Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear' • Hacker News Board

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#251

Post by jjk166 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

If you're not willing to stand by your opinion and face the consequences of sharing it, how important is your opinion really?

Intellectual progress demands that ideas distasteful to the status quo must be openly discussable, but some stakes are necessary to keep those who have carefully thought out their positions and thus hold them with conviction from being drowned out by those who merely parrot ridiculous talking points they never took the time to digest themselves.

If you are ashamed to be associated with an idea, that is not an idea you should be advocating - if it has any merit, others will advocate it better than you, if not then what purpose does your advocacy serve?

There is nothing wrong with picking which hills are worth dying on, and it's okay to acknowledge that some of your opinions are kinda dumb. The fact is most of us are experts on only a narrow range of human knowledge, and our opinions on the rest are coming from a place of ignorance. If you don't have something valuable to add to a conversation, it is not only reasonable but preferable to remain silent and listen to what others have to say.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#252

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

the_only_law wrote: post #197

solosoyokaze wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leftists get canceled all the time (by liberals). Look at the censoring/smearing of Bernie Sanders and his supporters during the primary. Twitter bans leftist accounts all the time as well. Take a look at every VC in our industry and they espouse staunchly establishment neo-liberal policies. Calling Biden into question (which anyone on the left would do) is risking your career. The focus is often on censoring those o…

In fairness, leftists get cancelled by leftists. insert joke about leftist infighting here

No they don't. They get canceled by neo-liberals.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#253

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #161

throwaway894345 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today. In the past, dissenting opinions voiced loudly were often punished by blacklisting or excommunication or prison or death. Granted, but what's the logic here? We ought to content ourselves with regression so long as no one is being imprisoned or killed? We want to progress, not regress . We don't want a conformist society, w…

I think the prior post was making the case we -have- progressed?

It seemed like “we have progressed, therefore it’s okay to backslide and no one should criticize cancellation”. After all, no one here is arguing that the 1500s, 1600s, etc were the golden ages of speech.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#254

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

refenestrator wrote: post #198

solosoyokaze wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leftists get canceled all the time (by liberals). Look at the censoring/smearing of Bernie Sanders and his supporters during the primary. Twitter bans leftist accounts all the time as well. Take a look at every VC in our industry and they espouse staunchly establishment neo-liberal policies. Calling Biden into question (which anyone on the left would do) is risking your career. The focus is often on censoring those o…

I was including Sanders and any Biden skeptic as "heretical liberals" -- no disagreement from me there.

I don't think Sanders people would consider themselves "liberal". I know I don't.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#255

Post by edbob » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #135

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is this had been around for a while, and what people are calling "cancel culture" is the same old-same old, but with (hopefully) less prison/death. There's nothing new about receiving negative feedback for having and expressing unpopular opinions. That's really common in pretty much every single social group I've been in, including on HN.

People are upset now that the current is shifting and you get shunned for being racist, rather than being shunned for not speaking properly or whatever the heck. The underlying mechanism has not really changed.

People are upset that the definition of racist has been repurposed to apply to racially neutral positions and even anti-racism positions. If one advocates in favor of enforcing existing immigration laws, that's a quick way to get labeled a racist Nazi even though it's actually a very moderate stance. If one supports treating everyone equally regardless of race, then that explicitly anti-racism position is characterized as racist and attacked with baseless accusations of "bad faith".

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#256

Post by prionassembly » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #64

bitcharmer wrote: post #5

It's really sad that in the age of unrestricted access to information public discourse is self-restricting to avoid wrong-think and dissenting opinions. If you look at the history of intellectual progress, much of it was exactly due to unpopular opinions. Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.

What kind of intellectual progress do you think we're missing out on? I see people getting "cancelled" (aka facing consequences) for things like sexual misconduct / abusive behavior. For anti trans views. For fascistic ideas, or storming the capital to re-instate a democratically defeated politician. Are any of these places where the next big leap in intellectual progress is going to come from?

You’re blurring away the gap between behavior and ideas. Sexual misconduct and “anti trans” views are as incommensurable as musical scales and baseball bats.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#257

Post by lainga » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #163

lainga wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, peoples' expectations have changed in America since we declared independence from Japan.

I erroneously thought the critic in the article was Japanese, although the "sir" should have been an obvious giveaway. In the states, just off the top of my head: the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident

I guessed as much :)

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#258

Post by lom888 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

pedrolins wrote: post #41

It's an interesting phenomenom the one described in the story. I myself a great number of times have experienced situations where I held back on writing down certain thoughts even in places like my journal where the whole point is to write down every single thought crossing through my mind anyway.

I know this experience. For me the fear was that if I put the thought onto paper that somehow it would be more real, but the result was that the thoughts ended up burning away at me and taking up more headspace than if I just put them on the page. The realization that I am an emotional being full of contradictions and not a logic machine helped me stop suppressing.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#259

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #169

pseudalopex wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was fired for not having pronouns in their bio?

It was supposedly one of the reasons Disney fired Gina Carano. However, she had apparently been annoying the powers that be with her generally Trumpian social media postings for a while.

I just looked it up. She added boop/bop/beep to her name on Twitter and doubled down when people asked her to remove it. [1] And like you said it wasn't her first PR problem.

[1] https://uproxx.com/movies/pedro-pascal-sister-trans-lux-gina...

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#260

Post by mywittyname » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #14

I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental. But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange…

>I can't help but admit that it seems to work.

Really? I see it as a abject failure.

- It is universally derided by many different groups.

- It is considered a plague on society.

- Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some.

I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability.

Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day.

Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.