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Heresy

paulgraham.com

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Re: Heresy

#391
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game. No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.

I mean, I agree that practically PG will never feel any serious repercussions for saying whatever he wants _because_ of his wealth and influence. I don't think that's healthy (as wealth and influence are often afforded to people due to privilege or luck instead of ability, wisdom, or empathy) but it is how the world is currently. The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why…

> The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it.

Since only people with wealth and privilege are in a position to denounce it, they must have questionable ulterior motives?

You argue dishonestly and incoherently.

Re: Heresy

#392
post #5

It 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…

I think you're the one who is confused here. The paradox of tolerance was not conceived to describe people who merely hold opinions. To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted): > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion,…

> But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.

Neither was I. Nor do I think Paul should be "rounded up" either. Just that I believe his mode of thinking is flawed. I expressed an opinion just as he did.

Re: Heresy

#393
Another word for heresy is political correctness.

The problem with it is you can attack anybody you dislike with very little cost to you because you stand with a large crowd agreeing with you. And you don't even have to understand the issues since the opinion you put out is commonly accepted. It in fact might not be your opinion but you can still use it to attack opponents.

Political correctness is a quite naturally occurring phenomenon. People oppose other people. There's not much we can do about it except try to point it out. But that's not what Paul Graham is doing, he's talking about it in the abstract, only.

That is not a bad thing but I see an issue with it: It gets you far away from actual issues that harm us greatly.

It is not the biggest problem that political correctness occurs. The problem is some of the things it is used for.

For instance in Russia it is the ultimate heresy to say that Russia is fighting a war on Ukraine. The war is a real big problem. It is not caused by political correctness, supporters of the war are simply using political correctness to support the war. And state-sanctioned official heresies, yes that's what we need to fight and expose in general.

The real problem is not political correctness but using it for bad purposes. Like using it to support an unprovoked military attack on your neighboring country and putting the "heretics" into prison.

Re: Heresy

#394
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the reason it's sexist because it can be interpreted as "women are less capable than men"? You would say this other statement is false and sexist, correct?

Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans. When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says. So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something . And depend…

> We are not Vulcans.

Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.

Re: Heresy

#395
post #31

> The clearest evidence of this [that some x-ist statements may be true] is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does. The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are on…

The particularly uncharitable reading of that quote that jumped to my mind when I read it is "but why can't I, a white guy, say the n-word?" But this probably isn't what Graham actually had in mind.

I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.

There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"

Re: Heresy

#396

Is the situation in the US that insane or is he fighting strawmen strapped to windmills?

> Is the situation in the US that insane

Does PG live in the Bay Area? That’s probably why. Most mainstream American opinions would get a person fired there.

Re: Heresy

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't everybody think their ideas are self evident? As for the gender one: imagine you woke up in the body of somebody of the opposite sex tomorrow. Wouldn't you be in the wrong body? My understanding is that the "wrong body" argument is actually not an accurate explanation of trans people's experience though.

No. I think these are, more or less. But I have other ideas that are works in progress, or that I’m not so sure about. Gender: I was talking about reality, not science fiction scenarios. Yes, by definition, in your example, you would be in the wrong body.

In reality, people report not identifying with the body they were born in. What more evidence do you need?

I think that's a good example of how people can be certain of their beliefs despite flying in the face of the evidence.

Re: Heresy

#398
post #10

When 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.

Religion isn't out of favour. We are currently in one of the most religious periods of human history but the gods and authorities have just changed.

This is a crappy hot take. Monetary and labor contributions to religious endeavors are way down and have been for a while. I understand the desire to call any strongly held organized belief 'religion' but you're misrepresenting most of human history when you do so.

Re: Heresy

#399
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which groups are deserving of criticism that they're currently protected from?

For example, almost everything I’ve ever heard about white privilege is also true for Jewish people but it would be a career ending mistake to talk about the over representation of Jewish people in positions of power.

