The Kolmogorov option • Hacker News Board

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#181

Post by pavlov » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:43 AM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #150

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've now seen several defences of this, and it confuses me. The whole "Marxist Intellectuals are destroying our society from the inside by promoting the gay lifestyle" thing only makes sense in terms of being a dog-whistle for people who don't like jews or gays or liberals generally. It doesn't make any sense to me if I take it literally. How is Peter Thiel or Tim Cook being able to be open about their sexuality bad…

Your comment is dishonest. That isn't a quote from the memo. It is: [7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race…

You admit the mainstream contemporary left is not advocating for Marxist class warfare. So why do you call them Marxists?

The talk of "Marxist intellectuals transitioning into gender and race politics" is bizarre because any such shift would have happened around 40 years ago. Those individuals are mostly dead or retired. What do they have to do with working conditions at Google?

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#182

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:45 AM UTC

This quote comes to mind:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#183

Post by beaconstudios » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:46 AM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #140

benchaney wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not all subjects are amenable to "rational discussion", since it's inherently a restricted format which has implicit rules about what does and does not count as "rational". I don't see how this follows. Are you suggesting that some topics can only be discussed if the discussion includes a non-sequitur. > Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful. On the balance it seems…

No, the claim is that you cannot have context-free universally true premises for every type discussion. Most of this discussion outrage is based on people on all sides not realising they start from different, inherently subjective premises, and then believe they can build a universally true objective claim on that card house. EDIT: This is why I believe people in STEM fields would really benefit from spending some ti…

if you throw out the concept of objective truth (a staple of postmodern philosophy) then there is no debating at all, because the whole point of debate is to get to the truth at the heart of a matter. With postmodernism all you have is interest groups waging war on each other to pursue their own benefit.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#184

Post by paganel » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:48 AM UTC

guillaumec wrote: post #50

I really enjoyed reading the The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the state of mind of the population during Stalin leadership. He relates the story of a conference of the party where nobody in the room dared to be the last one to stop applauding in honor of Stalin. After a while everybody started to realize how stupid the situation was, yet they couldn't stop clapping because they all knew that this…

> He relates the story of a conference of the party where nobody in the room dared to be the last one to stop applauding in honor of Stalin.

For those interested of how that might look, here's a clip of people applauding Ceausescu just one month before his fall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk_EnsIr8lw .

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#185

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:49 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #152

tpeo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an equivocation. There's such a thing as an is/ought distinction. The fact that there might be some rational description of morally abhorrent behavior doesn't lead to the conclusion that that behavior is acceptable . Understanding doesn't mean accepting. Darwinism, for instance, doesn't imply Social Darwinism. Neither do theories of criminal behavior attempt to legitimize crime. And if anything, anyone who's…

And if anything, anyone who's appalled by these things should actually be interested in studying the conditions under which these things might happen I agree with this very strongly. I'm not sure if (or why) this leads to the requirement to have a rational discussion with proponents of abhorrent ideas. It's interesting. I used to believe that abhorrent ideas should be confronted. But I'm not longer convinced - it see…

> I'm not sure if (or why) this leads to the requirement to have a rational discussion with proponents of abhorrent ideas.

Who decides what is abhorrent? In what sense? Rational, yet undesirable?

> abhorrent ideas should be confronted

This is an entirely different think. A constructive (cooperative), rational discussion is different from an adversarial debate.

> to allow abhorrent ideas to spread

Again, who decides which ideas are to be silenced? And without discussion, in this case.

You are essentially advocating restricting individual choice, by restricting available information; pushing individuals towards the "correct" viewpoint by banning advocacy of any other. The US, in particular, and many other western countries, were founded on opposition to this philosophy.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#186

Post by typon » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:51 AM UTC

This was such an incredibly self serving post that it's almost funny. Thanks for the bravery Scott, you chose not to argue for what you believe in from your position of immense privilege. A martyr indeed.

In any case, people like Scott and others in this thread sound so incredibly childish when talking about "rational" argument being the antidote to the venom of "political correctness" ruining western society. You know what's ruining western society? Income inequality, racial discrimination, mass consumerism, disregard for environmental destruction, etc. That this is the hill where software engineers choose to fight their battle for western civilization is just depressing

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#187

Post by beaconstudios » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:52 AM UTC

Sniffnoy wrote: post #162

pjc50 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all subjects are amenable to "rational discussion", since it's inherently a restricted format which has implicit rules about what does and does not count as "rational". It also tends to presume its own weightlessness. Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful.

> Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful. ...you realize where this goes, right? Like -- suppose you're right; and suppose you're given the power to suppress all such harmful discussions. You apply it. No more such discussion. Great. Now suppose this occurs but in fact you're wrong. We must then ask: How would you find out that you're wrong? Well, in such a case, you p…

I wish I could upvote this comment multiple times, you've laid out very accurately the common underpinnings between all these anti-free-speech ideologies and what they end up as (hint: it's Nazism/Stalinism).

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#188

Post by red_admiral » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:55 AM UTC

> This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about

Isn't this exactly what safe spaces were originally meant to be?

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#189

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:57 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #130

SidiousL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you find a rational person willing to defend any of the points you made, then yes, it is wrong to be against that discussion.

Well.. Your comment was marked as "dead" and I just vouched for it, so does that count as not trying to censor every idea that disagrees with me? ;) But I'm not convinced. There have been plenty of racists with arguments they consider rational. I think they are factually wrong, but surely the real point is "what you are saying is offensive and immoral" rather than try to argue that (eg) the costs associated with keep…

If a viewpoint is censored (or controversial), it is human nature to seek it out, end even compensate it with more "weight" than it might otherwise be given. This is why the latest in rhetoric is not to censor something, but to explicitly acknowledge it and damn it with faint praise (or claim it is mediocre, boring, denounced etc).

Furthermore, another way to damn a viewpoint is to associate it with poor arguments; or to strengthen a claim surround it with strong (or at least battle-tested/accepted/familiar) arguments. You should be happy that a true claim is discussed, creating stronger arguments, and making those better known; and that false claims are also discussed, explicitly demonstrating the poor arguments used to defend them.

Now, whether a poor/strong argument is recognised as such, that is another issue, and goes to the "rational literacy" of the general public, which certainly is an issue (on both sides).

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#190

Post by beaconstudios » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:57 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #88

habitue wrote: post #33

Let's say this is about the Google memo. And let's say, for the sake of argument, you're a person who thinks Damore had some good points and some bad points but you think the hysterically censorious response to him was way over the line. But you don't want to become a pariah yourself, so you stay quiet about it. The argument Damore was making was fiddly, kind of subtle and takes a long time to explain, it's not worth…

Damore is himself deeply buried in identity politics, as can be determined by his use of the codeword "Marxist intellectuals" in one of his footnotes.

rather than edge around your accusations, it might be better to state plainly what you're accusing him of. You're suggesting he's using "Marxist intellectuals" as a codeword for Jews, and that he's actually a Nazi (or at the very least a conspiracy theorist anti-semite) who is carefully wording his ideological diatribe so it sounds less ominous?

This is usually the accusation that's thrown out by ideologues to silence the middle ground by accusing them of being secret ideologues on the other side. Every communist is just "punching Nazis" and every fascist is just "stopping the red threat" when in actual fact they're both just oppressing moderates. Maybe think about that before you casually accuse people of being Nazis based on subtle inferences.