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

The whole point of intellectual exchange and growth is from the idea of freely sharing ideas regardless of how "thought through" they are. How do you ever go about sharpening a knife if you aren't encouraged to bring a dull one to the grinder?

Have YOU "thought through" your theory/argument/belief/ideology here?

New hire, been working a few months at a job out of college. I was on a business trip to another state with some people not on my immediate team. There were like four or five people going in total and I didn't have a hotel room yet, so my supervisor asked me to reach out to some of the others going and see what they were doing. I picked a number from the list at random and called. A woman a good bit older than me answered the phone and I explained the situation. She told me she had gotten a four bedroom house on AirBnB close to the location we were going. Assuming that she had booked the house so we could all stay together, I asked if there was a room left for me. She immediately became very stern and told me that she would never "room alone with a younger man" and that my request was "extremely inappropriate". Sputtering apologies I told her I thought she had gotten the house for everyone from the company going on the trip and she said no, it was just for her. She nastily asked who my supervisor was and I told her the name. Confused as hell I hung up the phone and got a room at a hotel nearby. My immediate first thought was oh fuck, I'm going to be getting a call from HR about sexual harassment, it's all over, fired before I even really started.

When we actually got to the client location this woman acted very creepy. She made several comments about how if she was 'ten years younger' this would be a 'memorable trip' while eyeing me up. She asked for my personal cell number. She even invited me to dinner, just the two of us. After that I stopped responding to her texts, cold shouldered her hard in person, and would only send very cordial, short emails to her in response. Some months after she left the project and I haven't talked to her since.

After she left I told some other male coworkers about what happened and everyone agreed I was a hair's width away from some sort of sexual harassment case, and also agreed that had it come to that, corporate would have sided with her and I could have been fired for a simple mistake. I now walk on pins and needles around women that I work with, unless I know them well.

TL;DR: Accidents happen, women can be creeps, and at least where I work young men are definitely worried about being accused of sexual harassment. I don't think this is a typical case but it does happen.

One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.

This is a myth perpetuated by selective cultural memory. The Nazis were all about "free speech" before they were in power. They frequently complained about "Free speech" when papers published editorials criticizing them, or when their public appearances were protested, or when opinion pages didn't present "both sides".

One widely used Nazi propaganda poster from 1928 even showed Hitler with a big "CENSORED" block over his mouth, captioned "Only One of the 2000 million people in the world is not allowed to speak in Germany"[1]

> in speech-tolerant societies, a diversity of ideas compete and the best, most valid ideas rise to the top irrespective of bias.

I'm not sure that you understand what "bias" means. Bias is that which leads people to believe in ideas that are false for various sometimes difficult to quantify reasons. The fact that evidence opposing flat-eartherism is available has not prevented that idea from gaining popularity, in fact it is more popular today in 2021 than it ever has been.

The "marketplace" metaphor itself exposes that the argument comes from a utopian perspective, the argument only works if you pre-suppose that a free and unregulated economic market produces best results, but we know from experience that it produces monopolies, child labor, and bread doped with sawdust.

Public discourse is like a market in some ways, namely that people with more money are able to advance their ideas further by buying media outlets and marketing broadly and engaging in deceptive communication that exploits cognitive bias to acquire more believers, in just the same way as people with more money are able to buy out and undercut competition and exploit addictions and consumer psychology to get more sales than their products deserve.

1. https://twitter.com/_amroali/status/1190809322315534336?s=20