I wonder if a lot of people are somewhere in the middle, and also, if their position on the quadrants is situational.
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#742There's a subtype he doesn't mention but I think deserves notice and is especially pertinent to today's environment. That is, the conventionally-minded who is convinced they are die-hard independently-minded. People like this come across by chance doctrine which appeal to a special part of themself, be it religious, political, or social doctrine. They hardily embrace the newfound doctrine and denounce others as havin…
> There is a subtype that is especially pertinent... the conventionally-minded who is convinced they are die-hard independently-minded. > I believe this to be the reality today. So many people are deluded in thinking they are the small, under-represented, minority, oppressed group when they actually function as the oppressors to people who are sincerely independently-minded. This right here is the fundamental undercu…
Yeah, the idea that the American past was some better home to more open public discourse is obviously false on the face of it. The voices of minority groups are barely present in the history books, because they were barely present in the public discussion of the time.
Look at the national anthem (adopted by the government in 1931) or pledge of allegiance (adopted by the government in 1942). The people who get offended by others not standing during them would hardly identify their own reaction as "political correctness," and yet... is it a good thing that the government adopted a "pledge" or proscribes expected behavior during a song?
That's the "free speech" past we think we want to go back to?
We forget about the right-in-your-face "political correctness" and "rightthink" demonstrations of the past, since we didn't live through them, and just accept them as-is.
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now. This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the c…
As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance…
I understand why you would not think it is a problem. Unfortunately the only evidence for something like this is anecdotes, so unless you personally experience cancellation or are a member of a community where someone is cancelled, you won't notice. The lack of concern about the cancellation narrative makes sense in this respect.
Beyond "random people being fired", there are a number of notable examples in the programming community, like James Damore, Stallman, and Donglegate. After CoCs were added to open source projects, there are a handful of accounts of people being removed for their views expressed outside of the open source community.
In the wider world, things like the Harper's Magazine letter criticizing cancel culture (signed by many notable individuals, including Noam Chomsky), Obama's criticism of the "circular firing squad", leading philosophy researchers decrying sanctions for expressing ideas [1], the Joe Rogan discussion between Twitter Exec and Tim Pool on online censorship, the Evergreen College fiasco, and the rioting of Berkeley students into a Ben Shapiro lecture, paint the picture of a worrying trend: some subset of people on the left respond to argument not with argument, but with censorship, boycotts, and sometimes violence.
Hell, one from a few days ago: https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal...
[1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers...
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#744Was PG always so precious, or have I just aged out of appreciating these sublimated attempts at bolstering ones sense of self?
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's pretty much where we are today. What on earth makes you think that?
Oh, well obviously there are hungry and cold people in the world, but I was talking about within a developed country like the UK. People who go on about equality are concerned with making themselves richer because of billionaires. They are not concerned with making themselves poorer because of hungry and cold people in other countries.
> Oh, well obviously there are hungry and cold people in the world, but I was talking about within a developed country like the UK.
I see. Perhaps this will change your mind?:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_Kingdom
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#746With the trajectory of this and the previous one, it honestly feels like we're only a handful of steps from praising the Intellectual Dark Web(tm) and saying that Charles Murray was misunderstood.
Outside the far-left, nobody thinks the IDW or Charles Murray are devils.
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#747The oddest thing about this essay - is that the people he's kind of lamenting - the 'banners' particularly in academia and the press - are by far not classically conventional or authoritative types.
That's where this analysis goes way wrong.
'Ban culture' is driven by 'aggressive antagonists' who generally have power through the mob, or some kind of 'new' authority, they are 'anti classical power' in their very identity.
I would characterise them as the 'least conventional' people.
The logic I think goes off the rails there.
Banners are 'people angry at the system'. Not 'people adamantly supporting the system'.
Mr. Graham may not realize that those pushing ban culture are in his camp - 'SJW' has more in common with Entrepreneur/CEO and Artist than it does 'Police' or 'Justice System'.
Also the author's choice of words to describe the groups says far more about the author than his musings on personality types.
Most tellingly 'tattletales' and 'quasi-fascists' as those who support the rules and 'Galileo' as those who break them.
It also speaks to class a little bit, because for common people, in reality, the rule breakers are more likely to be actual criminals. Like the 'bad' kind.
The closest 'common science' we can get at would be the 'Big 5' personality types of which 'conscientiousness' is somewhat correlated with following rules. Prisons are full of 'unconscientious people'. And most succesfull people are highly conscientious.
That said, it's not an exact correlation and his 'sheep' type 'vs' aggressive type are probably very differently: conventional people in the burbs, aspirational conventional in business. (I literally read that yesterday, I'm sorry I cannot find the reference, but 'Big 5 conscientiousness' does break down into sub-types).
The underlying problem with the analysis, is that there is often an inherent morality in 'convention', which the author's choice of words seems to kind of deny.
'Look both ways before crossing a street' or 'wear a mask' - these are very important rules to follow, and we need these conventions. None of us are smart enough to really understand the nature of all the rules, so we end up having to follow a lot of them.
Dr. Fauci says 'wear a mask' - and since he's the expert, I trust him on the whole, even though I could point at a myriad issues, I know it's a complicated thing.
Also:
"The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. "
So here's the thing - when CNN is deciding 'who to ban' - this is very bad.
But when Facebook is deciding how to moderate - this is not bad, and Graham is wrong to suggest only dummies would want to do this. This is an astonishingly difficult problem to solve, it's not bounded by the norms we normally understand, so it should be very attractive to real thinkers.
People say horrible, horrible things all the time. Tons of harassment, abuse, doxing, bullying, point-blank racism - and I'm not talking 'intellectuals being called out' - I'm talking 'neighbours don't want the n-word on their street' and 'my boss is a faot', people making death threats. Graham is speaking a little bit from the bubble - 'most' of censorship is simply just getting people to stop saying they're going to kill each other - not 'banning ideas'.
So I think this thought-piece has a big hole: most people shutting down freedom of expression (in the free world) in the more intellectual sense - are not 'conventional' by his own description. Not at all.
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#748Earlier 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…
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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more directly similar to the "red guards" period during the Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples. Some of the parallels are just so direct -- students denouncing their professors, forcing them them to recant, the ideologies of the students growing more and more rigid and narrow through the conformity of the mob, until they often ended up even denouncing th…
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This tends to be my gut reaction too. Maybe because I live in a very conservative area and come from a very conservative background. In my filter bubble I consistently see people saying really horrible, legitimately and unapologetically racist and mysoginist things and not being called out or cancelled in any meaningful way but actually encouraged. That makes it hard to take complaints about cancel culture seriously.
That being said I'm very sympathetic to people saying they've seen this before and know where it's headed. So I want to understand GP and try to act accordingly. I just can't stomach lending support to the gun-toting, trigger-happy, unapologetically authoritarian Trump regime.
Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans“ And where is the evidence for this assertion?
Turns out that we aren't electing a counsel composed of the liberals most active on twitter. Lets look at the situation clearly. I don't think JK Rowling is a bigot and yet and the internet hate machine is sure going full steam but her detractors are a smaller group than her fans and the woman is worth almost a billion dollars. She could burn dollar bills for warmth in her house for warmth for the rest of her life if…
"A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."
Not true at all.
It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.
She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.
The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.
'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.
I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.
Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.
'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement. This is inexcusable.
The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.
It's a fairly existential problem right now.
A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.