What You Can't Say (2004)
paulgraham.com
What You Can't Say (2004)
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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#2Most active recent past posting, 120+ comments:
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#3Most active recent past posting, 120+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18221049
(Edit: just to be clear, links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted! Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so—this is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Had this repost had been a bad one, we'd have marked it as [dupe] in the title instead. The purpose of linking to previous threads is that readers find those interesting.)
Also, from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420
2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956884
2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581050
Those are the big ones.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#4The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.
But yes, this has also been discussed a lot here before.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#5> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.
Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..)
Quite the hubris to make that assumption!
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#6The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in. But yes, this has also been discussed a lot here before.
Selfishness is devilry, and devils make Truth out as falsehood and spin falsehood as true.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#7This quote is eerily prescient:
> I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
It's especially powerful when paired with this question:
> Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Combining the two yields an odd idea. The group likely to have the most things they're afraid to say out loud will be the group that was recently strong enough to enforce taboos, but is not now.
One such group is white, straight males in the US.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#8> Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist"...
This made me remember the essay "Against Murderism" by Scott Alexander. If someone would like to read a somewhat similar article to what's posted here, written by (in my opinion) a devastatingly better essayist than Graham with a lot more knowledge about human psychology and understanding of how culture works, I definitely recommend it and Alexander's popular blog, "Slatestar Codex," in general.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#9The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in. But yes, this has also been discussed a lot here before.
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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#10What is scary about this approach is that it tends to favor conservatism.
Any change achieved politically can easily be dismissed as a moral fashion (immigrant's rights, racial equality being ideal, same-sex marriage, women's rights).
This is much more of an issue when you use the methods outlined to argue against an idea. If instead you use these methods internally, this is less of an issue.