Heresy
paulgraham.com
Heresy
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Re: Heresy
#2Minor criticism: I wonder why including a statement like "like a vector field whose elements become aligned" was thought necessary. It does not make much sense technically and it does not even add to the content. If anything it makes me doubt the rest of the essay by suddenly making me aware that Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. From my point of view it is absolutely net-negative.
Re: Heresy
#3Is the situation in the US that insane or is he fighting strawmen strapped to windmills?
Re: Heresy
#4What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics.
It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
Re: Heresy
#5It seems like Paul is confusing intolerance of intolerance with heresy in this essay.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.
E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.
(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)
Re: Heresy
#6I mean, this is the only real response to people posting this sort of nonsense.
Re: Heresy
#7Excellent read
Re: Heresy
#8What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics. It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
Both of those topics are fraught with gaslighting ("nobody is teaching X") and misrepresentation ("don't say gay") along with outright fabrication ("it's a right").
Re: Heresy
#9Graham has forgotten his own essays if he thinks that this is a rebirth.
"What you can't say" [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html] is one of the first of his essays I ever read. It eventually directed me to this site.
At the time, I thought it was brilliant. 18 years on, I think it's a good piece of writing but he's only got half the story. Sadly, today's essay suggest to me he hasn't found the other half in the intervening nearly two decades.
Taboo is a powerful tool. Some taboos, to be sure, outlive their usefulness. But some compress lifetimes of experience into easily remembered lessons for people who have not yet had that experience so that we can ever progress... If every generation has to keep relearning the same lessons over and over, there's no time for more.
The counterweight to the philosophy Graham is espousing here is this one (https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...). A taboo is a social analogy to a fence. Someone built it at some point for a reason. That reason might be gone, in which case the fence is unnecessary. But if you're going to tear down a fence, understand why it's there.
18 years on, I don't think Paul is wrong, but the repeated mistake I see people in my field make is assuming that they're the smartest person in the room when they encounter a heresy or taboo and falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.
Re: Heresy
#10When you say or do socially unacceptable things, there can be consequences. Is that “heresy”? I always associated that word with religion, myself, but it’s interesting that religion is so out of favor right now that you can use it as a comparison to argue that any action not explicitly illegal should be free of negative consequence.