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Dude, you're not trying hard enough. :) Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia. There are

Dude, you're not trying hard enough. :) Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia. There are others of course. For example, I am not a climate-change denier, but if I was I certainly wouldn't say so on HN! I'm gay so I'll pick on my own group: HIV is ridiculously high amongst urban gay men. To me, it's obvious why this is the case. Evolutionarily, men have had no reason not to try and be as successful with as many partners as possible. Women, who may be saddled with a pregnancy and baby for years, had evolutionary pressure to be more choosy with sexual partners. This created fertile ground for HIV to spread amongst gay men. Now, could a straight person say that without being ostracized from polite society? Probably not! The question I would throw back to pg though is this: are we better or worse off for avoiding these topics entirely? The truth sometimes comes at a cost. Let's say that we found out that white people are less smart than East Asians. What good could come from knowing that? I don't know the answer...

paulbaumgart 13y ago
As I understand it, HIV transmission rates also vary a lot based on what body parts are being used, and asymmetrically so. related: http://nytimes.com/2014/03/15/health/in-rare-case-woman-with-hiv-infects-female-sex-partner-cdc-says.html http://nytimes.com/2014/03/15/health/in-rare-case-woman-with...
ucarion 13y ago
I agree with you about most of those phobias, but I strongly disagree about Islamophobia. I think future societies will be surprised by how much human suffering we permit in the name of being "tolerant". Religions are not all created equal, and no intellectually honest person will claim that Islam and Jainism are equally valid moral frameworks (this is why few people fret about Jainophobia). We know that Islam and its adherents are generous contributors to the surplus of misery in the world. People concerned about the quality of human life will recognize that we were right to be extremely suspicious of Islam. (Note that I'm defining Islamophobia as "deep suspicion of Islam / thoughts informed by Islamic beliefs", especially when it comes to questions of morality and ethics.)
- chrismonsanto 13y ago
  I think a lot of people write "Islamophobia" when they mean "hating Islam as an excuse to hate Arab people." Speaking as an Arab person who is very critical of Islam, I think we should be careful to distinguish the two.
  - ivanca 13y ago
    Many times is used by the offended ones in an (rightful or not) attempt to portray any critics as motivated by hatred/racism and not on rational thoughts.
- gautamnarula 13y ago
  Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, wrote an interesting post on Islamophobia and how he believes it doesn't actually exist, at least not in the framework that we normally consider phobias: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/#views_on_islam http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controve... The relevant part: The meaning of “Islamophobia” is not at all like the meanings of those other terms. It is simply not easy to differentiate prejudice against Muslims from ordinary racism and xenophobia directed at Arabs, Pakistanis, Somalis, and other people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, there is no question that such bigotry exists, and it is as odious as Greenwald believes. But inventing a new term does not give us license to say that there is a new form of hatred in the world. How does the term “anti-Semitism” differ? Well, we have a 2000-year-old tradition of religiously inspired hatred against Jews, conceived as a distinct race of people, both by those who hate them and by Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is, therefore, a specific form of racism that, as everyone knows, has taken many terrible turns over the years (and is now especially prevalent among Muslims, for reasons that can be explicitly traced not merely to recent conflicts over land in the Middle East, but to the doctrine of Islam). “Sexism,” generally speaking, is a bias against women, not because of any doctrines they might espouse, but because they were born without a Y chromosome. The meanings of these terms are clear, and each names a form of hatred and exclusion directed at people, as people, not because of their behavior or beliefs, but because of the mere circumstances of their birth. Islamophobia is something else entirely. It is, Greenwald tells us in his three points, an “irrational” and “disproportionate” and “unjustified” focus on Muslims. But the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. There is no race of Muslims. They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora. Unlike Judaism, Islam is a vast, missionary faith. The only thing that defines the class of All Muslims—and the only thing that could make this group the possible target of anyone’s “irrational” fear, “disproportionate” focus, or “unjustified” criticism—is their adherence to a set of beliefs and the behaviors that these beliefs inspire. And, unlike a person’s racial characteristics or gender, beliefs can be argued for, tested, criticized, and changed. In fact, wherever the norms of rational conversation are allowed to do their work, beliefs must earn respect. More important, beliefs are claims about reality and about how human beings should live within it—so they necessarily lead to behavior, and to values, laws, and public institutions that affect the lives of all people, whether they share these beliefs or not. Beliefs end marriages and start wars. So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the actual doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.
lmg643 13y ago
