> For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent.
There are a lot of topics I won’t touch any more, more every year. Accounts - can’t stay anonymous, ml systems working around the clock to identify posters. My social justice focused friends have it worse, their online “friends” attack them publicly over every single little thing. They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans. They have panic attacks over the guilt and stress
Theocracy may be bad, but an aggressively religious society is worse.
Religious here means that certain things are articles of faith, and any attempt to discuss them in any way, let alone disagree with them, gets you marked as an enemy who needs to be driven away and stripped of any respect or role in society.
I won't even say it's the majority that's so aggressive. But the majority of people who are somehow active in the society and thus visible outside the circle of their family and coworkers, either actively or passively agree. Either they share the faith (many do), or they don't want trouble.
What good is the First Amendment if citizens themselves see free speech as a dangerous transgression?
The big difference is that religion usually believes in some kind of forgiveness and repentance. I can't say I see the same things in the current society.
Repentance — yes, galore, it's exactly the expexted action from the one accused of transsgression. Write a long blog post condemning the bitter mistake, step out from your post, if you have any.
But on the banner on this religion is not Love, but Justice. So, forgiveness is hard to obtain. It takes either converting into a zealot, or hiding in oblivion. "If God were to show justice instead of His endless grace, we would all end up in Hell", wrote one medieval theologician.
This whole thing is thoroughly medieval, if you look at it at a certain angle. While declaring that it stands for progress, it rejects the values of the Enlightenment much more deeply than many alt-right philosophers who flaunt this rejection.
If you ever wondered what highly westernized Iran might look like before the revolution, this may provide a glimpse. Feeling righteous and rejecting doubt is a powerful and addictive drug :(
Reminds me of criminal records. Time in jail is not the real punishment. You have not really paid your dues in this system. You can never be forgiven, you will pay for whatever crime your whole life without respite by being unhirable and all the other side effects. I forget which hn post made me think about this but it’s bugged me for years now
> But on the banner on this religion is not Love, but Justice. So, forgiveness is hard to obtain. It takes either converting into a zealot, or hiding in oblivion.
No, it takes saying some words and then going about your day.
> Feeling righteous and rejecting doubt is a powerful and addictive drug :(
Actually, Medieval Scholastics had a vibrant discourse from a wide array of sources that would look practically libertarian by comparison to contemporary woke discourse. It sounded way more fun too.
Scholasticists were careful though not to overstep the dogmata and say heresy. Discussing heresies was very much allowed, as long as they were considered heresies and thus wrong by definition.
Different churches at different times and places were more lenient or more strict, but always kept the One True Faith which could be discussed but not put to doubt. At least, this is how it looks to me after some superficial reading about the topic.
The structure of a revolution-- it usually begins when the rabble acts up and no authority is willing or able to stop them. So, 1 out of 1,000 users seek quasi-religious vengeance on Twitter and the mechanisms that used to inform the other 999 don't work. The NYT picks up toxic views of the rabble and reports them as mainstream, which the rabble have converted to a weapon in itself.
Most revolutions I've read about, large and small consist of an authentic breakdown in or reorganization of, society. Here and now, seems like we're actually discussing an antifeature of manufactured social technologies combined with capture or weakening of traditional media.
I think you mischaracterize these people as "rabble". Many of the vocal "woke" figures are highly educated, highly intellectual, and well-off. Professors, top business officers, high-achieving scientists, writers, engineers.
They do it not because they are stupid, for they are not. They truly believe that what they do is right, that it's the shining path to the better future.
> I think you mischaracterize these people as "rabble". Many of the vocal "woke" figures are highly educated, highly intellectual, and well-off. Professors, top business officers, high-achieving scientists, writers, engineers.
That is the actual structure of a revolution. Your parent comment is misguided; revolutions that aren't led by elites are rare and, when they occur, generally don't go anywhere.
Yes, despite slavery being horrendous and very common there was basically 1 successful slave revolt in all recorded history Haiti. Gaspar Yagna's Rebellion was arguable as they hid and became independent. Spartacus grew to ~120,000 then failed, Zanj Rebellion came closer and still failed.
This is also why killing all the intellectuals after a successful revolution is so popular.
None of those things were really the result of some top down utopian master plan, though. The closest might be the enlightenment if you consider the rewards for book finding granted by wealthy benefactors, but it was fundamentally a backward looking "Revolution" that was based on worship of the ancients.
The "scientific revolution", is not really a well known or unambiguous label, the growth of science being a long term trend. And it's worth observing that a major part of the present day corruption of science with the replication crisis, the junk sociological sciences and so on, are the result of an explicit top down utopian plan by governments to make a better tomorrow by funding academics.
Some are removed from reality that it might seem like a good idea. I believe them not to be too well informed though and much support stems from the fact that these people don't know what is done under their banner. Bipartisanship in the US heavily influences this too.
Most intellectuals have identified the problem pretty quickly but they also stay mostly silent.
There are also those in high positions without the necessary facilities of course.
