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Heresy

paulgraham.com

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Re: Heresy

#621

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jameshart wrote: post #347
pikma wrote: 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…

> Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans

Yay.

But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.

Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.

Re: Heresy

#622

Post by andrepd »

switchbak wrote: post #606
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem with this argument is the free speech "is at an all time high if you zoom out a bit". This is much like the argument, "gun violence is at an all time low if you zoom out a bit" argument. Both of these statements are true in the macro, but if you look at the trends, they point to a very disturbing line. The call for the restriction of free speech on the right(1) and the left (2) have increased in v…

I think that's something that often gets overlooked in the frenzy to tribal defence: this is a sideshow to take the spotlight off of the real important issues of the day. If you really look at it, the left/right dichotomy in US politics seems designed (evolved?) to serve much the same purpose. When we all calm down on the partisanship, often it's amazing how much shared ground there really is.

It's not surprising. Divide and conquer is a millenia-old tactic.

Efforts by the ruling class to pit the working classes against themselves have been noted in Western capitalist societies for at least 150 years.

Re: Heresy

#623

Post by catears »

softwaredoug wrote: post #454

In the 90s and 2000s it would be “heresy” to be a gay or transgendered person. I remember sadly how people in hushed tones would talk about coworkers. There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture that you didn’t defy very easily. I'm a bit surprised how easily people forget these things.

I also thought about transgender and gay rights.

Heresy to me sounds like it comes from an intolerant society. At least in regards to LGBTQ+ rights it feels like society has (thankfully!) become more tolerant. How many people would be fired from their job today if they said they are gay compared to 30-60 years ago?

Maybe PG is talking about specific contexts like academia, media, or tech companies though?

Re: Heresy

#624

Post by SauciestGNU »

sanderjd wrote: post #614
randomtwiddler wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a false equivalency. The majority of the personalized destruction, cancelling, firing, etc, comes from one side.

This is a common claim that seems to be based more on vibes than on evidence.

Yeah there are laws being passed to prohibit certain concepts from being discussed in private corporate trainings. Those laws are being passed by those same partisans who loudly claim to oppose cancel culture. I don't think we can have an honest discussion on the topic without acknowledging one side is using voluntary dissociation as a means of punishment while the other is using the power of the state to prohibit the expression of certain ideas.

Re: Heresy

#625

Post by infiniteL0Op »

amalcon wrote: post #568
Beltalowda wrote: post #155

I think this is an important part: "Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would…

I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today? What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for…

Ask Thai citizens if they can imagine that. Or Russians.

In democracies, society has moved a bit into a direction where many harmless things said will trigger an upset in some very uptight people.

It's enforced socially rather than by the government. Back when you could not say things openly against governments, at least you could speak your mind on anything else.

Today, you can say whatever you want against the government, they are so far detached they don't care.

Free speech is a stupid political term, it has never truly existed an never will.

Re: Heresy

#626

Post by rendang »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #519

> 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?

Does Graham say people who make those statements should be ostracized and fired? I don't see the parallel at all.

Re: Heresy

#627

Post by giraffe_lady »

waqf wrote: post #613
ss108 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not generally pro cancel culture, but a lot of the opposition to it is certainly whiney and low on evidence. For example, there's this notion that the advancement of knowledge is somehow being suppressed and that naked, barely-regulated free speech has been essential to Western dominance, and that, accordingly, to backpedal on the principle would have some material affect on society. However, no nexus between th…

But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others. Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.

> But in actual intellectual discourse

Well, where is that? I live my life surrounded by "discredited" ideas with much popularity and power. I don't know shit about intellectual discourse, can it get the police to stop killing my friends? Can it get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?

If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.

Re: Heresy

#628

Post by byecomputer »

ryanobjc wrote: post #514
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…

> There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college.

Unless we're including religious colleges, this seems hyperbolic.

While I did find this[1], which appears to support the idea that left-wing voices are more likely to get fired/kicked out of universities for their speech (though not by a magnitude), I have no idea how that study split up which speech was 'censored by right'/'censored by left', because when I tried to do so myself with the dataset[2], the results were closer to 55/45 (left-wing firing/right-wing firing) for 2015-2017, which was the years the study chose to focus on, but almost exactly 50/50 for the entire 2006-2020 dataset.

[1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...

Re: Heresy

#629

Post by stale2002 »

woodruffw wrote: post #450
randallsquared wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it allows the reader to insert their individual grievances into the shape of the argument rather than reflecting on whether their grievances are actually well-founded. Given that it's specifically about the shape of these sorts of arguments, adding specific examples would produce tangents into the merits of the specific examples; omitting them encourages the reader to consider the pattern in the context of their ow…

"The shape of an argument" is the polite way to say that an argument is imprecise. Less politely: it's a way to beat around the bush about what you actually believe while maintaining plausible agreeability. Graham can't make the point that it's pervasive, because he won't provide any evidence to that effect. He won't do that because he knows that hand-wringing about "heresy" is much more agreeable than the interior p…

> Graham can't make the point that it's pervasive, because he won't provide any evidence to that effect

Yes he can. The reader can use their brain and think of examples themselves.

Re: Heresy

#630

Post by ss108 »

randomtwiddler wrote: post #610
sanderjd wrote: post #369

> The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. This is an (aggressively?) conventional idea that I have an (I guess) heretical opinion about. I'm somewhat persuaded that there is a recent outbreak of intolerance for differing ideas and ideals (though I suspect every generation expresses a version of this opinion as they get…

Seems a false equivalency. The majority of the personalized destruction, cancelling, firing, etc, comes from one side.

Because that side simply has economic power.
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