It's remarkable that this needs saying: nobody gets fired for mentioning that Jews are over-represented in whatever industry you choose. It's a plainly verifiable fact. What they get fired for is claiming that said over-representation is the result of a conspiracy in which Jews, by virtue of a mostly amorphous cultural identity, are the conspirators and main villains.

Confusing these two fundamentally different statements is one of the oldest moves in the reactionary playbook.

Re: Heresy

#400
post #315
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just means not having the right opinion on the current issue of the month. Or anything about the groups of people you’re not allowed to criticize.

Can you please be more specific? I really do not know what would be “heresy” now. Maybe I’m tweeting something which is “heresy” (and knowing that since nobody reads my tweets).

David Shor’s firing is the common example since it’s the most egregious case (getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements). See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

Nastiness directed at JK Rowling and Jesse Singal because of trans stuff [0][1]. I’d add Bari Weiss to this list too. [2] If the mob could destroy these people and get them fired they would. As it is the pressure from the mob makes things unpleasant for them. Most people would not continue to fight back against it.

Sam Harris gets a similar level of hostility for what are very nuanced conversations and it’s why he has his own platform.

James Demore at Google is another more controversial case (actually read the memo - it’s way more benign then you’d think from the meta conversation and imo a reasonable thing to discuss).

AGM wrote chaos monkeys and comes across as an ass in it so he had his offer rescinded from apple - I personally don’t care as much about this one since there’s some risk here with what you write and how it represents you when it comes to a hiring decision (though Apple handled it poorly).

Depending on where you work not adhering to Kendi style anti-racism can also be heretical.

Then there are pressures for other things like being forced to state pronouns in tech interviews or be unlikely to move forward. The song and dance around land acknowledgements (I think they're dumb, but that's likely a heretical view in these circles). Being given side eye or “corrected” if you don’t say “Latinx” at work. There are lists of stuff like this at work, told not to say “sanity check” because it offends insane people, don’t say “left hand side” because it hurts one handed people. If you don't agree you can find yourself labeled ableist, racist, transphobe, etc. specific arguments from you are then ignored and your job can be at risk.

Lots of stupid shit imo and pushing back against it will often have harmful career consequences so you have to be quiet about it. Most of the people loudly complaining about this stuff are on the right, but it affects a lot of people across the political spectrum. I suspect the right complains the most about it because they paradoxically have the least to lose (they're just in a separate tribe anyway with their own political support structures). The people that get hurt by this the most imo are earnest people that are interested in things that are true despite tribal affiliation, they're more exposed.

This permeates the culture and makes it hard to have interesting conversations about anything that comes anywhere close to a third rail topic. It also makes it harder to understand what’s true.

I find Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander, Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Coleman Hughes, Kmele, to be good examples of people engaging on this stuff in a nuanced way across the political spectrum.

For what it's worth this is a comment I would not have historically been comfortable writing before getting a new job where the risk from this kind of thing blowing up and having career consequences is reduced. That's likely the most common negative affect of this kind of heresy. When you put penalties on sharing ideas sure you block some truly horrible stuff, but you also snuff out anything that doesn't align with the current cultural beliefs about what is correct and true. The issue with that is what's currently believed to be true is almost certainly not 100% correct and rigidly enforcing cultural beliefs will slow down our ability to struggle closer towards things that are more correct. That's why holding free speech up as a virtue is better on net (and engaging in in-good-faith discourse on difficult topics is a good thing).

When you limit speech you put a subset of people in the position to choose which speech to limit - even those with the best intentions will do this poorly, it's better to have robust systems that don't require this centralized speech control. The promise of the web was to enable this (and in a lot of ways it has), but the failure of the web is that problems with our computing stack incentivize centralized services that bring this problem back. Either way, mobs pushing to silence/fire people that disagree with them is probably something we should work to avoid.

[0]: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY

[2]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watching-lia-thomas-wi...

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