Or perhaps, they do it because its the ideal weapon and means of control. We've seen that "sociopaths in management studies" bit. Wonder how it'd apply to wokism.
There is no difference. I've heard that Islam and Christianity, as religions, are good and forgiving. I've also witnessed the behavior of actual muslims and christians. I would not call these people good. I certainly wouldn't call them forgiving.
My feeling is that the poster is on the right track. Ideological groups, (not trying to pick on politics, but they are usually political ideologues), have become the new pseudo-religions. As people in the West have fallen away from church, we've witnessed the rise of ideologue communities on the right and left.
You can't argue with them. You can't question them. Some want to kill off half the people in the country. Others want draconian control over the other half.
And people are surprised that the only option available to a reasonable person is to opt-out?
If anything, I think people are being shortsighted in viewing the threat. For some people in the US, this ideology war is not only about a right to speech, it can come down to a right to live. Those people have to oppose the ideologues, or die.
I don't claim to know the solution, I do know that it's a tough, tough problem.
Just like with any belief system, there are many more moderates than zealots. The problem is, zealots help the leaders of those belief systems gain more power. Moderates, for the most part, just want things to keep working and not to feel the lash on their back. When the zealots can't let this happen and the powers that be lose control of the zealots, that's usually when revolution happens =(
I don't think they are capable of a revolution at this point. Their wrath can easily be redirected. You don't even have to put up a too convincing target, small overstepping of some arbitrary social rule is enough.
> I've heard that Islam and Christianity, as religions, are good and forgiving. I've also witnessed the behavior of actual muslims and christians. I would not call these people good.
Of course not; the movement isn't the ideology.
Whatever the ideology, the people in it will be flawed and fallible human beings.
thu2111 says "Who is saying they want to kill half the population?!"
He's speaking of mostly apparent desire, not what people have explicitly said (although it is sometimes explicitly said, too). On the surface it would seem to be political suicide to say one wanted, for example,
- all Trump supporters, or
- all woke activists, or
- all conspiracy theorists, or
- all Democrats, or
- all Republicans, or
- all blacks or all whites or all LGBTQ+ etc.
(pick a group)
to be dead. But there is plenty of such talk going around and it is not always cancelled or censored by FAANG and it is sometimes even encouraged. I believe that the OP's observation is correct about a significant part of the population.
Political affiliation and religious affiliation are both beliefs. Wars have been/are being fought over beliefs. There are plenty of quotes by various parties suggesting what should be done with unbelievers at all times through history.
At bottom, isn't everything we know really belief?
Yes, if you opt out you are fucked in the long run. It's use force on others so that you can live in peace, join them because you believe, or join them and just lie. There is no moderate option in a globalised internetworked world.
There's also the possibility of the opt-out'ers just getting smart and offing the ideologues before the ideologues off them. Which, in my view, is the most reasonable course of action if too many of these nut jobs turn to violence.
One of the main difference between Wokism and Christianity, in my opinion, is that in Christianity there is forgiveness, whereas in Wokism you can be endlessly dragged overf the coals for something you said ages ago when you were a teenager: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/no-redemption-for-the-woke
Just because a concept of forgiveness exists doesn't mean that Christians actually do any of it and some folks simply will never, ever get such a thing: You are expected to start "acting right" before you can consider getting forgiveness. Some churches will banish you from their church if you do the wrong thing, all the while claiming that forgiveness exists.
So, you know, don't be gay or bisexual. Don't be trans. Don't, for any reason, have an abortion. Don't even use birth control. Don't have the audacity to explore other religions or be atheist. If you live in some parts of the world, this stuff might be codified into law. I'm not sure how jail time for abortions shows any sort of forgiveness.
Not exactly forgiveness, but if you happen to have the crime of being poor, you might have forced religion and forced work in a thrift store to earn your charity.
And your basing all of this off of experience? Some churches banish you so then all do? Did you read revelations where some groups are not following the word? So you and God have the same complaint. Interesting huh?
Also Christians are not the ones forgiving. You’re asking for forgiveness from God himself. They’re not supposed to judge in the first place. It’s considered a sin. So all you’ve discovered here is literally written in the Bible as a negative.
Straight? I don't think it's as relevant as it was 5 years ago. Cis? That's one I would agree on. I think you could make a case that "trans is the new gay", at least in their place in society.
All belief systems are the same: communism, christianity, mohammedanism, buddhism, etc.
No organized belief system (includes any religion) is noteworthy for forgiveness and repentance. Such gems as the religious wars in Europe, CCP treatment of Uighurs today, the Inquisition, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the current Middle East all showed little mercy for unbelievers.
They'll forgive you, maybe let you repent. But then they will kill you, your family, your friends and your business associates.
Gengis Khan, afaik, was not a religious fanatic, or even an ethnic supremacist. His army absorbed warriors from different places and of different religions. What he required was fealty, not faith. This is how he built a colossal empire, Earth's largest IIRC.
