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E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: E Pur Si Muove

#391

Post by dmode »

kelukelugames wrote: post #327
dmode wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that 50% of the people in the Bay Area are foreign born, and have no experience of the South, I find your comment "a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country" to be hyperbolic. May be you are projecting based upon a few interactions ?

Have you seen this clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYRkzznsc0 The man is an elected official in Alabama. Also an idiot and a bigot who think only Christians can be elected to Congress. It's okay to look down on him for being ignorant, but a lot of the comments attack his regional accent. That's not okay.

Exactly right

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#392

Post by ThrowAwayFSp »

Houshalter wrote: post #378
cortesoft wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, another way of putting it is "Liberals are tolerant of anything except intolerance" If I want to be a tolerant and accepting person, do I have to accept someone who wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body? This is similar to a love of freedom; I want everyone to have freedom, but that means having to restrict the freedom to…

That's how they justify it, but empirically it doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think it's just based on how much of a threat a gro…

Where do you draw the "control a woman's body" line. Let's say a woman choose to abort on partial birth a healthy baby because she do not want it. Is a healthy 9 months gestation newborn part of the woman's body?

You're spinning the argument and calling the other side "intolerant". You're part of the problem Altman is mentioning. Sad thing is that probably you are not aware of that.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#393

Post by argv_empty »

Cyberdog wrote: post #58
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a funny assertion to say that you're less free to speak in SV where the worst you'll get is a tongue-lashing vs China where the worst you'll get is quite a lot worse. How would you even fix this freedom? Somehow constrain people to not speak their mind when they disagree with you? Constraining them through government would obviously make us less free so that's out. Constraining them through culture is no…

"The worst you'll get is a tongue-lashing?" Not even close. It is quite ordinary for SV employees to be fired or "resign" after being caught participating in wrongthink. Eich is the most famous example, but Apple's former chief of diversity is a more recent one. No, this is not quite as severe as being arrested and imprisoned for thinking the wrong things. But career-wise, at least, it can be almost as disastrous.

It is quite ordinary for SV employees to be fired or "resign" after being caught participating in wrongthink. Eich is the most famous example

Eich was free to think whatever he wanted, and he spent many years doing exactly that. What he turned out not to be free to do was enforce certain ideals he held on others.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#394

Post by mundo »

bambax wrote: post #356
mundo wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essay was not so much against "life extension is bad" as against "people who think life extension is good are bad."

Fair point, but some ideas reflect on who expresses them. If you think gay people are evil, it says something about you (usually, not good). I think the same is true about life extension.

See, that sounds innocuous enough. Yet, this essay strikes a chord with me as delineating a real and serious problem.

Best way I can explain why is an anecdote. The other day, someone asked if anyone could recommend a book on JS, and someone else suggested "Javascript: the good parts" by Douglas Crockford. The following exchange occurred:

A: Oh, not Crockford, he's a sexist.

B: Really? I hadn't heard, what'd he do?

A: Ah, I forget.

Turns out, the accusations against Crockford were (as far as I can tell) pretty weak and largely abandoned, but most people never read about that, they just saw the initial salvo and took it as gospel. That's where we are right now - we have gotten to the point where we take accusations of bias seriously, but not yet the point where we always make them that way. We have the power to destroy the careers of bad people, but not yet the responsibility to use it wisely or sparingly. Right now, the result of that is an understandable reticence to speak frankly about controversial topics and to hash out ideas in public, which is what the essay is describing.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#395

Post by CalChris »

dang wrote: post #366
CalChris wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. Y'all campaign against San Francisco values. Pelosi is basically a code word for it even though she's from a Baltimore political dynasty. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=644311... San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco. http://www.breitb…

> Oh please. Y'all Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your…

I lived in the South and I know what y’all means. Given what Altman was writing about I’ll put this down as unintentional irony.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#396

Post by jdtang13 »

dmode wrote: post #388
jdtang13 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not true. The Bay Area is ideologically safer in only two regards: you can criticize the city, and you can criticize the government. If you have personal beliefs that are even a tiny bit different from orthodoxy, Beijing is a far safer place.

Really ? Do you openly discuss LGBT rights in Beijing ? What about rights of Uighur folks in China ? Do you discuss that in Beijing ? What about Tibetian rights ? Is that discussed ?

Yes. You can talk to people in Beijing, especially college students, about these issues and more. One of my friends is an ethnic minority in China and talked about these issues with Han Chinese folk with no negative consequences. Many young people in China are also ready to talk about LGBT issues. There is no problem.

As long as you don't try to subvert the government or anything, you can talk about it.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#397

Post by SwellJoe »

angersock wrote: post #335
SwellJoe wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houston is always surprising to people who've never been there (and was surprising to me when I first moved there as a 19-year-old kid). It's among the friendliest places I've ever lived. And, for all its horrible traffic, the drivers are among the most polite I've seen, as well (though they drive terrifyingly fast on average). It's one of the biggest/best cities that nobody's ever heard of or thought about. Great mu…

One follow-on to your final paragraph: the thing is that small-town Texas (depending on the area) does look a lot different from Georgia. It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport). In some ways (if you…

I agree with you; rural Texas is more like western rural cities than the deep south, including California. I pretty much always argue that Texas is not part of "the south", and often get ranted at because Texas is so far south...it's as southern as you can get in the US, but I think its character is just so different from SC, NC, GA, AL, etc. that it doesn't make sense to group them in most conversations.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#398

Post by dang »

cortesoft wrote: post #340
btilly wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that "logical response" is that it is wrong. Here is a simple demonstration. Consider the conservative argument that when you raise the minimum wage, elementary economics of supply and demand results in fewer jobs for poor people. I guarantee you that if you present this argument to 10 liberal friends, more than half will have a strong emotional response against it. While responding, some are likely…

No, the 'logical response' isn't wrong, it just isn't followed by all self-proclaimed 'liberals'. Of course some liberals will have emotional reponses to something that is not actually an intolerant opinion, like your example. There is no admission requirements to be a 'liberal', so we can't deny entry to people who don't understand the difference between a moral question and an implementation question like minimum w…

I think btilly was making more of an empirical observation than arguing from the definition of liberalism.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#399

Post by int_19h »

letsbehonest wrote: post #329
nine_k wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While in SF / SV, can you feel the general air of the ideas acceptable here? A small experiment: take an idea which obviously contradicts that air, and imagine rationally discussing it with people who you typically meet in SF. Will it be more than slightly uncomfortable? Scott Alexander wrote this great piece, I leave a link to it here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... For instant enlig…

While on HN, you can feel the general air of acceptable ideas. Sam Altman is not concerned that a leftist can't have a sane discussion on this website. But he IS concerned that a bigoted racist can't be openly bigoted at work. Weird. I wonder why it is that Sam Altman is so concerned about the rights of bigots to be openly bigoted? Definitely couldn't be related to his relationship with Peter Thiel. No way...

I'm a "leftist", and I had plenty of sane and interesting discussions on this website.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#400

Post by Houshalter »

Most of the comments here are about culture war and missing the more interesting point of the essay. We knew political tribalism was getting bad in SF. But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.

These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.

Another very important point was missed here. The smartest people can have the absolute weirdest political beliefs. They are the least likely to conform. And the most likely to not shut up about their weird ideas even when the consequences are obvious.

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