451–460 of 482 posts
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It was scientifically sourced and he did not spread it himself, others did that on 'his behalf' whilst also stripping out the sources.
He sourced things from scientific journals, but he pieced them together to fit a narrative that he knows better about what women want. It wasn't a good argument.
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Analyzing the consequences is only half the ethical story. Doing the right thing sometimes is different to what the consequences are. If you don't do the right thing in the first place regardless of the outcome, you let weaknesses in the system grow. James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good e…
> James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
>"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document.
It went viral later on.
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> James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
No he discussed it with peers and it died in discussion >"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document. It went viral later on.
It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).
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I certainly don't favor mob rule. And I don't agree that cancellation and mob rule are in any way comparable. If you want to make claims like that, much like your claims that "cancellation is authoritarianism", you're going to need to support them. Large groups of people taking action you dislike isn't mob rule. Mob rule is characterized by violence. Is large groups of people expressing their disagreement with you vi…
The problem with mobs is distinctly not that they don't attack the "right" races (or whatever else you might've meant by 'minority'). Perhaps our disagreement is representative of a broader disagreement between (philosophical) liberals and progressives, in which case this might be enlightening. In any case, the reason societies for thousands of years have evolved away from mob rule and toward rule of law isn't that m…
As a result of that, I want to push back on your use of "mob rule" in this conversation entirely. There's nothing that related mob rule and cancel culture. You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't "mob rule" make. So yes, the entire reason that we moved from mob rule was to protect minorities in a society. Otherwise the majority is able to repress the minority or minorities with no way for the minorities to defend themselves.
The liberal ideal of free speech is one such protection for the minority: the ability to speak out against injustice without fear of government silencing people. (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280992197404491777, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281002990002769920)
> Mobs also lack any sense of proportionality in their "sentencing"--it's always as severe as the mob can get away with.
I disagree with this: Look at the super smash bros and gaming community over the past week. Tons of people have been kicked out of the community, many of whom made their living by playing the game, but at the same time those who did bad, but not unforgivable, things have been offered the opportunity, or even apologized without prompt (https://twitter.com/dizzkidboogie/status/1280566816801124352) and faced no consequences. There's a sort of fatalistic argument that the outcome is always the most the mob could have gotten because it is ultimately a democratic movement, but I don't think that's the argument you're making, nor is it really useful (it's circular).
Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to sentence people unjustly. To the extent possible, the mob tried to fix the issue, it just couldn't.
> but that harm to one's livelihood and psychological well-being are all well and good.
To be clear, I think there should be more restrictions on free expression than exist today (or in other words, I don't support the level of 1A protection that exists today). However, if you do, you must apply that justly. Much as a KKK demonstration can (and have) caused harm to people's psychological well being, so too can cancellation. If you want to support free expression, you have to come to terms with the fact that some of that expression will harm people. It's unavoidable (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280994817305018369, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280995368738516992).
A common thread among classical liberals is the belief that speech can't harm people, it's just speech and it isn't real, or somesuch. More progressive groups have long realized this wasn't true. The conversation about cancel culture is forcing a reckoning about that among liberals, and instead of facing it head on and accepting that yeah, this is the cost of free speech, people are doing what you yourself have done elsewhere: try to slice the aspects of cancel culture that they dislike into a box of "not just speech". This is something that progressive groups have said for a while ("hate speech isn't free speech"), but have faced criticism for.
The idea that a threat or a boycott isn't just speech is an interesting thought. I personally am fully on board with there being no difference in theory between "a speech" and "an act", and that we should protect various acts on a gradient. But the liberal idea that speech is unique doesn't have that nuance. Speech is protected, whether it be hate speech or threats. Yet you yourself elsewhere expressed that the threat to boycott isn't protected speech, it's something else. That's decidedly illiberal.
Threatening to boycott something on moral grounds is absolutely speech. And trying to frame it as a threat that isn't protected speech is horribly problematic: how do we differentiate between the unprotected threat "I will not contract with you if you hire this individual" and what is presumably a completely reasonable threat: "I will not contract with you if you don't give me your product at below this price"? Or perhaps the even more ambiguous "I will not contract with you if you employ child laborers to help build your product".
> Lastly, I invite you to have some empathy for the people who are being targeted
I'm quite aware. I've been the target of online harassment (although not "cancellation" specifically) before. It's not, at all, fun. I didn't enjoy it.
> Imagine if you felt as though the prevailing public debate was avoiding obvious questions or being framed in a very limited scope that disenfranchised you and people like you
I often do. But I enter those conversations with curiosity and the intent to learn, not to fight.
> imagine that you wanted to raise those questions, but were told your views had been determined in advance to be racist and hateful (and then being told to go read a book which purports to "take down" your views, but really only takes down a straw man)
I've had exactly this happen to me. I read the book. I still do read books when people suggest them. Not every one, but some. I've yet to find one of these recommendations that I didn't come away from having learned something, both about empathy and about history or politics or society. But perhaps this is because I engage to learn, not to fight. So I read this more as a condemnation of the reader than the book.
> Imagine going so far out of your way to avoid offending anyone in a social media post, but a colleague gets whiff of it and begins a campaign to ruin your reputation in the company and the broader industry--you know you'll bounce back, but the sheer trauma of being targeted by strangers and acquaintances, to have work friends avoid you for their own personal preservation.