An empire has to be somehow tolerant towards differences between the many nations it consumes. The process of assimilation, even if forced, can and usually does take centuries.
Faith systems are not like that: they require an immediate conversion, and an immediate and willing following the norms.
You're quibbling about minor details. Khan was head of a belief system: believe and help him and you might not die. He and his men wanted the tundra cleared of cities. He did it.
nine_k says>""An empire has to be somehow tolerant towards differences between the many nations it consumes. The process of assimilation, even if forced, can and usually does take centuries."<
Khan didn't assimilate, he destroyed. Only after his death and the end of his generation of warriors, was his former empire "assimilated" by groups lucky(?) enough to be alive.
The words "tolerant" and "assimilation" have no place when speaking of the advancement of Gengis Khan's armies out of Mongolia.
Just like "faith systems" today have no tolerance, accept no "repentance" and refuse "assimilation".
Well current society has chosen "struggle sessions". You get forgiveness if you voluntarily admit to some sin and only then if the sin is mild. If you're found out without coming forth with your sins first, you're excommunicated.
You should generalize that to "aggressively ideological society".
It doesn't matter what the ideology is based upon. It's the aggression that matters.
And the "solipsism" too, I guess. If that term can be applied to societies. I mean, when the hivemind detaches from all evidence, insulated from reality, self-affirming, self-amplifying, purity-seeking. Modern social media is, of course, great for achieving that.
Theocracy isn't religion at all. It's politics that assume a religious veneer, similar to how nationalism assumes a historical veneer. (And honestly... most 'aggressive' religions are really nothing BUT politics.)
The idea is that a theocracy forces religious norms on its subjects by the force of the state.
The contrast I'm making is that the state in the U.S. does not do that, but citizens themselves seem to act coercively and force the norms of their faith on anyone who voices any doubts loudly enough.
Totally agree. What's interesting is that "antiracism" (i.e. neoracism) has analogous tenets and catechisms of a secular religion. They even reinvented original sin.
> What good is the First Amendment if citizens themselves see free speech as a dangerous transgression?
Well, first and foremost, the First is about the government interfering with speech. I don't think that applies to what you're complaining about, which appears to be an increase of intolerance of intolerance.
And your usage of "religious" to those of that ilk is sloppy whataboutism. Religion is about believing is something that can't be proven, and countless atrocities have occurred in its name. Equating that to somebody who says "black lives matter" and believes that to be true is flat out dishonest.
Minor but important quibble; religion is about what cannot be disproven. It can potentially be proven (if we ever encounter an alien species that, for example, has a document fundamentally identical to the Qur'an, the weight of evidence would swing quite heavily, I think anyone would agree).
In that framework, the people comparing wokism to a religion might point out several unfalsifiable beliefs that it's adherents generally hold. For an example of a fairly common one, "[inequality] is the result of discrimination."
Minor quibble: religion is about social control, i.e., God says you can do this but not that.
I'm not trying to attack religion (happy to do that elsewhere), just trying to clarify the language being used. Specifically, this game of calling people who believe in a certain morality religious is dishonest. Just because I believe that all people should be treated equally regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc -- that doesn't make me religious. I hope at worst it makes me avoid being a "bad person".
That's playing with words. If we can agree that discrimination exists then that clearly impacts "equality".
As to the nit about religion -- I was trying to be polite. Religion really exists because people were really ignorant in the beginning and wanted answers to the questions of life. Then it became a self-sustaining self-serving organization that exists because "god".
I'd posit that almost all religious people are of their faith because their parents were of that faith. Then it's turtles all the way up.
It's always the loudest few. I've read takes from conservatives in favor of BLM, racial justice, queer rights, etc from conservative principles. The "conservatives" who go feral over any queer representation in media or even discussing reparations probably don't represent the majority numerically, but the silence of the rest (probably out of fear) makes it hard to say they aren't, essentially, representatives.
I try to do right from my "side," but sometimes it's scary when popular checkmarked people on Twitter call for genocides of "red" states, where I happen to live, to thunderous applause.
I personally am entirely fine with queer people (some of my closest relatives and friends are queer), I think that racism is wrong due to many reasons, and certainly I'm totally fine with immigrants because this is how America came to be and later became great.
What I see as troubling is the "cancel culture", the force of the righteous mob. I believe that a society with more justice and grace than we have now can be built entirely without it, and that the intolerant fighters for inclusion and tolerance make the prospects of building such a society weaker.
You can't force people to be just, loving, and caring. You can force them feign that, but I suppose you very well understand how fraught such a society would be. There is a number of historical examples, all sad.
At the risk of self-promotion, I found some cause for empathy for the crusader types when writing about the subject:
"They’re mostly people whose elders, the people who might guide them to a fierce but strategic advocacy, were murdered by police or mob violence, thrown in prison for bullshit reasons, or allowed to die in a plague. If you can bring empathy for the guy who got fired from Google for circulating a paper that made his colleagues uncomfortable, you can bring it for people who are dealing with a strange world with no one to talk to who gets what they’re going through."
