue to fight back against it. Sam Harris gets a similar level of hostility for what are very nuanced conversations and it’s why he has his own platform. James Demore at Google is another more controversial case (actually read the memo - it’s way more benign then you’d think from the meta conversation and imo a reasonable thing to discuss). AGM wrote chaos monkeys and comes across as an ass in it so he had his offer rescinded from apple - I personally don’t care as much about this one since there’s some risk here with what you write and how it represents you when it comes to a hiring decision (though Apple handled it poorly). Depending on where you work not adhering to Kendi style anti-racism can also be heretical. Then there are pressures for other things like being forced to state pronouns in tech interviews or be unlikely to move forward. The song and dance around land acknowledgements (I think they're dumb, but that's likely a heretical view in these circles). Being given side eye or “corrected” if you don’t say “Latinx” at work. There are lists of stuff like this at work, told not to say “sanity check” because it offends insane people, don’t say “left hand side” because it hurts one handed people. If you don't agree you can find yourself labeled ableist, racist, transphobe, etc. specific arguments from you are then ignored and your job can be at risk. Lots of stupid shit imo and pushing back against it will often have harmful career consequences so you have to be quiet about it. Most of the people loudly complaining about this stuff are on the right, but it affects a lot of people across the political spectrum. I suspect the right complains the most about it because they paradoxically have the least to lose (they're just in a separate tribe anyway with their own political support structures). The people that get hurt by this the most imo are earnest people that are interested in things that are true despite tribal affiliation, they're more exposed. This permeates the culture and makes it hard to have interesting conversations about anything that comes anywhere close to a third rail topic. It also makes it harder to understand what’s true. I find Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander, Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Coleman Hughes, Kmele, to be good examples of people engaging on this stuff in a nuanced way across the political spectrum. For what it's worth this is a comment I would not have historically been comfortable writing before getting a new job where the risk from this kind of thing blowing up and having career consequences is reduced. That's likely the most common negative affect of this kind of heresy. When you put penalties on sharing ideas sure you block some truly horrible stuff, but you also snuff out anything that doesn't align with the current cultural beliefs about what is correct and true. The issue with that is what's currently believed to be true is almost certainly not 100% correct and rigidly enforcing cultural beliefs will slow down our ability to struggle closer towards things that are more correct. That's why holding free speech up as a virtue is better on net (and engaging in in-good-faith discourse on difficult topics is a good thing). When you limit speech you put a subset of people in the position to choose which speech to limit - even those with the best intentions will do this poorly, it's better to have robust systems that don't require this centralized speech control. The promise of the web was to enable this (and in a lot of ways it has), but the failure of the web is that problems with our computing stack incentivize centralized services that bring this problem back. Either way, mobs pushing to silence/fire people that disagree with them is probably something we should work to avoid. [0]: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY [2]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-win/id1570872415?i=1000553066075 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-wi...
- umvi 5y ago
  The following opinions will be labelled as heresy by the left (note there are plenty of heresies labeled by the right as well): - Transgenderism is a mental illness - Trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete athletically with cis women - Kids under age 8 shouldn't be taught LGBT concepts such as gender identity in elementary schools (read: "Don't Say Gay Bill") - Code of Conducts in software projects are dumb and ineffective - Biden shouldn't have used affirmative action to assign a SCOTUS justice - Forced corporate DEI is dumb and ineffective
- darepublic 5y ago
  If you use master branch on git you are racist. Inexplicably the word is still ok in other contexts like chess master. Although maybe that needs to be updated too. What's the harm in changing the term to chess expert I ask you? Are you going to get so hung up defending the use of a word?
beaconstudios 5y ago
Which groups are deserving of criticism that they're currently protected from?
- 3qz 5y ago
  For example, almost everything I’ve ever heard about white privilege is also true for Jewish people but it would be a career ending mistake to talk about the over representation of Jewish people in positions of power.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Jewish people are white though - and "white privilege" as a concept is primarily about how white people don't have to overcome racism or adapt their behaviour to the dominant culture to get ahead. It does connect with issues of diversity but it's not a direct explanation.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      > Jewish people are white though No, this isn't true. Jewish is an ethnicity that crosses multiple "race" backgrounds.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        I agree, but if we're talking about the Jewish people who OP was talking about (in relation to overrepresentation), that's white Jewish people.
    - 3qz 5y ago
      “In positions of power” is the important thing here. I’m not talking about diversity, I mean statements like “a small number of extremely wealthy white men have a disproportionate influence in the media, government, financial system, some specific company, etc” is a common left wing opinion for why systems work against the interests of racialized people. It’s even more accurate if you add “Jewish” after the word white, but that’s not something we’re allowed to talk about.

