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Heresy

paulgraham.com

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Re: Heresy

#511

Post by bloaf »

photochemsyn wrote: post #461
Osmose wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm following you correctly, you're implying that in order to debate with others to determine what truth is, you must have the freedom to say things without being bound by how the act of saying them would affect other people, right? And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't…

I'd just note here that 'truth through debate' is an ancient concept (Socrates - Aristotle - Plato etc.) that has been replaced with 'truth through experiment and observation' (Galileo - Newton - Maxwell - Einstein etc.). Of course many have attempted to use science to justify their behavior or to justify some arbitray human social organizations (i.e. Francis Galton and Social Darwinism, or Lysenko in the USSR and Ph…

The courts, to this day, still believe in 'truth through debate.'

Science does too, although the debaters are generally expected to be working towards developing empirical ways of settling their disagreements. I believe it was Gell-Mann who famously tells a story of holding on to his theory because of its beauty despite several experiments indicating it was wrong, and eventually being vindicated.

Re: Heresy

#512

Post by codedeadlock »

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

It's difficult to build strong opinions on a topic. Mostly we go with the safe opinions that are acceptable by society.

And problem comes up when we mix belief, perspective, facts and opinions.

https://binaryho.me/opinion/

Re: Heresy

#513

Post by jacobolus »

NoraCodes wrote: post #498

> The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like. I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politic…

Paul Graham grew up in a time when rich middle-aged white men with no relevant experience or credential could spout off about whatever topic they wanted, including pseudo-intellectual racism/misogyny, and everyone would be forced to listen to their nonsense unable to respond with more than an eye-roll for fear of reprisals. (For that matter, when Graham grew up those powerful white dudes could beat people up, sexually assault people, etc. with no consequence.)

Now when they spout similar nonsense, such dudes are publicly criticized, and the criticism deeply shocks and distresses them, to the point that whiny white/male supremacist grievance has now entirely taken over a whole US political party, which is trying to outlaw public criticism of white/male supremacist ideology.

Edit: Disclaimer to satisfy rayiner: I am a 6'2" married 36-year-old straight white male homeowner with 2 kids and a car.

Edit #2: Folks may enjoy https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

Re: Heresy

#514

Post by ryanobjc »

Biologist123 wrote: post #220

This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently very sensitive too. It makes me wonder what happened - as given his lack of evidence - it appears to be an emotional reaction rather than a logical one. As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wo…

I’ve looked at some of these academic circumstances and the ones I looked at were very misleading. Often times the only account we have is from the fired person, who is obviously going to push the most favorable narrative. When you dig in, there is something else amiss.

But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.

Re: Heresy

#515

Post by [deleted] »

zarzavat wrote: post #345

This is one of the best reasons to learn a second language. Heretical concepts are often wrapped in layers of euphemism. For this reason, heresies tend to have problems crossing language barriers as that structure of euphemisms hasn’t necessarily been developed. One of the properties of the euphemism treadmill is that the mere existence of softer alternatives makes the original seem much worse than it was before. Spe…

[deleted]

Re: Heresy

#517

Post by Apocryphon »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #510
Apocryphon wrote: post #73

Has anyone considered this whole phenomenon from a materialist analysis? Global society is more interconnected than before. The public discourse on social media platforms is huge. It’s also hugely polarized for multitudes of reasons. People (on the Internet) are getting into arguments with more people than ever before, usually with strangers. From that perspective, canceling/labeling heresy could potentially be thoug…

It's the US society that is so polarized. Global society is just in a situation where it has to deal with the fallout of that.

Sort of. Social phenomena like the rise of Bolsonaro or Zemmour, or the gender wars currently going on in South Korea, might be influenced by culture wars in the U.S. but are also propelled by their own local experiences.

Re: Heresy

#518

Post by NoraCodes »

jacobolus wrote: post #513
NoraCodes wrote: post #498

> The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like. I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politic…

Paul Graham grew up in a time when rich middle-aged white men with no relevant experience or credential could spout off about whatever topic they wanted, including pseudo-intellectual racism/misogyny, and everyone would be forced to listen to their nonsense unable to respond with more than an eye-roll for fear of reprisals. (For that matter, when Graham grew up those powerful white dudes could beat people up, sexuall…

> the criticism deeply shocks and distresses them

This is a really good point. It's frustrating, though predictable, to see people arguing about the precise threshold of "harm" to which speech should be held in the comments here when the harm done to most people Graham seems to be defending amounts to "someone was mean to me on the Internet."

And - yeah! That sucks! People being mean to you on the internet sucks. But until people like this are defending every target of KF/ED/4chan/etc hate mobs just as vehemently, I'm not really interested in treating them like they're neutral, rational parties.

Re: Heresy

#519

Post by erikpukinskis »

> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion

If that's how Graham reads such statements, isn't he basically saying "It's heresy to call a statement x-ist" in his presence?

What am I missing, this seems totally hypocritical given the rest of his argument?

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