This is the part where I'd anticipate a crusader type accusing me of infantalizing people if I were on Twitter. I don't think it's entirely people who have no guidance + people taking up their cause (often without asking), but I think it's a large part of it. Some of it, maybe most of it, is Well-Meaning Allies causing a lot of noise while not listening to the people they're trying to help. I had a cis woman on Twitter lecture me on nonbinary identity because she didn't realize I was describing my own experience. I think that type is what most people get annoyed at, and sometimes their anger/fear has splash damage on people who didn't ask for that help.
Indeed. The fury of revenge is totally understandable, but also not very constructive; it did a lot of sad things throughout history.
The founders of great spiritual movements, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, all warned against revenge and called for forgiveness (even though Quran calls more to the due process and justice while gospels call to radical forgiveness). This is easy to understand rationally: a society with a lot of revenge keeps killing itself and keeps nurturing cruelty. Such societies tend to not survive for long.
I'm very sorry for all the Black, queer, Jewish, Arabian, East Asian, etc people who were victims of bitter oppression. I adore those of them who struggle for justice, cessation of oppression, peace, and reconciliation with the rest of the society. But I would not join those of them who strive for a war and a revenge.
Fighting against a powerful enemy, it's important to be watchful and not become the enemy's mirror image. I hope the people among them who possess more wisdom and compassion will eventually help most of them choose a better path.
The OP is referring to issus which are faced by LGBTQI rights advocacy. Who do you think they're waging war on? How many people has radical gay rights murdered recently?
Fortunately, LGBTQ struggle is mostly avoids destruction and wounds from either side. Unfortunately, mass street protests very often do not. Even if every participant of such a protest had a very good reason to feel infuriated and destroyed stuff because of that, I say that it's not good for them, it's corrupting them. AFAIK Rosa Parks didn't break a single window.
The lure to use the fury of the crowd gathered for a just cause is always strong for their leaders. Holding this fury back and not allowing it to turn the gathering into a riot is always hard work for those leaders who strive for a non-agressive way to protest.
Perhaps you can name some people who fell victim to "cancel culture" who weren't utterly despicable people. Cancel culture is an utterance that seems to lack a singular clear definition.
When someone tells others to vote with their wallets against something that is contrary to their own interests if a conservative is effected by people's free choice not to associate with him we are told its "cancel culture" likewise when someone hires someone nearly entirely for their image then no longer desires to be associated with their former hire's flagging popularity which is flagging precisely because of their own bad behavior.
In a long winded fashion what she said could reasonably be interpreted as trans women aren't women. While she doesn't support discrimination against people on the basis of being trans she is promoting the same thought process that is pervasively used by individuals justifying discriminating against trans people.
Imagine if someone said its totally wrong to put Jewish people in camps, after all they deserve the same rights as you and I, but maybe they really did cause us to lose WWI...
There are people who really are just mistaken and then there are others who are weaponizing this strategy to minimize their obvious racism.
I think she is merely incorrect not malicious but the reaction is easy to understand and it absolutely has to do with the size of her megaphone not just what she said. Someone who wasn't the world famous author of Harry Potter just wouldn't have got the same reaction in the first place.
JK rowling has a billion dollars and a bright future despite the reaction to her views. Can you give me an example of some people who have actually and in fact been canceled?
Protecting billionaires from people saying mean things about them on twitter doesn't seem like a worthy cause.
"In a long winded fashion what she said could reasonably be interpreted as trans women aren't women."
Wasn't she saying that trans women have a possible biological advantage over non-trans women in performance sports such as weightlifting?
Isn't that a fair question to be asking and within the realm of scientific plausibility?
The frenzied cancel mob attacking her on Twitter was frankly insane. The fact that you need to be a billionaire to survive that and speak (or earnestly question) the truth is not good.
This is not even close to all she said on the topic. I think the biggest issue is her She support of an unapologetic bigot Maya Forstater but that is neither the beginning nor the end of her commentary on the topic and she ended up with her foot firmly planted in her own mouth. She not trans activists is the cause of her own discontent.
I skimmed the article. Is the issue that JK Rowling thinks the terms men and women should refer to sex and not gender? That seems to be the basis for her tweet in support of Maya. Isn't this a widely held view in the general population? I mean, she's neither right nor wrong. Man/woman can refer to either sex or gender depending on the context, and appreciating that is in line with reality.
I think JK Rowling's main point is that trans activists conflate sex and gender and this creates unfair outcomes in areas like sports, not to mention there's a deeply anti-science bent to it (for example denying that trans women have any biological advantages).
For being one of the few cultural mainstream voices speaking against those aspects in particular, despite the vitriol she receives, I think she's brave and I appreciate that.
Some people, not so much you, but people in general who are uncomfortable with the larger sexual identity issues prefer to focus on the woman's sport's angle because its comfortingly simple and avoids the things that make people uncomfortable.
Maya didn't have her contract renewed because she said things like the senior director of Credit Suisse was "a man who likes to express himself part of the week by wearing a dress"
Not for advocating for fairness in woman's sports.
