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An actual attempt at a list of "What You Can't Say."
- unignorant 17y agoNot a surprising list. I agree with some points, and disagree with others. But this: "6. People believe what they want to believe. Any evidence they possess is an excuse, not a reason." Seems to pose a bit of self-referential paradox...
- iamwil 17y agoI didn't think it was surprising as well, but I don't know if it's because I'm older and have seen more of the world and the sort of people in it, but I know I would have been surprised at some of them as a college student, such as public schools didn't exist to teach, but as a daycare center so parents can work.
- efaith 17y agoI don't see anything here that you can't say to quite a lot of people. And I'm not surprised. After all, if you couldn't say it, you sure couldn't publish it for the world to see. A genuine list of things you can't say has not been written and will probably not be written, because such a thing is nearly paradoxical. Even if someone is foolish or suicidal enough to write one, nobody who reads it will want to pass it along to anyone else as that would taint them as well, so it will remain obscure.
- 83457 17y agoThis topic reminds me of an ex-girlfriend who had a knack for saying what I deemed inappropriate things. I recall getting upset with her when said something like #4 (below) among others. For example driving through an apartment area I used to live at which had slipped down economically after the dot-com bubble burst she said "You know you are in a bad neighborhood when there are a lot of black people" ... talking about a newborn cousin "he has a big nose, like a black person" ... and some other non-racist sounding stuff that I can't remember. Even when stuff she said was statistically true or had some basis in fact she just stated it in the most matter of fact and cynical way possible that really upset me. "4. There is no such thing as altruism. Everyone is ultimately only interested in their own pleasure. Even those who appear altruistic are doing so because it makes them feel good. No one actually cares about anyone else."
- joss82 17y agoMaybe the source of altruism is selfishness, but altruism exists anyway.
- galactus 17y agoHonestly, I could tell most of the things in that list to pretty much anyone I know without shocking them. Including my grandma. "Communism would never work" ? Gee, I think there are actually more people in the western world who would actually be shocked if they were told otherwise!
- 83457 17y agoI think you missed the point of that one "Communism would never work, because no one with power is ever willing to share it. However, the reason we were taught to hate it was because it was a threat to our masters."
- CWuestefeld 17y agoThey must something that teenagers can spot as true. Indeed. Many of these are sophomoric "truths" that a teenager might believe, but someone with more understanding would spot as falsehoods.
- iamwil 17y agoWhich ones are false? The only one I vaguely reacted to was about how women are less adept at symbol manipulation. I think there might be other sides of the coins and exceptions in exceptional situations to some of these, but overall, I didn't think they were falsehoods. Perhaps I'm too easily agreeable. But defn, I didn't find them surprising.
- ErrantX 17y agoMaybe not outright falshoods - but possibly a product of over zealous cynicism. For example: "Fathers being suspicious of their young daughters' boyfriends and dates is really just sexual jealousy" Could just as easily be attributed (nowadays) to social pressure: e.g. it is a well known in pop culture that fathers are suspicious of their daughters boyfriends and so some of them are. :) (and yeh I realise it is somewhat ironic to be disagreeing with a list of "things that cant be said" :))
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- gabrielroth 17y agoBoth you and the Reddit poster are overlooking the obvious evolutionary explanation. To a father, a daughter's eggs are a precious reproductive resource. A daughter who squanders her reproductive potential on lower-status mates is diminishing her father's genetic legacy. (This doesn't hold for sons, because they have a virtually unlimited reproductive capacity.)
- ErrantX 17y agoI was just using a random example to highlight the idea he is probably wrong in portraying that as an accurate assessment. Now we have 3 ideas - I'm inclined to agree yours has a lot of bearing.
- gometro33 17y agoTell me again why we're listening to this guy?
- asciilifeform 17y agoTell me again why we shouldn't?
- mquander 17y agoBecause most of the content is insultingly inane. I don't need some single guy with no kids telling me about how Love is not eternal. It is a simple state of endorphin chemistry. It serves a single evolutionary purpose. It lasts about three years. Fathers being suspicious of their young daughters' boyfriends and dates is really just sexual jealousy. Parents care less about their children than they do about their careers, their socioeconomic status, and what the Joneses think. That's why we have public schools instead of home education by one parent who doesn't have a "career".
