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Heresy

paulgraham.com

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Re: Heresy

#661

Post by drdec »

tomp wrote: post #545
ScarletEmerald wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

For some weird reason, the same people can be OK with Cloudflare or Twitter banning someone for their political views, but wouldn't be OK with a bank or electricity provider banning someone for their political views.

An electrical provider is typically a government-granted monopoly, and given that, it is not unreasonable to extend the protection of speech against government action to the electrical provider.

Banks are not however, and in fact, banks and the financial system do act against classes of people. Visa and Mastercard frequently pressure their customers in an effort to prevent sex work in the name of preventing sex trafficking. If their customers do not do enough they will cut them off. This most recently happened with OnlyFans. See also PornHub.

Re: Heresy

#662

Post by slibhb »

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…

> It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right

The question isn't "staying in good graces". While people should have friends with whom they disagree, the topic here is heresy. Heresy leads to punishment that goes beyond social consequences.

At this point, it's hard for me to know how to respond to people who remain skeptical of the thesis here. The NYT editorial board has acknowledged the problem. If you're still a holdout, you're probably part of it.

Re: Heresy

#663

Post by rendang »

pikma wrote: post #48
tedivm wrote: post #11

This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird. I have the right to judge your statements just as much as you have a right to say them. I have the right to leave jobs when it turns out the people working there hate people like me, and companies have the right to hire people who aren't going to alienate future potential employees. When people bring up posts like this they neve…

Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone? I see this expression often, but I'm genuinely puzzled by what it means in practice. I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, ho…

Interesting - I would never knowingly refer to someone by pronouns other than those which correspond with their birth sex, it would violate my conscience to do so. Obviously not a majority position in SV but also not an extremely rare position to hold in the world more largely. I suppose that means you would fire me and others of the same opinion if you had the chance.

I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.

Re: Heresy

#664

Post by adolph »

UncleMeat wrote: post #570
nonrandomstring wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed with which society is moving is also a factor. Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise. I think Graham is slightly missing the point about our period. It's not that heresy is on the up, so much as it's on the move. Outrage is a homeless beast. We're in an Orwellian age where it changes with the seasons, so what is h…

> Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise. The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi who was using this quote to claim that Jewish people run the world. It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work, but autistic people clearly aren't running the world through some secret cabal.

The political orientation of a thought is orthogonal to an honest evaluation of its accuracy. Call it a broken clock fallacy if you will. The statement was about criticism of the powerful, which is different from ridicule of the relatively weak.

The concept seems facially valid to me although incomplete in that it seems to have an assumption of singular power rather than many different power domains. Taken further, an hallmark of power, prestige, might be defined as those things which seem so natural that criticism would not occur to the larger portion of people.

Re: Heresy

#665

Post by smugma »

atoav wrote: post #640

> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a wom…

There’s a big difference between calling it out in person and over the Internet. You were rightly calling out the person’s language as unacceptable. Maybe the hope was to change their behavior (unlikely, at least in the short term) or at least stand up for what you thought was right.

When this is done over a mass medium, there are many other motivations. Could be to make themselves look good within another group, attempt to cancel, etc.

It may come from similar positive/good faith motivations but easily becomes distorted.

Re: Heresy

#666

Post by telchior »

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…

Trying to give it the article a more positive reading: at least for myself, I can imagine several opinions I could express in the United States which would count as "heresy". I'd imagine that if those opinions were said out loud (whether or not I really believed them) my employers would fire me, friends would unfriend me, etc.

But, I can't really think of any supporting real-world stories where that reaction wouldn't be justified. There are two that come to mind:

- Justine Sacco, the woman who was fired for tweeting a joke that she hoped she wouldn't get AIDS on her trip to Africa. I don't think the joke is necessarily indicative of some deep inner evil, but the lady was a PR exec; it does tend to indicate that she was probably dangerously incompetent at her actual job. Firing seems like the right response.

- Amy Cooper, the lady in New York who called the police on "an African American man threatening my life" in Central Park. He was a bird-watcher asking her to keep her unleashed dogs under control. Widely reported that she was fired for racism. But again, is this really a case of being fired for heresy? Or could it have perhaps just a case of the employer realizing their employee is a dishonest sack of crap? God knows what kind of havoc a person like this might wreak inside a company.

Those two are probably the most widely reported in the past few years. People here are referencing firings in academia; maybe those would give more nuance.

Re: Heresy

#667

Post by Animats »

teakettle42 wrote: post #381
Osmose wrote: post #258

The behavior he's calling "heresy" here cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; these kinds of statements are all contextual, ESPECIALLY hinging on who is saying them. And the reason that is the case is because the consequences of saying something are different depending on who says them. Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is jud…

You have invented a “harm principle” to be used when evaluating truth , and the fact that you think this is a cogent argument is scarier than anything Paul Graham might have said. One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.

That's what Graham did say:

"They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they have to recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like something that can be banned."

Re: Heresy

#668

Post by Biologist123 »

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…

It’s a good point you make. I’m thinking of all the heterodox economists who don’t get hired - ie the throttle is applied at a different layer.

Re: Heresy

#669

Post by philosopher1234 »

The issue isn’t consequences for speech. Conservatives like Paul Graham are perfectly fine with consequences for certain kinds of speech (speaking out against a company in his portfolio, for instance.)

The issue under debate is what kind of speech merits what kind of consequence. The idea that there should be no consequences for speech oils only remotely believable when you are a member of the white, cis, wealthy class who’s lived without consequence for speech for their whole lives.

Re: Heresy

#670

Post by pessimizer »

jounker wrote: post #641

> Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased. In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.

I know, it's a very common but very bizarre centering of the general concept of intolerance on China and on lib college students. States make laws denying work to people who support BDS. Announcing that you don't give a shit about whether Russia takes over Ukraine could get you fired, especially if you're ethnically Russian, but announcing that Ukraine should fight until the breath of the last Ukrainian is spent and the last blade of Ukrainian grass is burned will get you a spot on local TV news in Milwaukee, WI, USA.

The BBC had MI5 vet its employees for correct political opinions and associations into the 90s, and won't deny that they do it now.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/16176527.revealed-mi5-vett...

http://tonygarnett.info/mi5-and-secret-political-vetting-at-...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/14/bbc.research

The major difference is that captains of industry used to be able to almost completely dictate orthodoxy, and now in the age of the internet there are competing orthodoxies - some of which don't consider power and wealth synonymous with wisdom and genius. It also turns out that plenty of powerful people who control institutions don't care about being seen as philosopher-kings, and are happy to let their PR and HR departments deal with controversy. They will happily capitulate to all orthodoxies in order to protect the institution.

The problem is that labor rights have been overrun by freedom-of-contract at-will libertarians, so instead of people just hating you for things you've said and done, everyone also has to deal with apolitical sociopathic corporations that will excise you like a suspicious mole at the first whiff of controversy.

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