8 ms·

> I remember years ago you could have a discussion and express your opinion and it was fine. I’m always curious what time period people are referring to when t

by slg 4y ago

> I remember years ago you could have a discussion and express your opinion and it was fine. I’m always curious what time period people are referring to when they say something like this. Because it seems to me that there have always been things that you would have been shunned for saying. The only difference is that collection of things changes over time and people are uncomfortable when those changes outpace their own opinions. That has been happening throughout recorded human history, every generation thinks the generation or two after them are destroying the moral fabric of society. It wasn’t true when the ancient Greeks complained about it and it probably isn’t true today.

brightball 4y ago
We did have the dark ages…
- slg 4y ago
  That gives us 1 generation being right and we're roughly 100 generations removed from Socrates. I'm not sure that I would hang my hat on a 1% accuracy rate just yet.
- lukas099 4y ago
  Some would say we're in them.
- bmelton 4y ago
  Worth remembering that the "Dark Ages" were named that by those with a heavy Roman bias and otherwise weren't particularly dark, having experienced innovations like standardized handwriting (punctuation and consistent lettering and casing and such), art, science, math, agriculture, and laid the groundwork for the later Renaissance.
wyldfire 4y ago
This sounds similar to the Overton Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- pksebben 4y ago
  it's hilarious that "policy" is in the middle. A great idea otherwise, but policy and public opinion are not nearly this closely linked.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Policy, being most difficult and slowest to change, has a lot of intertia, so sticking it exactly in the center of mass / center of inertia makes intuitive sense. And since the shape is symmetrical, that place is also the geometrical center :).
    - pksebben 4y ago
      this is true, if and only if public sentiment is an indicator of the direction of policy. There have been a number of studies that suggest this is not true [1] 1 - https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20...
jimbokun 4y ago
It was completely true when the Greeks complained about it and it's true still today. The younger generations are constantly in the process of destroying the moral fabric established by previous generations and weaving their own.
- slg 4y ago
  Touché, maybe the wrong word choice by me. The point was that moral fabric changing doesn't actually harm society.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Pretty sure it would be trivial to find historical examples where it absolutely did harm society.
    - notch898a 4y ago
      This is part of the reason why increasing federalization and consolidation of governments of the world worries me. A big part of progress in society is a crapshoot and arguably a lot of what we do is inadvertently harmful to society. Allowing experimentation in relatively small segments of the population compartmentalizes risk while allowing everyone else to copy it if they see it works.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        How much copying is actually happening? I live in the US, and our healthcare system is objectively terrible. There are numerous examples of systems in other countries that provide better care for more people for less, but we refuse to adopt any of them. First past the post voting is also obviously terrible, and many better ways are available and have had successful implementation, but nothing changes here. Theoretically what you're saying makes sense, but it doesn't seem to match reality. Instead we just get a lot of tribalism, war, and death.
        4y ago
mdorazio 4y ago
I would argue that in the social media space, trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon. At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.
- slg 4y ago
  >whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden. And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.
- kurthr 4y ago
  Yes, but now it's also really trendy to complain about woke social justice cancel culture while spewing fascist tropes. When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago. Is Ham radio cool again?
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    Ham radio was always cool.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    > When did the internet become garbage? September 1993. Now get off my lawn!
- samtp 4y ago
  > trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman? To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world. > At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today. I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.
charlieyu1 4y ago
My lifetime is limited but early internet era was the time where the people were far more open-minded than both the generation before it and now
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Depends on who you are. I put up with a lot of shit for being who I am in the early internet era that is far more acceptable today. Would not be willing to go back in time for anything.
koonsolo 4y ago
Yeah I agree. My parents were born in the 40's and 50's, and they always taught me not to discuss politics publicly. It was just the smarter thing to do that nobody knew your alignment. It seems now online, the biggest discussions are about politics.
- gizmo 4y ago
  To put the above in perspective, the civil rights march was on August 28, 1963. Not talking about politics was a good strategy for white men, because the political environment favored them so much. Not talking about politics was not an option for people who still had to fight for equal rights.
- melagonster 4y ago
  in the time, talking politics just give someone a reason to kill your whole family. we had go into a new, better epoch. gen-Z have more freedom than older people can imagined!
belorn 4y ago
The answer to that question depend on what kind of quantity and quality that the shunning had on a person. At the extreme end we have massive discrimination of whole demographic because something a single person said or did, and at the other end we have zero reaction. We can look at notable events in history, like say Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Monty Python films. Those were censored in some countries and got shunned by Catholics, but they did not get fired, their homes did not get turned on fire, the shows did still air on TV and movie studies in the UK, they continued to get employment later in life and in general was not that shunned by society at large. How they treated Catholics was not compared to the Nazi. UK flags was not burned nor did anyone break into UK embassies. So that is one level of free speech we can compare with. Catholics may disapprove of what Monty Python said and did, but as a society we should defend the level of free speech that Monty Python performed. We should avoid having consequences of Monty Python-level of free speech be worse than what Monty Python received back in 1979.
rqtwteye 4y ago
I know that people always complained about the younger generation. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad. They do this while offering no opinion themselves. For example I got in trouble because I questioned the way corporations are implementing diversity initiatives. I am completely on board with the intent but I think it's not done in an effective manner but more like a PR stunt. It's possible that I am wrong but I don't think I deserve to be called a racist by people who are not offering any thought of their own on the issue. I think this has to do with the the way the US parties with the help of social media have managed to split the populace into two camps that live in separate realities where even listening to somebody who is on the "other" side is viewed as treason.
- danaris 4y ago
  > What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad. I think the problem with statements like this is that there are some things they could refer to that are very, very obviously (at least from where I sit) actually ethically bad, but were considered by many to be acceptable things to say few generations ago. Things like sexist and racist jokes, comments about where women and "colored" people belong, blatant homophobia and transphobia—y'know, all the widely-normalized bigotry that was a part of the rich white male landscape in the postwar years, à la Mad Men, remained so to some extent at least through the late '90s, and continues to be aggressively defended by some to this day. It is true (I might even call it a truism) that some people go too far and overreact, but I think it's important to step back and think for a minute about just how short a time it's been since these things were considered widely acceptable. Then think about how that affected the people still around today who had to sit through that. Then remember that, as I said, there are still many people today who are actively advocating for a return to that blatant bigotry. This is why you get people who overreact even to genuinely-benign questioning of such policies: because it's very hard, in many cases, to tell the difference between someone who's just asking questions, and someone who's "just asking questions"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
itdidhappen 4y ago
>That has been happening throughout recorded human history, every generation thinks the generation or two after them are destroying the moral fabric of society. It wasn’t true when the ancient Greeks complained about it and it probably isn’t true today. The Greeks and Romans suffered serious civilizational decay around the times that people were saying such things.

