Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times • Hacker News Board

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#411

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:44 AM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #407

tptacek wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't in fact have a right to food and housing. But a right to food and housing would be a coherent proposition; you could design such a right (within obvious limits). You can't do that with the proposition that people have a right to speech without fear of shame or shunning; like, the logic itself literally doesn't work . You could simply shut down anyone's objectionable political speech by saying that it is sha…

I didn't try to rebut the blog. And anyway, my comment doesn't hang on right to no-shunning/right to food being identical. My point was that the blog is strange because the author agrees with the spirit of the op-ed while taking pains to criticize it. I think this is clearly because he dislikes being on the same side as conservatives. If I was going to disagree with the blog, it would be over this strange idea that w…

He clearly doesn't agree with the spirit of the editorial (it's a staff editorial, not an op-ed). He thinks there are real free speech problems, but that the editorial (and the public sentiment it cites) terribly misconstrues them, succumbing to sloppy thinking in a way that not only works against their stated goal but actually further jeopardizes speech.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#412

Post by RangerScience » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:45 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #388

RangerScience wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I think your points are well made and articulated. I particularly like your term "struggle session". Second, I think you're missing what Ken called the "First Speaker Problem" (which IMHO is one of the most important parts of Ken's thinking) > "We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work" The implication I'm hearing in those word is that the "first speak…

I don't understand the "first speaker" problem, or why this abstraction is necessary. You shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work independent of when you entered the conversation or whether you entered into it at all.

> I don't understand the "first speaker" problem

Ken talks about it in depth. Is there a part in there where he loses you? (by which I mean: a part where you're understanding it, and then in the next part you're not). I might be able to help you get your head around it.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#413

Post by da39a3ee » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:45 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #371

da39a3ee wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the subject. I don't have the right to deny racial equality without fear of being shamed or shunned. But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't women in the normal sense and don't match many people's definitions of the word "woman" without fear of being shamed or shunned.

If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.

Of course. A better way of saying what I intended is this:

We cannot control the statistical distribution of opinions within the population and hence cannot control whether we will be shunned or shamed. However, that does not mean that we throw up our hands and define "repulsive" to be whatever gets us shunned by the majority: neither truth nor morality is completely relative.

The two propositions I gave differ markedly in the degree to which they should be controversial to a kind rational mind:

(1) That ceteris paribus two humans who differ only in their ethnicity should be accorded the same rights, a kind rational mind will always agree with.

(2) That a man who decided recently to try to become a woman is not a woman in exactly the same sense as a standard biological woman is something that most kind rational minds will agree with, but some still perhaps might not.

I'm sure you're not suggesting that either of those propositions is repulsive in any absolute sense. What I am saying is that in order to maintain standards in society, rather than letting those standards drift with cultural fashions and whims, all those who write and speak with the aim of maintaining a healthy culture should state clearly that proposition (2) is not repulsive or deserving of shame.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#414

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:46 AM UTC

Latty wrote: post #409

whiddershins wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit threats, defamation, calls to violence, harassment, inciting riots, fighting words … these have a legal precedent for the reason that cause and effect are traceable. By the same token, ‘cancellation’ if it leads to loss of livelihood etc. is questionable. Being offended or hurt by someone’s words are much harder to quantify.

So freedom of speech should be limited if you could cause someone to lose their job? So I go to a shop, and the employee calls me a piece of shit, I could be arrested for telling their boss that they were rude?

[deleted]

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#415

Post by toofy » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #390

tptacek wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're so fixated on the partisan angle here. Both right-wing and left-wing Twitter engages, viciously, in "cancellation" behavior. How is it helping us understand the phenomenon to digress into whether liberals are paternalistic towards working class people? The thread you're writing on is rooted in a comment saying that Ken White doesn't purport to have figured out the whole "cancel culture"…

Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain. For example, pro-abortion speakers don't normally need police escorts to speak at a university. It's not true that both wings engage in the behavior equally. There are many problems with radical right, but canceling people isn't one of them.

> Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain.

No it isn’t. Not even close. There are countless examples of the right engaging in the same behaviors, including the recent massive wave of passing laws attempting to silence people.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#416

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

Latty wrote: post #149

jimbokun wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. Someone having an opinion different than you does not cause you harm. This is the Big Lie underlying a lot of the rhetoric that has been labeled "cancel culture". The potential harm at shutting down the opportunity to find out you were wrong about something by heari…

I said "for actions they take that harm others", and you jumped to some trivial difference of opinion. If the difference of opinion is supporting policy that hurts me or people I care about, then yes, of course it can harm me. You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company. Freedom of…

> "You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company."

Like unborn fetuses? (I am pro-choice by the way.) The pro-life side care about them and feel they should have human rights and, by the silly paradox of tolerance people seem to love to quote, they're even justified in not tolerating those who don't tolerate their beliefs. So do you really believe that freedom of expression swings both ways and are willing to allow them to enact their consequences on those who don't agree with them?

