The Four Quadrants of Conformism • Hacker News Board

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#381

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

AlanYx wrote: post #347

BurningFrog wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the similarities, but one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies and reshape society to serve him more fully. What's happening in the US emerging from below, without anyone orchestrating it.

>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames…

I guess we've read different books about it. This is my source: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679746323/

What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully.

But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#382

Post by enoch_r » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

rclayton wrote: post #312

ptero wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "just count the cancelled" does not work. I have lived in the East Europe pre-Perestroyka and back then, it was "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!". And it was true -- there were not that many by 1980s. But there were few not because thought police was not real, but because any appearance of acting against it would be quickly dealt with. So very few people would dare. That's the path we are…

As oisdk points out, I would consider the very real threat of violence different than a celebrity getting their contract cancelled. But that’s an important point to also make. There’s a vast difference between a celebrity being cancelled and an average person. Cultivating popularity is a part of being a celebrity — so isn’t avoiding being cancelled a natural extension of that profession? As for regular people getting…

Kindness Yoga shut down after their pro-BLM posts online were criticized as "performative activism" by employees: https://coloradosun.com/2020/06/29/kindness-yoga-closure-dur...

A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she didn't support BLM in a facebook video: https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/ (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.)

A high school teacher in British Columbia was fired after mentioned that he thought abortion was wrong, as an example of how personal opinions can differ from the law, in class: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-b-c-tea...

David Shor was fired after retweeting a black scholar's work on riots and election results: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...

A Mexican-American utility worker was fired after someone filmed him making the "OK" hand and accused him of white supremacy: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

A graphic designer was fired after the Washington Post published an article about how she wore a blackface-costume (attempting to make fun of Megyn Kelly) two years ago: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/why-did-the-washingt...

The operator of a campus cafe was fired after he posted an ad full of jokes, saying that he needed "a new slave (full time staff member) to boss around": https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/head-of-ontario-univers...

The founder of a charter school was fired after he was accused of "white supremacist language" in a blog post: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ascend-cha...

An author withdrew her book because she was mobbed for being a white author writing chapters from the perspective of a Gullah Geechee person: http://elainemarias.com/2020/06/26/bethany-c-morrow-gets-ya-...

A Boeing exec resigned because of an article he wrote advocating against women in combat 33 years ago, when he was 29 years old: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation/boeing...

I can post more if you'd like. None of these people are celebrities. None of them committed a crime. Some of them have stupid opinions, some of them made stupid decisions, one of them cracked his knuckles in the wrong way.

But if you don't believe that "regular people" are at risk here, well - I hope your opinions are all non-heretical and that they stay that way for the next 33 years.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#383

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

rclayton wrote: post #322

BurningFrog wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point, to spell it out, is about chilling effects. If some organization starts killing everyone wearing a blue hat,pretty soone nobody would wear a blue hat. And then people like you would think that since no blue hat wearers get murdered, this is fine. Even call it "non violent" perhaps.

Have we started killing cancelled people? Who has been “cancelled” anyways? What punishments have they endured? A lost job at a very public position? As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered. Look at Al Franken - polls show he’s electable in his state (by the group that ostracized him no le…

It's rare to see someone so purely miss the point.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#384

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

cmorgan31 wrote: post #346

missosoup wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don't know this word, but you're literally advocating for ochlocracy, which is the very thing I was talking about in the upstream comments. The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied. That's exactly how it transitions into totalitarianism. Pandering to the mob just adds more fuel to the fire. Police brutality etc. are issues that should certainly be addressed, and there's cou…

You are not addressing the point that the society at large has to continue to trust institutions to alleviate concerns of corruption by the institution. The mob is not formed in a vacuum. Democracy, rule of law, and government only have value when trust in those pillars of our society have not been eroded to the point where large swaths of people form a mob to carry out their own justice. It’s been made abundantly cl…

"I don’t focus on cancel culture because I’m concerned more with the erosion of our voting rights and the dismantling of our institutions by our own citizens."

Maybe we need to focus on both as manifestations of the same disease, even though one is much worse than the other?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#385

Post by oisdk » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #308

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…

You're engaging in a straw man of both sides and it makes me want to disregard your argument entirely. > you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like... Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign? There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he was on the legal defense team for…

> Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign? There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he was on the legal defense team for someone despicable.

