221–230 of 1001 posts
We live in New Middleages. Just substitute religion for ideology and suddenly it all makes sense.
No it isn’t. Nobody is literally losing their life over this.
Sorry, I mean 'intolerant people'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the competing thoughtcrime tribes seem to care about things like free thought, discourse, etc. This is the frightening part to me--people in the "other tribe" aren't worthy of things like due process, and authoritarian approaches are fine as long as they are aimed at the "other". I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.
Nobody’s trying to put you in jail for having differing views. But there’s never going to be a world in which there aren’t social consequences for having them. If you think, for example, that the world is going to greet people who think it’s ok to molest children (whether they do it or not) with open arms, you’re just deluded.
I’m not saying it should be unlimited or anyone should be legally or morally obligated to refrain from social consequences for any and all speech, but I do think a society where tolerance is extended to a majority of the other people by a majority of people is healthier than one where that isn’t the case.
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…
It's really easy to think/say horrible things. The main defense humans have against it is following orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.
If you think you are naturally good (whatever that means), you are wrong. If you think you are good because of your intellect, you're also wrong. It takes many generations to build up the kind of orthodoxy that keeps humans good. And the lessons behind it are too many to learn in a lifetime.
So, we need to mostly follow orthodoxy, at least in our actions. But that poses an intellectual problem: orthodoxy is imperfect, and to discuss and advance it, or even understand it well, you have to challenge it. If merely by challenging it you transgress, then it will never be understood very well and certainly not advanced.
Granted, there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
Remember: gay marriage was illegal almost everywhere 20 years ago. Imagine the surprise to, say, a 60 year old, that "misgendering" (by using pronouns associated with one's biological sex) might be a firable offense today.
We should all strive to keep an open mind, especially to ideas contrary to our own. But it’s not easy, because every group, in every society, organically develops its own heresies – things you cannot say without consequences. For example, here are some heresies common in the Silicon Valley startup community: * Heresy: “Government regulations are, on the whole, a net force for the good of humanity.” * Heresy: “All ent…
You're basically just saying it is heresy to be moderately left-wing in Silicon Valley.
Which I don't doubt is true, even if I hope it is not quite as dire. Just wanted to point out the connection.
EDIT: though if we're talking "in front of CEO", that might be like talking about French Revolution in front of a monarch, or mentioning Mao in front of landlord, so I can understand why the CEO would not like it.
What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics. It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
This comment is not just intellectually dishonest, it's also a basic example of the core problem of our society: demonization of "others". You can have a problem with cancel culture and not be anti CRT. Who would have thought, right?
It seemed to me that the firing of Timnit Gebru at Google was superficially the political reverse of the firing of Antonio García Martínez at Apple. And yet the latter case is considered cancel culture, while the former is not.
What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics. It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
The idea that you could introduce homosexuality or anything else without the same basic check seems backwards.
Granted, the DSG bill has some badly-written foibles but the general idea is on the mark.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
THIS is exactly what some are afraid of. People taking statements, interpreting them with their own mental models, and coming to the conclusion the person who made that statement is x-ist. Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
"Implicitly sexist" does not mean "sexist by default". "Implicitly" is a reasonable qualifier here. You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. In English, "very few" implies "very much fewer than the alternative", but in strict logical construction, it does not , hence the parent's point and my remark abou…
I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context:
A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top.
B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all.
If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's:
> Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
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…
The missing component not mentioned in PGs essay is the acceleration and amplification of cancel culture via the Internet. Even a decade ago, tribes were geographically local. Today, your tribe is literally global. It knows no borders. Thus social media amplifies the effect of cancel culture and "same think".
I would argue this may dominate over the effect you assume and drive the same simply because if one wants to become outraged over an act, they need to know it occurred in the first place.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the overall effect of the internet is to drive cultural consensus.