To be clear as far as athletics. Trans people make up 0.5% of the population. The female->male portion is most apt to experience on average a measurable disadvantage while the male->female portion if they start hormones when it is medically advisable to do so wont experience the same clear average advantage as a male athlete who simply declared himself a female one day and switched teams.
> “For the Olympic level, the elite level, I'd say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study's lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women," he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
> For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”
It's a tempest in a teapot. All things being equal you are likely to end up with a small percentage of woman's athletics being trans women and nothing else changes. This is especially true of school athletics which are after all supposed to be for the betterment of the student body as opposed to for objective success.
The science of women's sports performance is more complex than that. For a more complete explanation I recommend listening to this episode of The Real Science of Sport podcast.
Believing "trans women aren't women" isn't "despicable", it's what everyone believed only 50 years ago, and what most people alive still believe. It's not even despicable if they were a minority.
The only reason the phrase TWAW exists is as an ideological counter to "trans women are men". They're really not either one, and saying trans women are women, full stop, is just an indefensible position.
She deserved strong negative feedback on that issues. Given same she doubled down. If you believe trans rights are important then its perfectly logical for example to boycott her books/movies. Which is to say she deserved to be canceled. By which I mean people simply vote with their wallets not to give her any more money. This doesn't infringe on her rights to live her life as she chooses she will just have to do so with less of other people's money.
This is fundamentally a different question from should someone hate her or say hateful things to her. Anything that stirs up strong emotions and reaches millions will result in both reasonable dialogue and insane screeching. The people who reasonably disagree with her can't do anything about the nutjobs nor are they responsible for same.
I disagree, because she doesn't want to strip anyone of any rights. I think people scolding others on these issues could seriously profit from a bit of headwind.
If you cannot be convinced to let people have their standpoints, I am for canceling you. Believe me, I would not enjoy it like you do.
I'd be remiss if I didn't speak up against this sub-thread. I mostly lurk here...but as you can see from my short post history...there was a point in 2019 when I didn't understand what was so wrong -- and SO dehumanizing -- about JK Rowling's actions.
I now see them for the attacks that they are.
Unfortunately...it took overcoming my repression, a lot of soul searching, and a lot of educating myself about all manner of topics in orbit of trans people.
I'm proud to say I'm a trans woman. J.K. Rowling and her hate-mob would like to see a genocide of anyone like me.
If you're earnestly interested in learning more, here's a recent-and-relevant video essay on just that topic.
PLEASE do not be another hate-mob to her, because after all, that's what we're all proclaiming our disgust with in this thread.
I truly wish everyone reading this could see it from my perspective...and I wouldn't wish --on anyone-- the suffering that entails.
Ignorance may well be bliss, but if things had stayed the same, I'd be hating who I turned into. ♥
Edit: Ooh, and for those earnestly edifying themselves, explore "Falsehoods about Gender 1 + 2", found here: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit... -- I think you'll find out the edge cases are far greater in scope than we (even yours truly, previously) presume.
Her opposition to trans rights is enough to term her despicable, her blatant and repeated use of racial, ethnic, and cultural stereotypes in her body if work is also rather bad.
I want to explore a hypothetical to understand your perspective a bit better.
Let's say the only thing she said on the topic was that she thought trans women shouldn't be allowed in competitive women sports because they probably have a biological advantage over non-trans women, or at least that there's insufficient evidence that they do not.
Would this be enough to justify the label of "despicable" in your mind?
No, it's not. But that's a pretty ridiculous hypothetical, very few people who aren't actually transphobic care so much and spend so much time griping about such a miniscule issue.
You keep saying this but that isn't close to the only thing she said on the topic nor was it the genesis of any of the drama surrounding the issue. If you haven't read more on the issue it purely down to ignorance but if you have its not an honest portrayal of the issues.
No, in the first sentence I clearly stated that it was a hypothetical. I wanted to see if that particular subset of what she has said is enough to classify her as "despicable".
Thank you those are some reasonable examples. So in your opinion how do we separate the notion of pulling down legitimate bad apple's and trying to punish thought crime.
They wont call it cancel culture because they were "canceled" by conservatives. Although they experienced substantial fall out for not supporting the Iraq War a move that now looks prescient they ultimately recovered.
They did a world tour in 2016 that sold out stadiums then did the Country Music Awards. In 2019 they released a new album and reportedly sold 33 million albums.
Also the idea that "cancel culture" is even a left-wing thing is laughable.
There is not a week that goes by that a conservative group of some stripe is not calling for the boycott of something or someone. There hasn't been a year that has gone by that this is not the case - anyone who grew up in the 90s would remember that this was generically video games in response to every social issue, then specific developers, before that it was comic books. For some reason in the 80s it was the imagined cabal's of Satan worshipers and the very real lives which were ruined by it in an actual way (they went to jail).
