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What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#71

Post by lone_haxx0r »

kaens wrote: post #64

> Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress th…

Embracing Popper's thesis implies the existence of a line separating "tolerant ideologies" from "intolerant ideologies". Who is going to define that line?

Knowing how the world works, I don't suspect, but I know it will be used to suppress things that the mob doesn't agree with, while that same mob preaches ideologies more violent and intolerant than the ones they suppress.

Popper's opinion only makes sense when the person in power (or the mob) is never wrong, and that never happens.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#72

Post by armenarmen »

kaens wrote: post #64

> Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress th…

“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”

― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#73

Post by eebynight »

kaens wrote: post #64

> Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress th…

Every time this topic comes up someone posts this Popper argument.

The problem, in my opinion, with this argument is that it is spoken from a position of moral superiority. When deciding whether to surpress an idea by force, who is making that decision? Why is that person or group correct about the matter?

My major issue is that the people using this argument are usually so adamant about an idea they can’t see any flaws in their reasoning and believe they are correct without a doubt.

Can no one think of a time in the past when the “right” move to surpress or perpetuate an idea ended up being something that was regretted in the future?

Can you be sure that the decision you are making now will be looked back on favorably?

On one side of this argument, I can imagine this being a solid strategy to prevent another Nazi Germany style idea from taking over.

However, on the other hand, I see this being used to conveniently sweep ideas under the rug that are not favorable, but may not be as dangerous as they are made out to be (think Fahrenheit 451 or 1984).

So to summarize, I don’t think people should just drop this argument and call it a day. I’d love to see more discussion rather than ad hominem attacks.

/rant

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#74

Post by voidhorse »

inimino wrote: post #60
voidhorse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s a very naive and limited conception of intelligence that equates intellegence strictly with mathematical reasoning (and perhaps experimentation). There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing. And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of p…

> the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. This is of course true. But if you think this is an any way unique to the hard sciences, I have some humanities departments full of people I'd love to introduce you to.

Fair point. I wholeheartedly agree. The issue is, it is not the humanities profs, in this case, or at this time, that are claiming intellectual superiority. (funnily enough, it's not even a physicist that's claiming the intellectual superiority for physicists, but rather a venture capitalist computer scientist--this should be nice flag as to the dubiousness of the claim).

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#75

Post by bgrainger »

rland wrote: post #44
jonahrd wrote: post #5

> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..) Quite the hubris to make that assumption!

Statements like these are STEM vs. Non-STEM version of "why does Twitter need 4000 software engineers? I could make that in two weeks!" Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?

There's a Dan Luu essay on that subject: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#76

Post by knzhou »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #58
undefined1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul's response to this: "Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.) T…

Pretty high - has he updated his response yet? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...

This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what happened here.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#77

Post by ixtli »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #54
Tronno wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now progressives are trying to reinstitute segregation and promoting the idea that people should be judged on skin color and not content of character while conservatives fight them on these changes." That's quite a statement. Could you go into more detail?

I believe they are referring to support for concepts like Black History Month or a Women In Engineering group being equivalent to "segregation".

It’s amazing the lengths how reactionaries go to hide what they really mean. It’s most on display when we around and around entertaining their insane notions that acknowledging systemic racism is the actual racism. It’s shocking how often this argument is made.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#78

Post by ixtli »

spumoni wrote: post #62
egdod wrote: post #26

“It’s ok to be white” is racist hate speech. Does that count?

Oh, it gets even worse. You can't just not talk about being white. You can't talk about preserving a future for white children.

Yes, it’s terrible that you’re not allowed to reproduce white nationalist propaganda in public.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#79

Post by musicale »

undefined1 wrote: post #40
jonahrd wrote: post #5

> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..) Quite the hubris to make that assumption!

Paul's response to this: "Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.) T…

Thought experiments like this may reflect our own attitudes more than reality.

Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences. For example, peer review in CS seems to be highly random, often biased (depending on reviewer and author rather than the paper) and only weakly correlated with quality and impact. Moreover, there seems to be a problem with reproducibility (as well as data accuracy) of many published results in the biological sciences, medicine, and psychology. And "not reproducible" in science may very well mean "not true," and can have harmful consequences such as prescription drugs that don't work.

I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling and usually requires an unimaginable amount of reading (in multiple languages, usually) as well as writing a massive and highly detailed book for a very limited audience. It requires committing yourself to years of intense and often solitary effort for minimal reward and low pay, so I think you have to have remarkable dedication and "grit" as well as a passion or affinity for the discipline. Moreover, actually getting hired into a humanities faculty position is an astonishing achievement in itself.

Will the skills of physicists transfer trivially to the humanities? Perhaps, but I think it would be an interesting study to see how well both sides do switching disciplines.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#80

Post by yourbandsucks »

spumoni wrote: post #68
john-radio wrote: post #8

> Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist"... This made me remember the essay "Against Murderism" by Scott Alexander. If someone would like to read a somewhat similar article to what's posted here, written by (in my opinion) a devastatingly better essayist than Graham with a lot more knowledge about human psychology and understa…

And if you would like to visit a place that is tacitly backed by Scott Alexander as a place to discuss cultural phenomena with a wide variety of backgrounds, visit https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/

That's not at all how he described it in his Scott alexander-length blog post on the matter.
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