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What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#251

Post by Mathnerd314 »

trashtester wrote: post #173
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how good the enforcement is. If orbital space lasers were set up to incinerate anyone committing an act of violence within a few seconds, it's hard to see how incitement to violence would work. Comparable examples might be getting blocked for posting too fast and triggering the automated spam filter, or trying to harass someone by mailing them $100 bills. At the moment police response time is still 15 m…

Not sure if you realize the irony of such extreme violence as a tool to counter violence. Perhaps you don't consider it violence if it is within the law? If so, is it violence to execute people for homosexual acts? What about ideologues that seek to introduce the the death penalty for gay sex? Or is such legal actions only non-violence if it is used to enforce the values that you happen to hold yourself?

Violence seems to be an innate animal tendency, of course a system to counteract it would be extreme. I suppose such a system would not necessarily be violent, e.g. drones equipped with tasers are mostly nonlethal. And since people react to alarm clocks in the morning perhaps all that's needed are drones with loudspeakers ordering people around. But since it's a thought experiment I went for the zapper.

I was thinking of an objective definition of violence like causing death or serious injury. The death penalty is rarely used in most countries and seems unlikely to significantly contribute to overall violence statistics, compared to police shootings or natural disputes. The Hiroshima bomb is debatable as it might have caused more radiation deaths than an invasion from Japan would have. But a total surveillance system would not obviously cause any more deaths and could be used to prevent them.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#252

Post by wubblebubble »

musicale wrote: post #79
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…

Thought experiments like this may reflect our own attitudes more than reality. Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences. For example, peer review in CS seems to be highly random, often biased (depending on reviewer and author rather than the paper) and only weakly correlated with quality and impact. Moreover, there seems to be a problem with reproducibility (as well as d…

>Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences.

to what extent? surely it's significantly less than that of math and "hard sciences"

>I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling

working in a sweatshop is grueling work. when you're in a factory for 12 hours a day what's being worked is your obedience, your self-control. not necessarily strength or intelligence.

There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually,in lower-to-middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it.

The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#253

Post by psilocipher »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #245
psilocipher wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/teacher-fired-refusi...

This is not an example of someone being fired for saying or believing that there are two genders. This was someone deliberately misgendering and ungendering a trans boy (not non-binary) in class after having been ordered to stop.

The teacher felt strongly that the student's gender was biological and not something the student could arbitrarily choose to change. The teacher felt that using a pronoun other than a biologically consistent one was "lying", and it was against the teacher's religion to lie, so the teacher would not use the student's chosen pronoun. Did I miss something?

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#255

Post by DuskStar »

liara_k wrote: post #250
gruez wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing it's the shift for advocating for equality to advocating for diversity. eg. Harvard admissions where Asians and Whites have a handicap in an effort to increase diversity.

Diversity e.g., in higher education admissions isn't just about what's fair for the students, it's also about what's best for the university and the students. Universities are naturally xenophillic--both in their desire to understand more about the world and in their desire to influence it. Exploration and openness to new experiences and ideas are also important intellectual values important to develop in students. A…

> As a more concrete example... $IVY_LEAGUE doesn't gain that much by having its average standard test score go from the 99th to the 99.5th percentile.

Assuming accurate tests and a normal distribution of scores, shouldn't that be approximately equivalent to going from the 80th to 90th percentile?

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#256

Post by PavlovsCat »

atoav wrote: post #181
pointerpointer wrote: post #179

This definitely applies to HN. HN should not grey out down voted comments. It is like there is no freedom of thought and speech on HN. If many people don't like what you're saying your idea gets censored while it might be very true. That is inherently wrong IMHO. edit: HN, why not just showing how many up and down votes a comment gets? I am really curious why someones comment should be invisible. Sometimes I'm readin…

I have never seen a comment that I couldn’t read because it was greyed out. I always saw it more or less as sign that I should either take the greyed out comment with a grain of salt (which makes it less likely for me to post a snarky reply underneath) or it shows me that the thing said there (or how it was said) is at least viewed as controversial. Marking opinions is not censorship. Even if you’d mark posts with a…

> when the communicative tool of greying out is taken away, more people will write pointless responses.

It's as much a communication tool as physical violence is. It conveys zero information. Not having this "tool" would require people to think and argue, which is far from pointless.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#257

Post by PavlovsCat »

pointerpointer wrote: post #191
hmry wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use Firefox, something I made a while ago might be useful to you, I certainly wouldn't want to read HN without anymore: https://pastebin.com/8StFpps9

To make comments readable, only the lines from 86 to 106 are needed.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#258

Post by damnyou »

psilocipher wrote: post #253
pgcj_poster wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an example of someone being fired for saying or believing that there are two genders. This was someone deliberately misgendering and ungendering a trans boy (not non-binary) in class after having been ordered to stop.

The teacher felt strongly that the student's gender was biological and not something the student could arbitrarily choose to change. The teacher felt that using a pronoun other than a biologically consistent one was "lying", and it was against the teacher's religion to lie, so the teacher would not use the student's chosen pronoun. Did I miss something?

What in the world is a biologically consistent pronoun?

A pronoun operates in a purely social context.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#259

Post by trashtester »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #251
trashtester wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you realize the irony of such extreme violence as a tool to counter violence. Perhaps you don't consider it violence if it is within the law? If so, is it violence to execute people for homosexual acts? What about ideologues that seek to introduce the the death penalty for gay sex? Or is such legal actions only non-violence if it is used to enforce the values that you happen to hold yourself?

Violence seems to be an innate animal tendency, of course a system to counteract it would be extreme. I suppose such a system would not necessarily be violent, e.g. drones equipped with tasers are mostly nonlethal. And since people react to alarm clocks in the morning perhaps all that's needed are drones with loudspeakers ordering people around. But since it's a thought experiment I went for the zapper. I was thinkin…

Even if you are toning down your proposal, you still seem to argue for something that resembles an extreme police state.

Strip away the sci fi terminology, replace the space lasers with police armed with sniper rifles, and replace the tasers with batons, and you have technologies that are available today (except for the surveillance needed to identify the offenders, but for that part, you could have the super-AI needed foor the task feed informatino to the police instead of to satelites/drones.)

While efficient law enforcement is important, "perfect" law enforcement is likely to cause more harm than it will prevent.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#260

Post by psilocipher »

damnyou wrote: post #258
psilocipher wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teacher felt strongly that the student's gender was biological and not something the student could arbitrarily choose to change. The teacher felt that using a pronoun other than a biologically consistent one was "lying", and it was against the teacher's religion to lie, so the teacher would not use the student's chosen pronoun. Did I miss something?

What in the world is a biologically consistent pronoun? A pronoun operates in a purely social context.

Born with a penis = he/him/his. Born with a vagina = she/her/hers. It's genetic. https://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html. The whole "science" thing. You know, women have eggs, can get pregnant. Men, have sperm, can impregnate. Perhaps this basic lack of understanding is at the heart of the gender pronoun debate. Some people simply don't know, and refuse to accept that there are specific biological differences between men and women. A bit like flat-earthers.
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