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Heresy

paulgraham.com

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Re: Heresy

#851

Post by duvenaud »

titzer wrote: post #750

I was nodding along up until this: > The clearest evidence of this 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. [2] I think there is a ton of nuance that contradicts this. For example, a white, upper-middleclass college graduate could proclai…

I'm confused - it sounds like you're simply agreeing with Paul here, while claiming to disagree.

Re: Heresy

#852

Post by 0xy »

odonnellryan wrote: post #786
3qz wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Name one?

I witnessed someone get fired for wearing a MAGA hat in a Twitter picture at an unnamed tech company. Yes, that was the only reason. He was a good performer.

Holding a view that tens of millions of Americans have and you get fired.

It's not even particularly controversial.

Re: Heresy

#853

Post by lookalike74 »

To disable heresy you'd need to disable personal or moral offense. But it's as unrealistic to think that could ever happen as it is to blame "the left" for reacting to the deliberate incitement and cultivation of prejudice that's so popular right now. People die because of "x-ism" and pretending "the left" are to blame is ludicrous in the worst possible way.

Re: Heresy

#854

Post by tootie »

zozbot234 wrote: post #431
tootie wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy that Graham is espousing seems to be that moral superiority (or even moral improvement) is utterly impossible and any attempt to raise the level of discourse is oppression. The change in tone in the 80s he refers to is the ascendance of civil rights, feminism and gay rights. All incredibly worthy movements. The fact that some adherents make mistakes is human nature. The notion that they can't be debated i…

> The change in tone in the 80s he refers to is the ascendance of civil rights, feminism and gay rights Source? These movements are more than 100 years old. (yes, even gay acceptance basically got its start in the early 19th c.!) Did they really progress all that much from the 1980s to the present day? This is very much non-obvious, at least to me.

That's being very literal. Jim Crow lasted until 1965. Loving v Virginia was 1967. Gay marriage was made legal in 2015. The 80s wasn't necessarily a watershed but it was a generation raised knowing that a civil rights battle could be won.

Re: Heresy

#855

Post by rayiner »

keithwhor wrote: post #698

The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and…

The immune response example is instructive, but supports Graham's position, not yours. Immune responses often are destructive--but we've evolved to have them anyway because the consequences are potentially far worse. There's some really important principles of our society--not just free speech, but meritocracy, color blindness, etc.--that are under attack right now by a novel ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology.

It's not an ideology that's widely embraced, but has outsize influence in key institutions (kind of like Scientology). And it manipulatively invokes large groups of faceless minorities to paper over the fact that it's being advanced by a small, affluent, relatively homogenous minority: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/

Re: Heresy

#856

Post by sanderjd »

slibhb wrote: post #662
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 th…

> 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.

Potayto potahto. I was talking about the same thing that the article called "heresy".

My claim isn't that shunning and social pressure doesn't exist or isn't a problem. I'm just a bit skeptical that it's a lot worse now than in the past, and I'm a lot skeptical that it's only a problem on one side of the political aisle. I don't even think it's really a thing with a political valence, I think it's just a human thing.

Re: Heresy

#857

Post by rayiner »

FerociousTimes wrote: post #835
keithwhor wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha. Great observation; what you interpret as anti-collectivist / pro-individualist I interpret as misanthropic. Admittedly this is probably cultural on my part; growing up in a working class Canadian family bestows different social ideologies. It’s a complaint I have about Canadian culture (not individualistic enough ) but I do think a problem with American discourse is it can err so far on the side of individualism…

I know it's futile to persuade a Canadian not to apologize reflexively anytime they get the chance to but your pro-collectivist explanation is totally fine with me :) Here's my counter backstory, I grew up and live in a very collectivist society and I'm a very individualist minded person by nature, and it's like hell on earth for me, and to spare you the sob story and to get straight to the point, when I come across…

I think you're both a little wrong. The ideology isn't collectivist, it's pseudo-collectivist. For example, as a foreigner who finds ethnic "identity politics" rather natural, I'm completely befuddled by what passes for "identity politics" in America. It's not collectivism where everyone all the Muslim kids line up in their tribe and follow what the patriarchs and matriarchs say. It's a hyper-individualistic cosplay of collectivism. "Proud Muslim Americans" wear their identity on their sleeve and complain about "white people" and "Islamophobia," but their beliefs and causes align with those of their white progressive friends, not other Muslims.

This, incidentally, makes the movement seem much bigger than it is.

Re: Heresy

#858

Post by rectang »

rayiner wrote: post #855
keithwhor wrote: post #698

The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and…

The immune response example is instructive, but supports Graham's position, not yours. Immune responses often are destructive--but we've evolved to have them anyway because the consequences are potentially far worse. There's some really important principles of our society--not just free speech, but meritocracy, color blindness, etc.--that are under attack right now by a novel ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…

I'd never heard of this "Successor Ideology" before today. Turns out it's a straw man crafted by its originator, Wesley Yang, for the sake of tearing down: he opposes it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Yang

> Yang coined the term "successor ideology" in 2019 to describe an emerging ideology among left-wing movements in the United States centered around identity politics. Yang opposes this ideology and believes it may replace traditional liberal values.

Never mind "outsize influence", it has no influence at all — nobody follows "Successor Ideology", not even the person who made it up.

Re: Heresy

#859

Post by temp8964 »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #839
temp8964 wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's I am not aware of this history. Is there any data or document? What kind of jobs, private? governmental? academic?

Everyone crying about people being cancelled sure didn't have a lot of words to defend the Dixie Chicks when they were against the Iraq war.

Yes. It’s exactly like MIT canceled Dorian Abbot.

Re: Heresy

#860

Post by dragonwriter »

zozbot234 wrote: post #797
tptacek wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. I don't think this is new for him; there's always been a vein in his writing of someone scarred, late into life, by bad experiences in high school. Maybe it's not deliberate, but it is a vibe he sometimes manages to give off. When he writes about Lisp, or (for the most part) about startups, or about being a dad, he seems happy and well-adjusted (I'm looking for a better term but let's roll with that). When…

> When he writes about cancel culture, or maybe really culture of any sort: different story. Is there anyone at all who writes "happily" about cancel culture? Even SJW's themselves can only give an impression of being perpetually angry and frustrated; they try to present their inner frustration wrt. the world at large as some sort of zeal for superior justice and universal social liberation, but don't quite manage to…

> Is there anyone at all who writes "happily" about cancel culture?

It is something that, like the Devil, exists primarily in the minds of people for whom it is a central part of the opposition in their mythological construction of the world, so no.

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