"I can't wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight"
2 days later when 5 are killed at the Capitol Gazette
"jk"
Then there was the article he wrote ""Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" where he argued that the pill made women fat crazy and promiscuous and then declared his birthday "World Patriarchy Day"
Then the time he said that being gay was "a lifestyle choice guaranteed to bring pain and unhappiness." Just reroll as hetrosexual folks!
Then there was the time he said it was OK for sexually mature 13 year olds to have sex with adults then claimed being the victim of sexual abuse made him say it. He also said abuse victims were "whinging selfish brats" for "suddenly" remembering they were abused, and "suddenly" deciding it was a problem, 20 years after the abuse occurred.
How about the fact that he used his tenure at Breitbart to court white supremacists and promote their views.
He was canceled in fact by none other than Breitbart not for this of course but for the pedophile comments which was apparently a bridge too far.
>where he argued that the pill made women fat crazy and promiscuous
I'm not aware of psychological side effects, but weight gain while taking the most common form of birth control pills is expected and normal. At least that's what the doctor told my wife and I.
Milo was basically a professional troll though. His banning was inevitable.
No offense intended, but people like you fed the troll. He obviously didn't believe a damn thing he wrote. You made him everything he became. Also, I would argue that every single person born into this world has made it a worse place. Where man stands, he leaves damage.
Well, he obviously knew where to poke. I think his banning was an overreaction. People could have opted no to listen to him. But he knew what sentiment was moving people, therefore he had quite a following.
give up the "side" and the labels like "conservatives" and "red states". those are cognitive traps.
you'll never be able to reconcile all the beliefs of a "side" with your own, or another side with your "opponents", so are relegated to either paralysis by cognitive dissonance or selective rationality.
most people are generally decent and most people have some odd beliefs and proclivities. that's just life. it's not reducible to some "sides", much less two sides, no matter what the dominant mediopolitical narratives want you to believe.
two sides are chosen by tribal groups like political parties because it simplifies the quest for power. 2 is the lowest common denominator of power, and it's chosen exactly to simplify choices, and neatly bypass the inherent frictions of nuance and humanity. it's done for power, not to realistically represent the world or to cleanly align with your beliefs. instead, each side exerts pressure on you to conform to it (that is, coalescing its own power). in exchange, you get little random hits of dopamine, which is oddly as lopsided as it is surprisingly effective.
It's not the political parties. They're as much victims of this as the rest of us [0].
It's social media, optimising for "engagement". The most engaging content is not the normal, run-of-the-mill commentary from normal people with normal opinions. It's the far-out nut-job stuff that makes you mad. So that's what get prioritised in your feed.
I signed off of Twitter and was able to completely ignore it while being publicly abused on it. I've recently uninstalled Facebook and my rage at the culture wars has subsided noticeably. Now it's just Imgur and HN that spark this. I'm working on getting off here too (unsuccessfully).
The vast majority of people (I think, I have no proof) are not zealots for the cause (any cause). But the self-censorship effect of our society-wide Purity Spiral[1] means that we never hear from them. We hear the worst, most deranged, opinions out there first because human psychology isn't suited to this kind of situation.
I think the answer is to stop optimising for engagement, because we can't hack human psychology.
[0] I can't find it now, but there is a blog post out there explaining how politicians are getting hurt by the increasing extremism. The need to be more extreme than your rivals in your gerrymandered district where any sign of "weakness" or ambiguity can be taken advantage of on social media isn't good for politicians either.
i’m sorry, no, political parties are not victims insofar as they were unaware of those dynamics. political parties aim to amass power and if that requires becoming more extreme, so be it, in the logic of the party in-group, no matter how they lament outwardly.
social media does distort towards the extremes but that’s marginal, only flattening the distribution of opinions, not fundamentally changing the distribution’s shape. the real problem is the mediopolitical machine amplifying certain of those opinions and ignoring others in service of its own pursuit of power.
60% of them believe in imaginary voter fraud and support undemocratically overturning the election. 43% of them would support doing so via a military coup as long as someone else does it and it doesn't overmuch interfere with their beer drinking.
Please note that this is from 2015 long before any claims of election fraud could have been informed by any real concerns. The desire for violent over throw of the government generated the fake election fraud concerns not the other way around.
A former general has a public event where he openly discussed the merits of overthrowing our government like Myanmar.
There is little difference in my mind between Hitlers supporters in the 30s and Trumps supporters in the 2020s and in the modern day Republican party if you aren't a Trump supporter you aren't welcome near anywhere.
If what you call opinions can be broken down into those we have judged true and false, moral and immoral, promoting of peace and justice or liable to breed hate and death why on earth would anyone be expected to tolerate equally the expression of opinions that by their own standards were evil and destructive as those they viewed as good and constructive.
I tolerate your ability to possess either because by no means do I count myself the master of your mind or soul but that doesn't mean that I will tolerate the idea of your opinion running unopposed. Subject to the rules of this forum I will happily call it out.
Perhaps you can tell me what part of what I said was objectively wrong? More than half of your fellows believe that a satanic cabal of pedos has stolen the country and almost half want the military to end democracy in the name of saving it and install a reality TV star.