So the only actual example I was able to google here was the last one: and I have to say, is that it? A guy wasn’t asked back as a dorm administrator once he joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team? That’s the “cancel culture” you’re talking about, in contrast to one of the most brutal and grotesque onslaught of police brutality in the west in recent memory?

Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a murder, right?

This is what I mean when I say it’s ridiculous. The Harvard guy didn’t even lose his job, for goodness’ sake.

> Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade.

Where did I defend or endorse the actions of protestors? My point is simply that it’s ridiculous to think the main authoritarian crisis in the US right now is “cancel culture” when it is literally in the midst of a brutal police crackdown against protestors.

Also I’m sorry but it’s hard to take you seriously with regards to police violence when you didn’t mention a single thing the police did wrong in your list of grievances, but you’re happy to talk about the protestors.

> every major spike in crime due to police being defunded instead of retrained

This is not a view supported by the evidence.

> We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm change and it works much better than arson.

The US has more prisoners per capita than any society at any point in history in the world. The police are armed and violent. And those systems which apparently work so well have been in place throughout all this. But maybe you should tell me more about how these systems work so well.

Also I’m continually amazed that Americans forget their proud history of violent protest so quickly. It always seems like protest against injustice was fine in some unspecified “past” but of course all of that Is behind us now and The best we can do is vote (vote for the party at least partly responsible for the state of the police today, by the way).

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#386

Post by phkahler » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

I feel like PG has neglected the literature with this one. The two axis are probably aligned with exisiting traits from the field of psychology (agreeableness seems relevant for starters). It's nice that he considered all this, but I think he did so in his own bubble.

There can be benefits from reinventing things in your own way, but to completely overlook the existing work can be a mistake too. There is so much more out there on this stuff than analogies from junior high.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#387

Post by detaro » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

domador wrote: post #380

wrren wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Taibbi's had a few good articles on this recently. Some excerpts: "Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other p…

[This is not a direct reply to your comment, but a comment on Hacker News itself.] It's interesting that a couple of minutes ago, I was unable to even attempt to reply to wrren's comment. It was grayed out, and I guess you can't reply to grayed-out comments. I read the comment and saw an exploration of ideas, not something that would be destructive to the Hacker News community or experience. I reloaded the page, the…

Deep threads hide the reply button temporarily as an anti-flamewar thing (You can still reply by clicking on the timestamp to go to the comments permalink, it's just intended to be a soft deterrent against too much back-and-forth). Purely downvotes shouldn't disable replies, only if a comment gets killed (by flags or automated filters) it gets disabled.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#388

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

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 it almost never ends well.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#389

Post by archagon » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #298

marcus_holmes wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

I don't know. I never thought I'd see the day when Americans seem more concerned about "SJWs" exercising their free speech rights than actual secret police tossing political dissidents into black vans but I guess here we are.

I look on in desperate horror at the blatant, authoritarian corruption happening every single day at the White House, and yet the only righteous anger I see on the “intellectual watering hole” of HN is towards cancel culture. I don’t get it. Don’t people read the news? How do you not have an ulcer from watching this shit every day for four years?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#390

Post by tfehring » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

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.

It's pretty clear that you don't get to keep your knowledge of the world as it is today - if you did, the question would collapse to "Do you support slavery?" which is much less interesting.

Asking what your ancestors believed is also a bit of a miss. My ancestors in the US were all German-American, and German-Americans overwhelmingly opposed slavery, so my ancestors probably opposed it, and I probably would have opposed it too if I had been part of that population, but that's obviously a total cop-out.

So take the framing of, say you were born into a white slave-owning family in the antebellum American South. Would you have freed your slaves and joined the abolitionist movement? The actual people in that situation weren't entirely a monolith - surely at least a few of them actually did that. But if the actual share who did so was, say, 1% of the population, then you have to think you're in the top 1% in terms of some combination of empathy, racial tolerance, forward-thinkingness, etc. to claim that you would. The question is useful because we're not different than people 200 years ago, no matter how much we like to think we are.

I think the obvious and more explicit follow-up question is even better though - "What beliefs do you hold today that will be viewed as negatively 200 years from now as slavery is today?" If the answer is "none," we must be in such a utopia to have finally reached the end-state of human moral development.