Maybe you should rethink the implications of what you are saying.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#417

Post by kemayo » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:51 AM UTC

orangecat wrote: post #59

abnry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancel culture is... targeted at individuals, for the loss of their job, invitations, or positions, for offenses that are minor in comparison to historical offenses, or offenses that are based on guilt by association or speculative inference, often for things in the past, which were things many people accepted at the time, and often which the individual disavows today.

Or "offenses" that are purely imaginary, like suggesting that people should read a book before accusing its author of transphobia ( https://laurenhough.substack.com/p/a-question-for-lambda-lit... ), or discussing a common Chinese expression whose pronunciation vaguely resembles a slur in English ( https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus... ).

There's (topically enough) a NYT article about Hough's incident[1], which I will briefly excerpt:

> “In a series of now-deleted tweets, Lauren Hough exhibited what we believed to be a troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies and used her substantial platform — due in part to her excellent book — to harmfully engage with readers and critics,” Cleopatra Acquaye and Maxwell Scales, Lambda Literary’s interim co-executive directors, said in a joint statement Monday.

[...]

> Hough said Monday that she could not recall whether she had deleted any tweets, and denied that any of her tweets had been transphobic. Lambda did not provide examples of the posts they were most critical of. The Times has not reviewed any deleted tweets.

...now, my sympathies were honestly with Hough until I saw "could not recall whether [I] had deleted any tweets" attributed to her. Which, if she said that to a reporter, is not a good look. Because it makes my mind jump immediately to "I certainly did delete some tweets, but I don't want to admit to it because then I'll be asked what they said".

Nobody being willing to actually say what she's being judged for so that we can make our own minds up does leave us in the awkward position of having to rely on these proxy inferences.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/books/lauren-hough-lambda...

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#418

Post by rayiner » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:56 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #363

rayiner wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a "member of an unprivileged group?" If not, what exactly do you think life is like for us that we can't take a joke? Sticks and stones and whatnot: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rP0nqe... > Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent),…

I don't understand why you're so fixated on the partisan angle here. Both right-wing and left-wing Twitter engages, viciously, in "cancellation" behavior. How is it helping us understand the phenomenon to digress into whether liberals are paternalistic towards working class people? The thread you're writing on is rooted in a comment saying that Ken White doesn't purport to have figured out the whole "cancel culture"…

“Right-wing cancel culture” is a well understood, world-wide phenomenon. To use the example in your other post, people try to blockade abortion clinics because certain religious people understand those clinics to be engaged in mass murder. Or to use another example people freak out over cartoons of Mohammad because it’s a grave offense in Islam. That is what it is.

I talk about left-wing cancel culture because it’s a marked departure from certainly what’s been my experience. Unless we go down the path of calling progressivism a new religion, I think we have to posit that the cause of left-wing hostility to ideological pluralism has a different cause.

The overwrought nature of @otterley’s post suggested one possible explanation. If people genuinely believe that members of “unprivileged groups” suffer so much from an errant joke or political statement (even one made outside their presence) that it affects their ability to “have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise their family” then that might explain their hostility to any expression that may even remotely affect such “unprivileged groups.” If issues of race, gender, immigration status, etc., are literally life and death, then that justifies zealotry.

That mindset and reaction, in turn, seems to me to be a direct outgrowth of liberal paternalism. You have people preoccupied with harms to other people—harms that they are unable to experience directly and thus cannot put into perspective. Nonetheless, they’re convinced that they understand how society should be reshaped to help the people they’re concerned about. It’s a political agency problem.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#419

Post by whiddershins » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:57 AM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #118

lrem wrote: post #96

That's a lot of words to say "people are free to steer clear of people they don't like and always have been". And not much of thought into "what changed that now it is a problem perceived by some?" There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined…

> If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed. This just isn’t true, and I’m not sure why the discussion around cancel culture is framed like it is true. It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing. You can say literally anything you want if you can figure out how to be nice when you say it, but you do have to put real effort…

That’s just privileging people with really good social skills alongside Orthodox Privilege.

http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#420

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

da39a3ee wrote: post #413

tptacek wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.

Of course. A better way of saying what I intended is this: We cannot control the statistical distribution of opinions within the population and hence cannot control whether we will be shunned or shamed. However, that does not mean that we throw up our hands and define "repulsive" to be whatever gets us shunned by the majority: neither truth nor morality is completely relative. The two propositions I gave differ marke…

What I find repulsive isn't the point. There certainly are people who will avoid working with you if you make public statements in support of (2). It's not up to us to define the threshold at which people will or won't shun us. Unless you want to give up on the concept of free association --- it seems clear you don't --- you're going to have to accept that it's possible to have and express opinions that will foreclose on some options in life for you. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from social repercussions, and there is no clean divide between "social" and "workplace".