What about the people who aren’t afraid to provoke their peers? They seem to neither fall into the “stay silent out of fear” or “you just believe what you are told” categories.
What You Can't Say (2004)
31–40 of 266 posts
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#32> 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!
We can pretend to be outraged by it but he’s very likely right. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s unacceptable to say that people have different levels of ability or that some professions require more than others.
(And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted! I didn't say, or even imply, that. I just thought reference to past discussions would be useful.
Oh, I didn't in the least think you did. I meant that bit to apply to the link you kindly shared as well as the ones I listed. I added it because another commenter in the thread referenced that this had been discussed a lot before. Sorry for the misunderstanding! I still don't know a reliable way to briefly link to past discussions, or mention linking to past discussions, without it coming across to many readers as a…
Maybe the site should just automatically include links to past discussion. Perhaps hidden behind a little [+] next to or under the title in the comments view.
Then you wouldn't have to spend time posting them or feeling awkward about it.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#34> 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 understa…
[deleted]
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#35I'm confused about the comments section, maybe it's better to keep taboo comments to myself, or consider HN my confidants and enrich my belief.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#36Having seen many articles on this topic show up on HN, and this one in particular recur like a comet every year, I’d like to note a trend I feel like I see in the HN comments every time. First I see a highly upvoted top-level comment talking about how tragic it is that thoughtcrime is such a capital offense these days, and lamenting that surely the HN thought police will be coming for their head, but they still feel…
>sure, there exist people on HN who hold liberal or leftist beliefs, and there exist similar people in the Bay Area. But you know who else lives in the Bay Area? . . . Peter Thiel!
Uh, he moved to LA " — a move his camp describes as a bid to escape the political hegemony of the San Francisco Bay Area":
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-peter-thiel-20180215-...
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#37Things you can't say in the tech world, 2019: * global warming is junk science * there are approximately two genders * Trump is a great president * the US is not a racist country * Apple sucks Edit: If you're one of the many downvoters, who presumably disagree with this, I dare you to say any of these things if you work for a tech company.
African Americans consist of only 13% of the population yet commit over half of the crimes. Asians and Whites score much higher on IQ tests than African Americans and Latinos. Women have innately different interests than men.
[deleted]
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#38My laptop works every day. without fail. It's technical correctness gone mad. We have lots of people at work who are technically correct, it's sooo annoying, like just let me design my 737 how I want man/woman/neither/both. Seriously, why would you want correctness in every other aspect of your life, but not wish for members of a society to be correct (to whatever your definition) about issues of society?
[deleted]
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#39My laptop works every day. without fail. It's technical correctness gone mad. We have lots of people at work who are technically correct, it's sooo annoying, like just let me design my 737 how I want man/woman/neither/both. Seriously, why would you want correctness in every other aspect of your life, but not wish for members of a society to be correct (to whatever your definition) about issues of society?
This comment is analogically incorrect.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#40> 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!
Paul's response to this:
"Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.)
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?
We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?"