by slg 4y ago

brightball 4y ago

We did have the dark ages…

slg 4y ago
That gives us 1 generation being right and we're roughly 100 generations removed from Socrates. I'm not sure that I would hang my hat on a 1% accuracy rate just yet.
lukas099 4y ago
Some would say we're in them.
bmelton 4y ago
Worth remembering that the "Dark Ages" were named that by those with a heavy Roman bias and otherwise weren't particularly dark, having experienced innovations like standardized handwriting (punctuation and consistent lettering and casing and such), art, science, math, agriculture, and laid the groundwork for the later Renaissance.

wyldfire 4y ago

This sounds similar to the Overton Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

pksebben 4y ago
it's hilarious that "policy" is in the middle. A great idea otherwise, but policy and public opinion are not nearly this closely linked.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Policy, being most difficult and slowest to change, has a lot of intertia, so sticking it exactly in the center of mass / center of inertia makes intuitive sense. And since the shape is symmetrical, that place is also the geometrical center :).
  - pksebben 4y ago
    this is true, if and only if public sentiment is an indicator of the direction of policy. There have been a number of studies that suggest this is not true [1] 1 - https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20...

jimbokun 4y ago

It was completely true when the Greeks complained about it and it's true still today. The younger generations are constantly in the process of destroying the moral fabric established by previous generations and weaving their own.

slg 4y ago
Touché, maybe the wrong word choice by me. The point was that moral fabric changing doesn't actually harm society.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Pretty sure it would be trivial to find historical examples where it absolutely did harm society.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    This is part of the reason why increasing federalization and consolidation of governments of the world worries me. A big part of progress in society is a crapshoot and arguably a lot of what we do is inadvertently harmful to society. Allowing experimentation in relatively small segments of the population compartmentalizes risk while allowing everyone else to copy it if they see it works.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      How much copying is actually happening? I live in the US, and our healthcare system is objectively terrible. There are numerous examples of systems in other countries that provide better care for more people for less, but we refuse to adopt any of them. First past the post voting is also obviously terrible, and many better ways are available and have had successful implementation, but nothing changes here. Theoretically what you're saying makes sense, but it doesn't seem to match reality. Instead we just get a lot of tribalism, war, and death.
      - 4y ago

mdorazio 4y ago

I would argue that in the social media space, trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon. At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.