HIV transmission is a good example of a wildly controversial topic, that is actually no longer discussed. it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV. on IQ - I'm not sure that's necessarily true, or at least, the differences are complex (one group has a slightly higher average, the other a higher standard deviation, which has implications at the right-end of the bell curve). but for day-to-day social impact, that's not nearly as important as wondering what society should with people in the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, which is another topic we don't discuss. I often wonder whether the political correctness furies directed at pg were a factor in him putting sam altman in charge. for example - it was considered wildly controversial to say that not being able so speak english without a heavy accent might put you at a disadvantage in starting a company in an english speaking country. really? also - yc is the most forward thinking vc on women's issues in the country, and yet they were still accused of gender bias etc. wildly unfair, you might say. kind of hard for a thoughtful person to deal with all that chatter. you have to adopt a PR perspective, make general statements - no longer operating from a place of logic, just a desire not to offend. my sense is that there are many foolish things progressive americans believe which future generations will laugh at. we already laugh publicly at conservatives, but we're supposed to take everything progressives say seriously. here's a controversial closer - even if we equalized educational access to EECS, funding - women would be less likely to start companies than men, because men are hard-wired to take risks (hormonal profiles, probably other brain circuitry). tens of thousands of years of evolution can't easily be overcome, in even 100 years. doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage women, or that they can't do it (they obviously can) but bemoaning the out-of-whack ratios constantly, and expecting parity to be around the corner, seems foolish IMHO.
- mwetzler 13y ago
  PG really only stirs up controversy because he won't admit the fact that we're all biased to some degree. Even women in tech are biased against women in tech. It's natural because pattern matching is natural, and female developers & founders are (currently) rare. Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary. We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones. It takes extra work to do this. For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!). Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference. I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
scarmig 13y ago
Controversial is different from unspeakable--just because people get in trouble when they talk about something doesn't mean it's not spoken about. I read PG's essay as about something deeper. To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse. When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1] [1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?
pron 13y ago
Although pg touches on the question of truth in the social sciences, I think he accidentally touches on the answer but then misses it. Precisely because society is so fluid, the question of what is "true" not only does not have a clear answer, but the "truth" itself carries little value. Things might be true today but not tomorrow not only due to changing fashions, but they might be objectively true only because of circumstances that are in our control. Suppose Asians really are smarter than Caucasians. Not only is this "truth" unhelpful, it is also, possibly, fluid. The reason why people often choose to condemn those who speak an unpopular truth is because the truth is a powerful and dangerous weapon, often used to fight progress. This is what is known as the naturalistic fallacy, or the is-ought fallacy: the fact that something is true does not mean that it is good, or that it cannot change if we try hard enough. A "lie" might be more valuable than the "truth", because a lie might be a bright hope for the future, while the truth is simply the status quo. For some reason, even people that are usually curious and generally skeptical, sometimes stop questioning society when they find data demonstrating that some notion is "true". They don't take the extra step to ask why is it true, and can we change it? Or, should we change it? That is why the "truth" in the social sciences might be a dangerous thing, because if people come to assign the same meaning to a true finding in physics or in anthropology, we have a problem. While we cannot change the laws of physics, we can certainly change the social order. And we have. I don't think, then, that "truth" is all that important when it comes to ideology. What's important is picking values that you feel comfortable believing, and staying true to them.
rquantz 13y ago
Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia. PG suggested this as well with his references to "racial insensitivity," etc. And he may be right that future generations may not worry too much about racial insensitivity. But that does not mean that trying to speak and write about race in a way that is sensitive to the problems that race presents is irrational or merely fashionable. We live in a time of ongoing racial strife in America and around the world, and we come from times of even worse strife. Attempting to be racially sensitive is a rational response to the fact that, for centuries, we white western men have been extraordinarily racially insensitive. Let's look at an example of statements about race that would fall on different sides of that line. If I were to say that black men earn, on average, less money than white men, most people would say I was speaking factually. If I were to say that black men are, on average, less intelligent than white men, most people would say I was being racially insensitive -- or worse. In fact, one striking thing about many taboo or insensitive things that one could say today, is that they are frequently used as moral apologies for other, factual statements. Anyone arguing that black people are usually less intelligent than white people is probably also going to argue that black people deserve to make less money than white people. If it is taboo to say that urban gay men are more likely to contract HIV (in a moment I'll argue that that is not the case), it would be because there could also be a whiff of a suggestion that therefore a gay man with HIV deserves to be sick. Another striking thing about this variety of taboo statements today, as opposed to taboos of previous generations, is how frequently such taboo statements are factually inaccurate. In fact, calling "black men are less intelligent than white men" racially insensitive is possibly the most charitable thing one could say about that statement. When you see "racially insensitive" in print, that is usually because someone (a politician or celebrity) said something false and/or blatantly racist, but the publication felt it was too inflammatory to call it what it was -- false and racist. Finally, as a rebuttal to your statement about HIV, if it's taboo, why does a doctor ask me if I have sex with men the first time I meet her? Why are gay men still not allowed to donate blood? Context is what matters here. As a matter of fact, HIV is more prevalent in the gay community than the straight one (or at least it was -- feel free to offer newer data that refutes this). It is also more prevalent among African Americans. Stating these facts is not taboo, but suggesting that these fact hold any moral weight, that any of these groups that has faced ancient discrimination actually deserves it, is rightfully subject to distaste and rebuke given our cultural history.

