Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 882 posts

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#231

Post by chippy »

naveen99 wrote: post #216
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #141

The part of the essay that made me the most introspective was: " Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote: I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. " I had to stop and ask mysel…

It’s a weakly specified / trick question. Do you get to keep your knowledge of the world as it is today ? if not how are you different than people 200 years ago ? So you can just ask what your ancestor’s position would have been. Which we already know the answer to.

People don't want to admit that evil is done by people like ourselves. Asking what your dead evil ancestors would do is different from asking what you would do.

If you were born back then, with no knowledge of the future, you would be a Good Person no matter the conditions, right?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#232

Post by MikeOfAu »

I don't like his analysis. I don't think it models what's going on currently. And because of that, it doesn't allow us to think about the problem correctly.

IMO, the key thing that's happened since 2010 is that there has been a coup on "the progressive side" of politics, with "Classical Social Justice" (MLK-like) being replaced with "Critical Social Justice". It has been a mostly silent coup, until recently.

There's been a dramatic change, and most people on the left don't even realise it has happened, much less what it means. The shift is from empiricism, universalism, justice, equality of opportunity, and liberalism to ... frankly, pretty much the opposite of those values: lived experience, identity groups competing with winners and losers, maoist group-think, purity spirals, etc. The profoundness of the change can't be overstated.

IMO, the good people of the Left (classic liberals) have to take it back from those that have stolen it (the Critical Social Justic people). But, I'm not even sure that's even possible now. It has gone too far—what a disaster.

And because "classic liberals" want the left to go back to how it was ... they have almost become "the conservatives of the left" and they have been forced weirdly towards the centre - except those to the left of them are now more facist than those to their right. So weird.

Bottom line: the illiberal, Clitical Methods Left now holds sway (Newspapers, Hollywood, Universities) and it isn't going anywhere in a hurry.

The worst part about this is: the current sensemaking apparatus (newspapers, etc) has been hollowed out by the Internet. And they aren't even capable of analysis any more ... just activism (as a business model ... a way of generating clicks). How can a democracy function when the population is not informed? I really like Eric Wienstien's analogy for this: the Media has now become like Iago in Othello, whispering madness into the ear of those that will listen (on both sides).

All very broken. Suddenly.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#233

Post by marcus_holmes »

krapp wrote: post #193
marcus_holmes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this how this is supposed to work, then? A lot of people get angry about something and demonstrate/riot, and in response the laws get changed to pacify them. There's a term for that: "mob rule". It's not a good thing. I'm not for one second saying that Police brutality isn't a problem. I don't live in the USA so I don't know. I am saying that if your system doesn't provide a method for fixing this problem without…

That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes. And while people like to dismiss any group whose concerns they disagree with as being merely an "angry mob," more often than not that "mob's" concerns are legitimate, and their anger is justifiable. Laws don't get passed to "pacify" them, they get passed because public…

>> That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes.

And the endpoint of that process is revolution. Again, not a good thing. Revolutions are bloody.

How can you fix the democratic process so that works as it ought and prevent the disaster you're heading for?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#234

Post by mononcqc »

wrren wrote: post #196
oisdk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…

Because there's a mechanism for changing that government: the upcoming presidential election. Whereas changing a cultural movement like the one we're watching unfold is a lot more difficult.

A lot of the people "being cancelled" on twitter are only freaking out because for the first time in forever, they get the direct opinion of people reading their texts unfiltered, and they find out that they are prey to criticism.

For example, Kelly Loeffler, claims to have been "cancelled" while being a sitting US senator.

Cancel culture by popular action is not new (see letter-writing to TV stations, Frank Zappa having to testify in front of congress about censorship for his music albums). The only thing freaking people out is that people who have traditionally been structurally shielded from criticism and direct action (and often behind the cancelling itself) are just now on the receiving end of it.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#235

Post by langitbiru »

amelius wrote: post #171
bambax wrote: post #109

I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…

He should really come out of his ivory tower and put a comment section on his blog.

People can comment on Paul's Twitter or this thread.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#236

Post by hkt »

roenxi wrote: post #165
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to see how antibiotics harmed others.

There is an argument that the black plague was one of the driving forced behind the rise of British democracy causing a labour shortage that added fuel to the rise of the middle class. Now I've got no idea if that is a convincing argument, but it is plausible enough to say that a counterfactual world without antibiotics might have turned out better.

Not quite. It was during feudalism, and what it established was the power of the guilds and a large rise in wages. To use the Marxist term, there was no "reserve army of the unemployed" so workers found it much easier to negotiate wages.

British democracy generally came much later, as a divide and rule proposition. The divide was between the feudalism descended aristocrats on one hand, and the merchant capitalists on the other. The franchise was extended to property owners, then poorer property owners, then all men and property owning women, then all women, then they removed multiple votes in the 60s and limited the number of hereditary peers in the 90s. The start of the process was the 19th century, whereas the plague was the 14th and then 15th.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#237

Post by bitcurious »

elil17 wrote: post #203

In this article, PG creates a personality test of sorts that, I think, seems intuitively true. Then, absent any real evidence, he assigns political roles and moral value to each of the categories he invented. It’s so farcical to suggest that independent mindedness always manifests as “intellectual freedom” and conformism manifests as “political correctness.” (He doesn’t use that phrase but that’s clearly what he’s tr…

> We live in a world where people with power over others (even people with pretty small amounts of power like professors) have historically been allowed shielded from the consequences of espousing hate. It is not “conformist” to advocate that people should be held accountable for what they say.

The conformity is in the process which defines what “hate” is.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#238

Post by auggierose »

oisdk wrote: post #177
missosoup wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, I guess. Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on…

I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…

I can't real imagine how you can say that you "cancel someone" on Twitter and not shudder inside.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#239

Post by seneca »

tome wrote: post #215
seneca wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle? I'm not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that some things are better kept close at hand and not on a cart? The invention of the cart does not remove the ability to carry things. Do you mean to make an appeal to the evils of war? If so, the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology, thoug…

> I'm not sure what your point is. You denied a claim that "every new technology benefits some and harms others" by doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm. I'm suggesting a way that it could. > the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology I agree, but I believe it was morality that was under discussion, not efficacy.

> doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm

I think this is where we missed each other. I was trying to address "there is always a corresponding disadvantage", and I think mentally I was interpreting this as "an approximately proportionate downside or externality".

I don't disagree at all that nearly any technological improvement can cause harm.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#240

Post by motorcycleman9 »

DavidVoid wrote: post #192
motorcycleman9 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of…

One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the opposition to bill C-16. A bill he claimed to oppose because of its free-speech implications, when all the bill actually did was extend existing legal protections of identifiable groups to also include gender identity and gender expression. Those exact same protections already existed on the basis of race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orien…

You are explicitly mischaracterizing his arguments. Peterson has spent more time than you or I arguing about the pros and cons of patriarchal hierarchies. The fact that he is willing to admit to their merits and demerits is evidence that he is more open-minded, and arguing at a higher level of abstraction, than most people in the political debate.

Peterson opposed C-16 on genuine and extremely reasonable free-speech grounds. He was speaking as an individual that endorses the value of free speech. Hate speech laws obviously limit free speech, have a chilling effect on genuine debates, and can even hurt our ability to think straight.

Post reply on HN