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What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#191

Post by pointerpointer »

hmry wrote: post #187
pointerpointer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marking opinions is not censorship. You mean when a comment is not readable anymore it is 'marking' instead of censoring? So if China hides peoples opinion it is 'marking', like being a good thing? I don't get this. > more people will write pointless responses Is that scientifically proven?

They are supposed to be readable still. If you can't then that's an accessibility issue, not censorship. Try turning up your screens contrast.

I don't have accessibility issues and I don't make this up. I've seen comments with a text color of #eee, I had to go into the inspector to make it readable.. Maybe that has been changed/fixed already which would make my entire comment pointless indeed. Personally I think grey out text should not exceed about #ccc.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#192

Post by codr7 »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #128

I'd like to think that, like opening paragraph brings up, this piece is an old snapshot that brings some embarrassment today. At the time it was posted I would have been excited about it. 15 years later, indulgently and exhaustively defining the well worn subject of heresy feels pretty dull. Like most celebrations of heresy, this skips the fact that orthodoxy has its own value: coordination. Parents teach their kids…

The point stands, allowing your mind to roam freely without paying attention to what others might think is the only way to find truth within.

The vast majority of heresies are authentically wrong? How exactly did that happen? The opposite sounds more likely to me.

I used to enjoy PG's writings a lot more than anything that ever came out of YC, that much I know.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#193

Post by matheusmoreira »

johnr2 wrote: post #185
gruez wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 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. examples?

> examples? Person A is accused of criminal act X. Person B: "It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place." Person C: "X-apologist!"

Stallman's resignation in a nutshell.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#194

Post by jonny383 »

hmry wrote: post #187
pointerpointer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marking opinions is not censorship. You mean when a comment is not readable anymore it is 'marking' instead of censoring? So if China hides peoples opinion it is 'marking', like being a good thing? I don't get this. > more people will write pointless responses Is that scientifically proven?

They are supposed to be readable still. If you can't then that's an accessibility issue, not censorship. Try turning up your screens contrast.

Comments get further and further greyed out as they are voted down more and more, to the point where they do become unreadable. I've manually opened dev-tools just to read comments before. This is not an accessibility issue, this is definitely a censorship issue. Why should an unpopular opinion get greyed out to the point it's unreadable?

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#196

Post by TeMPOraL »

ixtli wrote: post #130
taylormckay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Wikipedia: The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a neologism coined by American mathematician Eric Weinstein, and popularized in a 2018 editorial by Bari Weiss. The term refers to a group of public personalities who oppose what they see as the dominance of progressive identity politics and political correctness in the media and academia.

Thank you. Strange that that article doesn’t at all mention Mencius Moldbug even though that’s clearly where this all inherits from.

How so? Doesn't seem related, except maybe that I'd expect the IDW to criticize Moldbug's ideas.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#197

Post by luckylion »

rayalez wrote: post #182
buboard wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the inverse , but a corrolary: With heretical ideas being purged from each Church, the churches have doubled down on absurdness

Another somewhat related thing is "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs": https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/ZQG9cwKbct2L... When more moderate, reasonable, or relatively skeptical people leave the group, people who remain are, on average, more fanatical and extreme. Which leads to even more extreme viewpoints, which pushes out more and more people who previously might have been acting as a voice of mode…

Purity spiraling has always seemed to me to be a good differentiator to tell apart the pragmatic and the purely ideological. The pragmatic will happily tolerate some dissent from their position as long as it gets them closer to their goal (even if they fundamentally disagree with it). The purely ideological will vehemently reject anything that isn't purely their flavor and will happily sacrifice making any advance in their direction if it isn't on their exact terms.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#198

Post by TeMPOraL »

bsanr2 wrote: post #65
undefined1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) T…

That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.

It's good analogy and it's really much simpler. Physics is grounded in reality. Literary criticism isn't. This is because most of the former is experimentally verifiable, or follows from experimentally verifiable results via a chain of rigorous formal reasoning[0]. In other words: you can't bullshit others as much in physics as you can in literature, and more importantly for being smart, you can't bullshit yourself. You have constant feedback from observable reality, which lets you refine your thinking abilities much better.

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[0] - You'll note that the weirdest, most nonsense things in physics happen in places that are furthest from any experimental verification.

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