wooque 5y ago

Some dog breeds are smarter than the others and it's not because of purely economic factors

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

beaconstudios 5y ago

Yeah I often see this kind of vague posting about cancel culture, but generally speaking people are being cancelled (which can either just mean being criticised, or the more legitimate problem of people contacting employers) for either directly saying things that are offensive (the aforementioned -isms) or are implications that directly lead to -ist conclusions. My understanding is that the underlying complaint is that the social left has cultural power right now - conservatives are equally likely to "cancel" people for atheism or being gay or having an abortion, but when they are on the back foot use the free speech argument as a wedge against the same behaviour from the other side.

tlogan 5y ago
Can you please be more specific? What is said which is considered ok but person got canceled? I’m definitely not left wing so I’m really confused with this GP post. Is he defending racists? Is he defending sexists people? Nazis? I doubt so. I understand that you cannot be Republican if you do not believe in gun rights. But these are political affiliations: nobody forced you to be Rebulican.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I'm agreeing with you. I think people complaining vaguely about cultural issues is unhelpful at best. Equating civil rights issues with religious persecution is quite a dodgy implication too. Edit: As for who he's defending: I don't think he's defending any of those groups. Honestly I don't understand why so many people get upset about the US getting more accepting given they don't seem to be socially reactionary themselves.

skellington 5y ago

You must be pretty asleep to not be aware of the hot button topics now. How about statements like: - people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants - there are two biological genders - the US is not structurally racist - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) - math is not racist

TheCoelacanth 5y ago
Since when are those things not allowed to be said? I see tons of people saying things like that without any consequences. Often, it even results in them being elected to high office. If the worst punishment is people yelling at you on Twitter, then I think the heresy metaphor has been stretched too far.
tlogan 5y ago
- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines Not heresy. - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants Not heresy. - there are two biological genders Bad - this sentence is telling part of population should just kill themself since they don’t exist. - the US is not structurally racist No heresy. This sentence needs to be context. - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites Not sure. The sentence needs be in context. - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) Bad. This sentence is implicitly claiming than being gay is not ok (being gay makes you “ controversial “ human - better not exist). - math is not racist Bad. This sentence implicitly claims that girls are stupid. (Mistake I read this is as “math is not sexist”) As you can see in you cannot say that certan type of people are less of a human. But I that think WW2 kinda solved this.
- trash99 5y ago
- skellington 5y ago
  You prove my point by most of your answers. You can't say a bunch of things without being a heretic. Non of your bizarre interpretations are part of the statements. They are a weird extended interpretation based on your internal fantasies. You might as well as just pointed to a strange woman and yelled WITCH. You religious fanatics are all the same.

emerged 5y ago

By saying any of them, commenters must subject themselves to the witch hunt panel right here in front of our very eyes. Is that what you’re hoping for? “Anyone who is sick of being called a witch, come forward” (demanded while erecting the stake)

leephillips 5y ago

(1) The concept of an inherent “gender” makes no biological nor logical sense. You can’t have been born in the “wrong body.” (2) Socrates was mostly right about democracy. (3) Seriously violent criminals, once convicted, should never bet let out of prison. (4) The US (and all nations) should have essentially open borders. (5) The US should make health insurance illegal and provide health care as a function of government, the way they provide national defense. (6) All gun control is against the US constitution and poor public policy. These are all my sincere opinions, and, although I think most of them are clearly, sometimes self-evidently true, most of them are heresies.

noelsusman 5y ago
The only one of these that could fit Graham's definition of a heresy is the first one, and even then it would depend on what exactly you mean.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Some are surely more heretical than others. The reason I think most of them are heresies is because of the hysterical reactions they cause when I utter them.
  - noelsusman 5y ago
    Heresies are not merely unpopular opinions. They're unpopular opinions that will also get you aggressively ostracized and fired from your job.
beaconstudios 5y ago
Doesn't everybody think their ideas are self evident? As for the gender one: imagine you woke up in the body of somebody of the opposite sex tomorrow. Wouldn't you be in the wrong body? My understanding is that the "wrong body" argument is actually not an accurate explanation of trans people's experience though.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blindmute 5y ago

"Despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks make up 52% of crimes."

alfor 5y ago

- US is one of the least racist country the world has ever seen - Climate change is not as bad as show in the news - Most womans prefer to work in somethings else than engineering - Most womans will find more satisfaction in raising kids than a job - A father and a mother is what is the best for kids - Trump wasn’t worse president than Obama - The press and big tech is 90% democrat thus they push the narrative they believe on other (some people call that deep state, other stolen election)