- a-priori 17y ago1. Just because a mental state like love has a known chemical or evolutionary basis doesn't make it any less real. 2. I say the father is concerned about his daughter's mate selection because she carries his genes. She is a proxy for his reproductive success. He wants her to choose a good mate (e.g. someone who's more likely to stick around to care for the children) so his genes are more likely to survive. 3. No comment here, but I think it underestimates the effects of social proof in a parent's decision.
- mquander 17y ago1. My primary target of ridicule on this one was the apparently arbitrary cutoff of "three years." 2. I'm not a parent, but what you just described is not at all what normal people would mean when using the words "sexual jealousy." 3. I personally think it speaks to a pretty unbelievable sense of privilege; there are a hell of a lot of jobs that don't support a reasonable standard of living for a family of four on one income.
- marltod 17y ago#27. There will always be people who think they are Right and anyone who disagrees with them is Wrong. These people will espouse their views through Religion, Politics, Lists of "What you can't say", etc...
- rauljara 17y agoThe list has the air of, 'you're an idiot if you disagree.' I suspect the punishment that the author perceives from society has more to do with over confidence of the delivery than the content itself. Not to say I agree with all (or even most) of those statements. All of them are highly debatable. Even the ones I agree with are not clear cut. I think that's why I do find myself upset on reading the list. I find it particularly infuriating when very complicated matters are cut down into terse one liners as though no more thought is needed.
- nickpp 17y agoI say (and believe) things from that list every day. I find it funny to provoke people and test how much they can accept. You can guess how popular I am with friends and at parties. Consequently, my list of things we can't say would be very different. I guess each of us has his own limits and his own taboos.
- jimbokun 17y agoI think you are taking "can't" too literally. I think the original sense of "can't" from pg's essay meant "things you can't say and remain in good social standing with the broader society." You are choosing to reduce your social standing on purpose by uttering these remarks.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ugh 17y agoMaybe stuff you can't say (and definitly should be able to say, no doubt about that), but not stuff that is (obviously) true. I have a hard time believing that there is empirical verification for all of the things on the list. (Considering the ability of the social sciences, I would claim that - at least today - finding out whether much of what is on the list is true, is pretty much impossible. Not forever or even in principle impossible, just as things stand today impossible.)
- jimbokun 17y agoI find most of these things true by default. But I also find them things that we are obligated to strive to overcome. And I can't find a way to express this idea of overcoming human frailty and human nature, without referencing something very much like a soul, or a spiritual reality. If we are just meat machines, we are just going to do what we are going to do, and the rest is just philosophizing. I find myself unable to accept that, and I guess that's why I'm religious. To be specific, Jesus talked about most of these things as being the default human condition, and said there was absolutely no way to overcome them from within the human condition. The ability to transcend default human behavior is necessarily spiritual, almost by definition. So, I find myself mostly in agreement with this list, but my disagreement with the first item puts the rest in a different context. Human nature is immutable, unless we consider something outside the system, which I and many others refer to as "spiritual."
- ErrantX 17y agoOn of my favourite ex-girlfriends once said the following to me: I have great difficulty with this whole idea of the soul. I mean it seems to simply be a way for individuals to secure themselves a much larger place in the universe than we deserve. When you think of the grand scale of things we are less consequential than a single atom is compared to the entire earth. Seeing as we cant even truly visualize that analogy the whole truth scares the crap out of us; hence the idea of a soul. (I post that w/o wanting to derail into an argument/discussion. It always struck me as an insightful analysis of the possibilities - hence worth sharing)
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- joss82 17y agoAll items on this list can be summed up to : We always act out of self-preservation.
- philwelch 17y agoI wonder--how much of what you can't say is necessarily all that cynical? I think there might be a lot of things you can't say which are actually positive and uplifting, but only incite outrage because they question the way most people live their lives or the restrictions they place upon themselves. 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, and maybe 27 are the only items on the list which will actually shock people, and 18 and 22 will only shock liberal people. I can think of a lot of claims that are more shocking.
- Semiapies 17y ago"They must be something that society will punish you for saying...in any degree from social disapproval..." Social disapproval? What a ridiculously low bar. We might be better off trying to come up with a short-list of plausible claims that don't cause a significant number of people, somewhere in one's society, to disapprove of anyone making them.