Who is this "we" doing the judging of true and false? People of good conscience have debated weighty issues like political philosophy for thousands of years. Thinking that one half of the country is good and true and the other is hateful and evil is simplistic and wrong (I would go so far as to say that it is a form of evil.)
50-60% of that shrinking minority espouse beliefs that are crazy, dangerous, or both. Members of that shrinking minority are losing control of this nation and they are taking it badly. With shifting demographics voter suppression and disinformation isn't going to be sufficient to retain control and they are going to choose between violence and irrelevance and I don't think they will willingly choose irrelevance.
To your point, I also am no longer willing to call myself progressive, or even "left-wing"....I don't want to be confused with the youthful, thoughtless, destructive, mob...and I'm a European anarcho-communist, so hopefully that means something. :-P I think in this regard, many, many, many people on both the "right" and "left" are in agreement.
Every time I’m tempted to actually get involved in the left-wing causes I support, I read something like this.
You’re saying there’s no difference between my Mom and Dad, and the Nazis. There’s no difference between my sister and the Nazis. There’s no difference between my in-laws and the Nazis.
Seriously. This is why people hate the Democrats, even though they agree with them in most issues.
I don’t care if we agree on everything. I’d never vote for someone who said the things you just did about my family.
Most of the people are neither heroes nor monsters. The atrocities committed by the Nazis were committed by a minority of the population and ignored or tolerated by the majority of folks like your family.
I am deeply sorry that your family has fallen in line behind evil and hate because they simply cannot tell the difference between evil that tells them what they want to hear and decency that tells them things that make them uncomfortable. For you I hope that their innate quality as human beings enables them someday to see through the con and I hope you continue to love them regardless for the qualities they possess that are good and worthy. I don't hate you and I don't hate your family.
How is that condescension? Odds are, iin Nazi Germany, everyone would have been a passive observer.
If your mom and your dad sincerely believe in the QAnon conspiracy, it doesn't make them inherently inferior people, but yes that's an absolutely abhorrent belief that is impossible not to compare to these situations.
But odds are most of us would be functionally the same by then.
I’m the only family who has heard of QAnon. They have no idea who she is.
You weren’t comparing QAnon supporters to Nazis. You were comparing Trump supporters to Nazis.
> There is little difference in my mind between Hitlers supporters in the 30s and Trumps supporters in the 2020s and in the modern day Republican party if you aren't a Trump supporter you aren't welcome near anywhere.
I think religion is a poor analogy, because except in a few extreme cases like Iran, religion doesn't seek to create a totalitarian framework for every personal thought or action. And I don't view the Iranian revolution as much as a religious revival as a movement in the sense that a totalitarian movement must stay "in motion". The motion is the point. The revolution carries on, eating its own.
To me as a liberal it took a long time to realize that "wokism" has no fixed goal; it's more like a millenarian cult or a utopian movement that is willing to constantly redefine language in the service of forever one-upping its own followers. The winner is whoever can create the most visceral mob anger at last month's winner. It survives without an articulable final goal precisely because each iteration of the dogma pushes the last under a bus. Power comes from staying ahead of the permanent motion of the movement, an impossible task.
Similar phenomena can be observed in right wing movements, of course. But the far right is open about its hate, so anyone who demures can ultimately fall back on personal conscience. The far left uses love, not hate, as the grindstone for its acolytes. Thus any dissent leaves the dissenter questioning whether she was insufficiently loving. This kind of "love", detached from its real world object or any true objective, used as a measure of fealty, is one of the key hallmarks of totalitarianism, because it requires absolute obeisance in thought and action, while totally atomizing each member of the community into a fearful, self-censoring follower of whoever claims the mantle of radicalism and motion today.
> I think religion is a poor analogy, because except in a few extreme cases like Iran, religion doesn't seek to create a totalitarian framework for every personal thought or action.
Sure, now tell that joke to Giordano Bruno.
The left and the right today share so many traits with how religions operate that it freaks me out.
The point wasn't to excuse any facets of religion, simply to point out that there are stronger similarities in operational tactics to totalitarian movements than there are to garden-variety religious organizations, which in the modern age tend to calcify around dogma rather than act as engines of motion via constant revolutionary purges.
When I worked at a FAANG, anti-censorship and pro free speech was normative. What happened? Why have we let a small number of intolerant activists scare us into silence?
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech. What he said is supported by a significant body of research and researchers. (And opposed by others - as it often the case on controversial topics.)
And yet, he was fired and made an example of. Anyone who publicly says that he had a point got shot down both within companies like Google, and on various discussion forums like this one.
I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the people doing the canceling are right and all the people being canceled are wrong.
Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse. Even the most well-intentioned will fail to learn when they are afraid of expressing the wrong answer.
Try to teach someone mathematics where every time they get the wrong answer, they get shocked. Not a good learning environment.
