241–250 of 373 posts
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> What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite. PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
Not if you apply the point-of-view that etiquette is what the unethical use to keep their unethical practices under-questioned.
While there’s no doubt that one can find cases to which this applies, I’d think that applying that broadly to the vast majority of people who are arguing in good faith would stifle debate.
This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle…
You articulated so well what I've been observing. With the widening political divide, we find ourselves in this weird situation where any decision makers are swarmed with moral outrage attacks unless they're the bastions of politically correct ideology. An increasing number of topics are taboo because merely opening up a discussion around them summons the moral outrage army. Moral outrage has become most effective so…
More recently, social issues have been the wedge between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The Republicans leveraged abortion and contraception because the killing of innocent babies via abortion and/or contraception is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Now progressives leverage LGBQT+ rights because erasing the humanity of a living person is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Climate change has both sides too; killing the planet for the convenience of cars and plastic bags is worst; sacrificing human economic progress and security for some stupid turtles and this made-up sea level thing is the worst.
Moral outrage is just a tool. Research is accumulating on the addictiveness of self-righteousness. Moral superiority and outrage get people to do stuff (vote, give money, show up at protests, sign petitions), in a way that self-reflective questioning does not.
How could we engineer things so that "moderate compromise with room to listen to the views of others" would get people to act?
(Edited to add a paper on self-righteousness, with experiments! http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf)
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This board could have been non-partisan, filled with leading thinkers in the space from academia and industry, and given meaningful access and authority. Google management decided to make it clear the whole thing was a sham by specifying they'll work a whole 8 hours a year and inviting someone who was wholly unqualified. There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this i…
what is non-partisan? Do you believe there are more than two genders, or not? you either answer a question like that, or don't. If you don't answer, people don't know your opinion, thus you are "non-partisan" via ambiguity.
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>I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary. I think we got here because of telecommunications and the internet. The world is joining up and a nascent collective mind is emerging. Like the individual mind it has a set of ideas about who it is and what it should be doing, a.k.a. an 'ego'. Many potential thoughts in a normal mind are continually being censored/suppressed because they do not conform to those fixed i…
I'm not sure it's anything to do with the internet. A lot of this stuff is taking place offline - shouting people down at lectures and things like that. My own theory is it's due to the decline of religion. I say that as a non religious person who has lately started wondering if I'm so right to be that way (I never used to question the righteousness of scientific atheism). Religion can be defined as a moral framework…
This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle…
Dear Hackernews, you are arguing with others who think banning people for different opinions is fine, but also downvoting and flagging them at the same time.
Nothing to see here :)
This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle…
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The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find comprise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easily."
- The Coming Of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, page 84.
So what now? No ethics board at all and it just proceeds without ethics oversight? Isn’t that state worse than having someone you disagree with on some principles but in theory provide constructive criticism where the politics don’t intersect? I mean, making some jobs obsolete or making decisions on recidivism etc I think are distinct from what a panelist thinks about an unrelated issue. Moreover this person didn’t p…
Oh, I think the problem might just be a little bit more complicated than that. In a sense ( and this is a gross exaguration, but just to frame the concept ), an ethics panel formed by Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and David Berkowicz would not be an improvement over nothing at all. It would be a step backwards, and the world would be worse for tolerating it. This is not to say that any of…
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Thank you for your candid answer. Can we then sum up your stance in two statements: 1: not all ethics viewpoints are equal, and yours are superior 2: in this instance, you believe that the above opposed viewpoint does not deserve any representation at an ethics board, even if it is represents a significant population of the US and the world? Is that correct? This is your stance?
I think you're confusing my personal viewpoint with my observation on what Google appears to have done in this specific context. But for what it's worth, in the specific question of trans individuals, my personal view point is that majorities have been wrong before, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be wrong again. This is one of those times. Trans exclusionism doesn't pass the "Do not ban that which is…
What's the point of a discussion if the only people that are allowed to participate all agree on everything?
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> The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. I grew up in small town rural Pennsylvania in a lower middle class family. I'm certainly now someone who is "in the industry". What differentiates me from myself twenty years ago is twenty years of learning and experience. I went to school, I had jobs. What you're implying is that even someone like me wouldn't have a representative opinio…
I think there's a subtle misreading here. The phrase "leading thinkers" is loaded with meaning. It's a phrase used almost exclusively by one political grouping to mean "people who think just like us". It should be obvious that it can't have any objective meaning (leading according to whom?). To see this try replacing it with "leading thinktanks". Sounds quite different now, right? Thinktanks are organisations associa…