paulbaumgart 13y ago

As I understand it, HIV transmission rates also vary a lot based on what body parts are being used, and asymmetrically so. related: http://nytimes.com/2014/03/15/health/in-rare-case-woman-with-hiv-infects-female-sex-partner-cdc-says.html http://nytimes.com/2014/03/15/health/in-rare-case-woman-with...

ucarion 13y ago

I agree with you about most of those phobias, but I strongly disagree about Islamophobia. I think future societies will be surprised by how much human suffering we permit in the name of being "tolerant". Religions are not all created equal, and no intellectually honest person will claim that Islam and Jainism are equally valid moral frameworks (this is why few people fret about Jainophobia). We know that Islam and its adherents are generous contributors to the surplus of misery in the world. People concerned about the quality of human life will recognize that we were right to be extremely suspicious of Islam. (Note that I'm defining Islamophobia as "deep suspicion of Islam / thoughts informed by Islamic beliefs", especially when it comes to questions of morality and ethics.)

chrismonsanto 13y ago
I think a lot of people write "Islamophobia" when they mean "hating Islam as an excuse to hate Arab people." Speaking as an Arab person who is very critical of Islam, I think we should be careful to distinguish the two.
- ivanca 13y ago
  Many times is used by the offended ones in an (rightful or not) attempt to portray any critics as motivated by hatred/racism and not on rational thoughts.
gautamnarula 13y ago
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, wrote an interesting post on Islamophobia and how he believes it doesn't actually exist, at least not in the framework that we normally consider phobias: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/#views_on_islam http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controve... The relevant part: The meaning of “Islamophobia” is not at all like the meanings of those other terms. It is simply not easy to differentiate prejudice against Muslims from ordinary racism and xenophobia directed at Arabs, Pakistanis, Somalis, and other people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, there is no question that such bigotry exists, and it is as odious as Greenwald believes. But inventing a new term does not give us license to say that there is a new form of hatred in the world. How does the term “anti-Semitism” differ? Well, we have a 2000-year-old tradition of religiously inspired hatred against Jews, conceived as a distinct race of people, both by those who hate them and by Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is, therefore, a specific form of racism that, as everyone knows, has taken many terrible turns over the years (and is now especially prevalent among Muslims, for reasons that can be explicitly traced not merely to recent conflicts over land in the Middle East, but to the doctrine of Islam). “Sexism,” generally speaking, is a bias against women, not because of any doctrines they might espouse, but because they were born without a Y chromosome. The meanings of these terms are clear, and each names a form of hatred and exclusion directed at people, as people, not because of their behavior or beliefs, but because of the mere circumstances of their birth. Islamophobia is something else entirely. It is, Greenwald tells us in his three points, an “irrational” and “disproportionate” and “unjustified” focus on Muslims. But the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. There is no race of Muslims. They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora. Unlike Judaism, Islam is a vast, missionary faith. The only thing that defines the class of All Muslims—and the only thing that could make this group the possible target of anyone’s “irrational” fear, “disproportionate” focus, or “unjustified” criticism—is their adherence to a set of beliefs and the behaviors that these beliefs inspire. And, unlike a person’s racial characteristics or gender, beliefs can be argued for, tested, criticized, and changed. In fact, wherever the norms of rational conversation are allowed to do their work, beliefs must earn respect. More important, beliefs are claims about reality and about how human beings should live within it—so they necessarily lead to behavior, and to values, laws, and public institutions that affect the lives of all people, whether they share these beliefs or not. Beliefs end marriages and start wars. So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the actual doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.

