111–120 of 853 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't specific to Sam, you're doing exactly what he is complaining about. Stop criticising the person and try to criticise the post instead.
Why? Is the idea that Sam is morally corrupt too dangerous, too heretical to be voiced? Should we not debate ideas?
Once the whole planet becomes a single-hive-minded social-media entity, innovation will stagnate, and the human race will slowly die off.
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though. It was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about _anything_. So on the Night in Question the night-- of…
But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no…
This really resonates with me. One reason I like working in software is that many of the limitations of other engineering disciplines (the strength of materials, the weight of concrete, etc) don’t limit our creations. Our limits are our own ability to manage complexity and the limits of what we can dream to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having an ethical outlook is a great idea. And it's good to criticise ideas you think are unethical. The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.
Fearing damage to your reputation if your ideas are unpopular is literally how society works. Unethical ideas aren't just unethical out of the ether, they usually involve harming someone or some group. Putting those ideas forward should come with risk to yourself because it definitely comes with risks to others.
I'm extremely aware of this as someone who is socially conservative in terms of abortion, gay marriage, trans issues, etc (seriously not trying to start a flame war). It's weird knowing that a large portion of the country has similar values to me, but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable. It doesn't matter that these things have zero impact on my behavior at work; y…
I am of course, not trying to start a flame war either, but my take on it is that those sorts of issues would be inappropriate to bring up at work or in a job interview in the first place, regardless of your position.
Based on your description, I believe I probably espouse the opposite position on those issues, and even though I work at a large tech company in NYC I still don't bring them up at work.
That said, I can totally see where you're coming from. I have a friend who ended up being a pretty staunch Donald Trump supporter, and I watched as a lot of colleagues ostracized him (even though he never really brought it up at work).
It takes hard work to see past issues that divide us. In the case of my friend, I always just try to focus on our shared interests. It's what has kept us friends.
In closing...there are of course different degrees of ideas that people will tolerate, and it may just be that large cities have spoken, and they don't want intolerant people in their ranks.
shrugs, walks away
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In what world are these opinions not voiced? I don't think this argument stands up to empirical scrutiny -- there's an incredibly robust network of vocally conservative student organizations.
See this list and go to the most recent years: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/ When the list started it was fairly evenly distributed between right and left leaning speakers being disinvited. Now it's much more commonly right leaning speakers.
1. Several speakers are overrepresented (I see a bunch of Milo invitations), which could well just reflect their aggressiveness at getting themselves invited / the strength of their own PR team. If one political side wants to make persecution their thing, they'll show up more commonly in that database.
2. In recent years, we've had a bunch of new forums for dissemination of ideas, which is a good thing. Twitter didn't exist in 2002. YouTube didn't exist in 2002. Podcasts didn't exist in 2002. Smartphones in people's pockets didn't exist in 2002. Today, anyone who wants to know what any of these speakers' opinions are can find out, easily, what they are, without needing them invited to campus. (And anyone who doesn't will just skip the talk anyway.)
3. In Milo's case specifically, he wanted to out a bunch of undocumented students on-stage. That I think doesn't fit the profile of political views being censored. (I agree that preventing him from speaking technically counts as censorship, but it's a very different discussion.)
4. Fundamentally, this list and the original article here both suffer from a blind belief in the "Great Man" theory. If person X doesn't express an opinion, or publicize their idea, or something, chances are absurdly high that someone else will have the same opinion or idea, too. If Newton were imprisoned for his alchemy, however unjust that might have been for Newton as a person, Leibniz would still have invented calculus. What I'd like to see is if certain types of ideas are being censored, not whether certain individuals who happen to hold those ideas are being censored.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what world are these opinions not voiced? I don't think this argument stands up to empirical scrutiny -- there's an incredibly robust network of vocally conservative student organizations.
I'm rather assuming OP was referring to the sort of culture that produces this sort of discourse: http://quillette.com/2017/12/11/problematic-poor-taste/ If the US Academic reaction to such a straight forward request was so hostile, then I can imagine many people feeling unable to voice actually difficult opinions
"Unfortunate." "Encourage the conference's organizers to change its name."
I'm a researcher. I'm also unusually thin-skinned. Compared to the naked brutality that is the peer review process, that's nothing.
Is your concern that people shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about trivia? I'm afraid academia's definitely guilty of that. Or that you disagree with the complaint? Perfectly fair, but then so did lots of the other people on the list. Or is it something else? I'm finding it hard to parse.
I might have more sympathy for this post if I only knew about it in the abstract and wasn't familiar with specific cases. For example, lately among Bay Area types, and especially the Rationalist community, there's been a surge of interest in eugenics and scientific racism, now euphemistically rebranded as "human biodiversity". It tends to take the form of hand-wringing about how "people from certain regions" have low…
California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember. Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
Mad scientists are born not entirely because they're mad, but because the world doesn't appreciate their intention and brand them as villains.
Once you're branded as a villain, you have no other way to go but than deeper into villainism.