I don't think this happens, or at least not as often as you seem to think. It's not endemic. And to a large extend, I think many of the people who do this are overreacting: they're reacting to the perceived danger that's larger than the actual danger, and believe that it will be impossible to stop. If you have any sense of social capital with people, this usually is possible (https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/12754857362597928..., and again the car driver) as long as you don't respond like an asshole.
> Consider those people when you're tempted to tell yourself that it's just the rich and powerful who are affected.
I don't believe I've made that argument. I've said it was a tool that could be applied to the powerful in cases where no tool existed before. Please don't construct strawmen, yeah ;)
There are specific cases of "cancellation" that I disagree with and think were bad. There are likely some that you also disagree with. But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.
Much the same way that someone might, for example, believe that the justice system in America is a net positive despite clear problems.
If you want to have the conversation about how we put "guardrails" on cancellation, I think that's an interesting conversation to have, and a valuable conversation to have, and it's in fact one that I have been having with others, and one that I know other progressives are having privately.
But that conversation can't be had publicly, and it cannot be had constructively with people who want to destroy cancel culture entirely. Interesting corollary, and I'll leave it to you to figure out why?
But those conversations have to come from one of two places: either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech, and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech. Then the question is how do we control and interact with these groups? How do we minimize the harms? If everyone has a stronger social safety net, does cancellation matter as much? What about the ideal of restorative, instead of punitive justice? Can we improve the existing power structures and justice systems so that we don't need to resort to cancellation?
Or you come from the progressive mindset: speech isn't holy, and stronger regulations on speech in general should be acceptable. But then if cancellation is unprotected, you should probably be willing to give on hate symbols or slurs and similar forms of harassment that are so often directed at the people who are forced to resort to cancelling to achieve justice today.
I don't see how any other starting point can be productive. It's ultimately a free speech for me but not for thee discussion at that point, and that's not interesting or helpful (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281004327327240192).
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FWIR: Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling. Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was. James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may als…
James Damore threw away an engineering job at Google with a long, generalized, and internally-shared rant about women, listing off their "Qualities". He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere. Why is there sympathy for this man?
Settled out of court for a non-disclosed amount. That's somewhere, so, you're wrong.
>Why is there sympathy for this man?
Data-driven adults place a high value on facts and truth. Virtue signalers don't.
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I thought that was a poorly-researched article. I'm most familiar with the Holy Land Deli situation, and actually talking to employees and customers results in articles like https://sahanjournal.com/news/as-holy-land-grocery-attempts-... It discusses some of the significant problems they had with pay disparity and treatment of Black customers; racism occurs in the Muslim community as in others. Mounk indicates oh, Am…
> Mounk indicates oh, American dream ruined because of spoiled daughter, while actual journalism exposes systematic pay disparities and unequal treatment of customers. Huh. Not to defend the article too much, but does that really matter (I would say it depends on the timeline)? Whether the person persecuted is eventually found to have some reasons why some persecution may have been justified, that does not justify th…
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Can you explain what ideological warfare is according to the rules please? And how my comment is ideological warfare but not the people complaining about cancel culture?
I don't like definitions because every definition has loopholes and then people treat the loopholes as if they are sanctioned. Hacker News is supposed to be a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place [1] However, look at it this way: ideological battle is when people use HN to smite enemies rather than for curious exchange. Particularly, to smite enemies on hot topics. Those sorts of threads are predictable,…
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30
[1] notably, what I would call "picking on hegemons" looks incredibly biased because the last two have been the US and the UK, and so Orwell would file it under "anglophobia". I need to broaden my criticism to the dutch, the spaniards and portuguese, the romans, etc. Unfortunately all of my lifetime, and most of recent history, has been under those first two...
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So here's the thing: people can and do lose jobs all the time over accusations that they've done something wrong. Often this happens pre-employment when background checks are happening the company finds old posts, or old arrests or whatever. Sure they don't fire you, they just never offer you the job. Other times people are fired over stuff like getting arrested even if it's a case of mistaken identity and the person…
So you won't complain when you get fired for this comment in 20 years when I am president? In what country were public figures ever above the law? Pre-employment checks search for drug use and crimes, a facebook post should never be a firable or arrestable offence (outside of the 3.3k arrested in the UK).
Is it considered to be “above the law” if victims never report violations, intimidated by abuser’s social capital?
All the issues with cancel culture, wokeness et al. considered, there are upsides to living in a culture where it is possible to call out a very public person who has used their publicity to cause harm to someone and not be ridiculed.
This goes into the how, but to me the more interesting question is the 'why'. Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into? I only have one example of why; I'm a genuinely curious and open person and I like having my beliefs tested, some of my beliefs are nuanced enough that I sometimes break down my current beliefs and my reasons into blog posts. Things that I thin…
What is your opinion on "The Meritocracy Trap:..." by Daniel Markovits? I was recently told this would be a good reading to question meritocracy, or at least to understand those who do.
The claim is that elites have instituted a caste system, more or less, with enormous inequality and very little social mobility, all under the guise of meritocracy which serves to legitimise it.
[1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/
[2] link at the end here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...