lmg643 13y ago

HIV transmission is a good example of a wildly controversial topic, that is actually no longer discussed. it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV. on IQ - I'm not sure that's necessarily true, or at least, the differences are complex (one group has a slightly higher average, the other a higher standard deviation, which has implications at the right-end of the bell curve). but for day-to-day social impact, that's not nearly as important as wondering what society should with people in the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, which is another topic we don't discuss. I often wonder whether the political correctness furies directed at pg were a factor in him putting sam altman in charge. for example - it was considered wildly controversial to say that not being able so speak english without a heavy accent might put you at a disadvantage in starting a company in an english speaking country. really? also - yc is the most forward thinking vc on women's issues in the country, and yet they were still accused of gender bias etc. wildly unfair, you might say. kind of hard for a thoughtful person to deal with all that chatter. you have to adopt a PR perspective, make general statements - no longer operating from a place of logic, just a desire not to offend. my sense is that there are many foolish things progressive americans believe which future generations will laugh at. we already laugh publicly at conservatives, but we're supposed to take everything progressives say seriously. here's a controversial closer - even if we equalized educational access to EECS, funding - women would be less likely to start companies than men, because men are hard-wired to take risks (hormonal profiles, probably other brain circuitry). tens of thousands of years of evolution can't easily be overcome, in even 100 years. doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage women, or that they can't do it (they obviously can) but bemoaning the out-of-whack ratios constantly, and expecting parity to be around the corner, seems foolish IMHO.

mwetzler 13y ago
PG really only stirs up controversy because he won't admit the fact that we're all biased to some degree. Even women in tech are biased against women in tech. It's natural because pattern matching is natural, and female developers & founders are (currently) rare. Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary. We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones. It takes extra work to do this. For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!). Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference. I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

scarmig 13y ago

Controversial is different from unspeakable--just because people get in trouble when they talk about something doesn't mean it's not spoken about. I read PG's essay as about something deeper. To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse. When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1] [1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?

pron 13y ago

Although pg touches on the question of truth in the social sciences, I think he accidentally touches on the answer but then misses it. Precisely because society is so fluid, the question of what is "true" not only does not have a clear answer, but the "truth" itself carries little value. Things might be true today but not tomorrow not only due to changing fashions, but they might be objectively true only because of circumstances that are in our control. Suppose Asians really are smarter than Caucasians. Not only is this "truth" unhelpful, it is also, possibly, fluid. The reason why people often choose to condemn those who speak an unpopular truth is because the truth is a powerful and dangerous weapon, often used to fight progress. This is what is known as the naturalistic fallacy, or the is-ought fallacy: the fact that something is true does not mean that it is good, or that it cannot change if we try hard enough. A "lie" might be more valuable than the "truth", because a lie might be a bright hope for the future, while the truth is simply the status quo. For some reason, even people that are usually curious and generally skeptical, sometimes stop questioning society when they find data demonstrating that some notion is "true". They don't take the extra step to ask why is it true, and can we change it? Or, should we change it? That is why the "truth" in the social sciences might be a dangerous thing, because if people come to assign the same meaning to a true finding in physics or in anthropology, we have a problem. While we cannot change the laws of physics, we can certainly change the social order. And we have. I don't think, then, that "truth" is all that important when it comes to ideology. What's important is picking values that you feel comfortable believing, and staying true to them.

rquantz 13y ago

Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia. PG suggested this as well with his references to "racial insensitivity," etc. And he may be right that future generations may not worry too much about racial insensitivity. But that does not mean that trying to speak and write about race in a way that is sensitive to the problems that race presents is irrational or merely fashionable. We live in a time of ongoing racial strife in America and around the world, and we come from times of even worse strife. Attempting to be racially sensitive is a rational response to the fact that, for centuries, we white western men have been extraordinarily racially insensitive. Let's look at an example of statements about race that would fall on different sides of that line. If I were to say that black men earn, on average, less money than white men, most people would say I was speaking factually. If I were to say that black men are, on average, less intelligent than white men, most people would say I was being racially insensitive -- or worse. In fact, one striking thing about many taboo or insensitive things that one could say today, is that they are frequently used as moral apologies for other, factual statements. Anyone arguing that black people are usually less intelligent than white people is probably also going to argue that black people deserve to make less money than white people. If it is taboo to say that urban gay men are more likely to contract HIV (in a moment I'll argue that that is not the case), it would be because there could also be a whiff of a suggestion that therefore a gay man with HIV deserves to be sick. Another striking thing about this variety of taboo statements today, as opposed to taboos of previous generations, is how frequently such taboo statements are factually inaccurate. In fact, calling "black men are less intelligent than white men" racially insensitive is possibly the most charitable thing one could say about that statement. When you see "racially insensitive" in print, that is usually because someone (a politician or celebrity) said something false and/or blatantly racist, but the publication felt it was too inflammatory to call it what it was -- false and racist. Finally, as a rebuttal to your statement about HIV, if it's taboo, why does a doctor ask me if I have sex with men the first time I meet her? Why are gay men still not allowed to donate blood? Context is what matters here. As a matter of fact, HIV is more prevalent in the gay community than the straight one (or at least it was -- feel free to offer newer data that refutes this). It is also more prevalent among African Americans. Stating these facts is not taboo, but suggesting that these fact hold any moral weight, that any of these groups that has faced ancient discrimination actually deserves it, is rightfully subject to distaste and rebuke given our cultural history.