slg 4y ago
>whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden. And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.
kurthr 4y ago
Yes, but now it's also really trendy to complain about woke social justice cancel culture while spewing fascist tropes. When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago. Is Ham radio cool again?
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  Ham radio was always cool.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > When did the internet become garbage? September 1993. Now get off my lawn!
samtp 4y ago
> trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman? To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world. > At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today. I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.

charlieyu1 4y ago

My lifetime is limited but early internet era was the time where the people were far more open-minded than both the generation before it and now

ModernMech 4y ago
Depends on who you are. I put up with a lot of shit for being who I am in the early internet era that is far more acceptable today. Would not be willing to go back in time for anything.

koonsolo 4y ago

Yeah I agree. My parents were born in the 40's and 50's, and they always taught me not to discuss politics publicly. It was just the smarter thing to do that nobody knew your alignment. It seems now online, the biggest discussions are about politics.

gizmo 4y ago
To put the above in perspective, the civil rights march was on August 28, 1963. Not talking about politics was a good strategy for white men, because the political environment favored them so much. Not talking about politics was not an option for people who still had to fight for equal rights.
melagonster 4y ago
in the time, talking politics just give someone a reason to kill your whole family. we had go into a new, better epoch. gen-Z have more freedom than older people can imagined!

belorn 4y ago

The answer to that question depend on what kind of quantity and quality that the shunning had on a person. At the extreme end we have massive discrimination of whole demographic because something a single person said or did, and at the other end we have zero reaction. We can look at notable events in history, like say Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Monty Python films. Those were censored in some countries and got shunned by Catholics, but they did not get fired, their homes did not get turned on fire, the shows did still air on TV and movie studies in the UK, they continued to get employment later in life and in general was not that shunned by society at large. How they treated Catholics was not compared to the Nazi. UK flags was not burned nor did anyone break into UK embassies. So that is one level of free speech we can compare with. Catholics may disapprove of what Monty Python said and did, but as a society we should defend the level of free speech that Monty Python performed. We should avoid having consequences of Monty Python-level of free speech be worse than what Monty Python received back in 1979.

rqtwteye 4y ago

I know that people always complained about the younger generation. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad. They do this while offering no opinion themselves. For example I got in trouble because I questioned the way corporations are implementing diversity initiatives. I am completely on board with the intent but I think it's not done in an effective manner but more like a PR stunt. It's possible that I am wrong but I don't think I deserve to be called a racist by people who are not offering any thought of their own on the issue. I think this has to do with the the way the US parties with the help of social media have managed to split the populace into two camps that live in separate realities where even listening to somebody who is on the "other" side is viewed as treason.

danaris 4y ago
> What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad. I think the problem with statements like this is that there are some things they could refer to that are very, very obviously (at least from where I sit) actually ethically bad, but were considered by many to be acceptable things to say few generations ago. Things like sexist and racist jokes, comments about where women and "colored" people belong, blatant homophobia and transphobia—y'know, all the widely-normalized bigotry that was a part of the rich white male landscape in the postwar years, à la Mad Men, remained so to some extent at least through the late '90s, and continues to be aggressively defended by some to this day. It is true (I might even call it a truism) that some people go too far and overreact, but I think it's important to step back and think for a minute about just how short a time it's been since these things were considered widely acceptable. Then think about how that affected the people still around today who had to sit through that. Then remember that, as I said, there are still many people today who are actively advocating for a return to that blatant bigotry. This is why you get people who overreact even to genuinely-benign questioning of such policies: because it's very hard, in many cases, to tell the difference between someone who's just asking questions, and someone who's "just asking questions"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

itdidhappen 4y ago

>That has been happening throughout recorded human history, every generation thinks the generation or two after them are destroying the moral fabric of society. It wasn’t true when the ancient Greeks complained about it and it probably isn’t true today. The Greeks and Romans suffered serious civilizational decay around the times that people were saying such things.