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E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

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131–140 of 853 posts

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#131

Post by igor47 »

psyc wrote: post #91
ak_yo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. The exchange seems to go like this: A: "I think black people are genetically inferior." B: "I think that's a bigoted thing to say that has historically caused a lot of harm to a lot of people." A: "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?" Person B is engaging with that idea, it's just that they think it's completely indefensible. I have a hard time understanding how Person A thinks this conver…

You’re leaving out the part where B whips up a Twitter mob to demand A be fired and ousted from the industry.

Ah, we come to the heart of it. If Sam had said, "Twitter is a problem because it enables dangerous groupthink, promotes overreaction, and stifles meaningful discourse" then (a) his argument would have been a lot more clear and (b) I would have been 100% onboard

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#132

Post by tclancy »

fundingshovel wrote: post #118
Analemma_ wrote: post #41

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…

In general people from certain regions do have lower IQs... What makes this bad thing to study? Is the cause culture? Genetics? Education? I think the entire point of article is that asking the question somehow makes you a bad person, instead of a person with a controversial idea.

>In general people from certain regions do have lower IQs

It's been 23 years since The Bell Curve and I am still waiting for someone who makes this statement and seems to have a solid grasp on the problem of general IQ scores across wildly different populations. I think there's a reason I never see it . . .

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#133

Post by orthoganol »

You know Sam, if you stopped censoring controversial positions or posts from hacker news I might take you seriously.

Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#134

Post by sampl »

> You can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right

A good philosophy for personal projects and starting companies too, IMO. Seems to be a pattern among indie hacker types.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#135

Post by olympus »

jonny_eh wrote: post #70

Uh oh, Sam has been "red pilled". Without providing more examples/specifics, it just reads as a tirade against the boogeyman of "political correctness". Is he upset that the SF crowd rejected Peter Thiel for endorsing Trump? Or is he upset that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla? Who knows? He's being so coy.

Maybe he doesn't want to give the specific example that he's thinking of because he doesn't want to be ostracized by people that automatically assume that he's now a Trump lover. That was the entire point of his post.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#136

Post by [deleted] »

CPLX wrote: post #29

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.

[deleted]

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#137

Post by dsr_ »

teekert wrote: post #49
hprotagonist wrote: post #3

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…

They all stood on the shoulders of giants, who were themselves part of huge and ancient communities of people working together.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#138

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

nilkn wrote: post #122
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #7

Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized? Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?

An example that comes to mind is that Apple's chief of diversity (a black woman) was recently fired and replaced by a white woman for the following comment: > "There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation." I find this to be a pretty mundane statement, and it's fairly spect…

1) That's very different from the example Sam gave.

2) Is that a problem of speech or a problem of the authoritarian nature of corporate power?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#139

Post by dominotw »

pmyteh wrote: post #96
dominotw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Results of this debate disagree with you https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...

The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the speakers that they've found to present it, even sympathy for someone who got obviously crushed by their opponent. When I was a debater I've seen some truly outrageous motions get p…

I understand. I was responding to comment that said its totally baseless caricature.

I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account?

Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#140

Post by geofft »

psyc wrote: post #111
geofft wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is the idea that Sam is morally corrupt too dangerous, too heretical to be voiced? Should we not debate ideas?

I find this sort of too-clever reflexive argument constructing impossible to take seriously. I propose a new fallacy: Argumentum ad Gödel.

I'm pretty serious with this argument, though. The entire point of the post here is that no idea is too odious to be considered unworthy of polite debate. Life extension? Sure! Gay people are evil? Sure! (For some reason, and against all evidence, we hope nobody will be convinced of that.) Eugenics is great? Sure! People of a certain race are genetically inferior and unworthy of human rights? Sure! Those who are apostate from my religion should be killed? Sure! This article advocates for literally no bounds on what should be considered an idea worthy of protection, because who knows when a "wacky" idea might be secretly good. I don't believe I'm exaggerating one bit from what the article says. (I might be exaggerating from what the author means, but only because we're supposed to self-censor some of those ideas, and the article is unclear on which ones remain worthy of self-censorship.)

So why are we treating "This person is morally bankrupt" as the sort of argument that is unworthy of polite debate? What fundamentally makes it a worse idea than any of the above?

I think there's an incompleteness problem here, yes - but I think that problem genuinely applies to the original argument. I'm just pointing it out. (And the gist of The Abolition of Man, which I mentioned in another comment, is essentially an incompleteness argument against the idea that you can have an ethical society evaluate its own ethics without a base moral code.)

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