And that's exactly what we have now. Repeat a few buzzwords and you are safe. But when problems manifest in a new way, you won't be able to understand or correct them because you don't really understand.
Being wrong is part of the path to being right. If you are cancelled for being wrong, you'll never be right. You'll just have to be quiet.
That isn’t the big issue. The big issue is that people think/act like they are always right. That is a close minded attitude that doesn’t lead to learning.
Furthermore people are actually acting tribally. They cancel people on the other side for the same behavior that they are ignoring from people on their side.
Let's assume - for the sake of the argument - scientists have managed to scientifically prove some unpopular theory. Pick your favorite one: working women do not benefit the society, some races are smarter on average than others or - god forbid - vaccines cause autism.
What's next? What are we going to do with these results?
P. S. And for those looking to reply "this cannot happen because it can never happen" - remember, this is just a mental exercise.
But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.
And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.
Basically, whoever is in charge (government, media platform, moderator,...) will moderate, censor and ban, until the preferable (for them) reality is set.
Masks reduce the spread of respiratory diseases in hospitals. People have known this for more than a century. Many tests have confirmed it for many different diseases. Masks also work outside of hospitals. Sars-cov-2 spreads like other common respiratory diseases. Therefore, masks reduce the spread of sars-cov-2.
We see this in data. Washington [0], Vermont [1], and Maine [2] all got mask mandates last summer. These states have had half the number of cases [3] as other northern-US states which waited many more months before requiring their citizens to wear masks in public indoor spaces.
I'm not talking about what happened after.. I'm talking about WHO literally not recommending to wear masks unless you're sick or caring for someone sick.
Back then, people who were wearking masks were marked as "stupid conspiracy theorists" and fearmongerers. Then, suddenly the mask mandates came in, and people not wearing the masks were "stupid conspiracy theorists".
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
> But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.
> And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
sigh
There are nuances for that. First, there weren't enough masks and other PPE for medical personnel; second, there was already hoarding going on. Making masks mandatory at the beginning would have been disastrous and likely resulted in the deaths of many medical personnel, who were among the main limits of how many cases a country can take.
Then, you're missing a big difference between the initial "don't use masks" and later "everyone should mask up" guidances. The initial one was that you shouldn't wear a mask to protect yourself because untrained people were unlikely to wear them properly and would just touch themselves too much, thus wasting the precious resource. And of course, there was little certainty about how the virus spread and when ( do you spread it only when you have symptoms? do you spread it only if you have a positive test? )
The later one was due to knowing much better how the virus propagates, we can now conclude that wearing a mask stops people from spreading it, so everybody should wear a mask to stop community spread. There's a huge difference between wearing a mask to protect yourself from getting infected, and to stop unknowing sick people from spreading the virus via the main way it spreads. And of course, when that came about, there were just about enough masks in most countries to actually be able to do that.
Yes, it should have been handled better. Is it normal for such guidance to evolve considering the many known and unknown unknowns ? Absofuckinglutely. Would you have prefered for the guidance to stay the same for fear of looking stupid and wasting countless more lives?
> Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.
Again, nuance! What was bannable was claiming that China developed the virus on purpose. The lighter versions, like accidental lab leak, weren't banned ( that i recall; if you have a source stating otherwise i'd gladly retract that statement). In any case, any such discussion in the beginning seemed, to me at least, as deflections and excuses. We suck at handling a pandemic compared to just about anyone, but it's not our fault, China made this! What does it matter where the virus came from when people are dying left and right from it? Now that things are calmer, we can discuss and investigate.
There is still zero proof on the matter, and i doubt there ever will be ( as if the CCP would admit a lab leak in China caused a pandemic with such proportions and consequences).
> Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.
I want to believe they had a good excuse for doing so.
I want to believe they created rigorous safety protocols that reduce the risks as much as possible.
Then they chose to do it in the most populous city in Central China (population 11 million) which is so stupid I doubt they had a good enough reason and certainly didn't bother with safety all that much.
After such stupidity one doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
> Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.
Guardian says it they also banned the "lab-leak" theories... (not to mention the second part of the quote).
Those are just two examples. Vaccine passports were also a "conspiracy theory". AstraZeneca was also marked as "perfectly safe" (and not "probably safe"), until they started ditching it everywhere.
And I'm not complaining about science changing after more data is revealed/processed (that is a normal part of science), I'm complaining about people getting banned one day for saying something, and then that something being accepted as reality the next day, and companies like facebook removing the bannable offence and saying "we will ban more people" in the same sentance.
Some media outlets have even removed the [erroneous] previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
Well, yes. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
By your tone alone and the wording, I feel like downvoting you too, despite probably agreeing to your main point.
That means, I agree we live in a time, that is pretending to be based on science - but the debates are way more about how all the people feel about certain things and words and happily ignore or fight against all the facts, if they don't fit.
Those are impossible because such questions can't be scientifically asked in the first place.
Like, what does "benefit society" even mean? By what parameter? You can definitely make a scientific conclusion of the order of "religious conservatives really hate it when women work", but... duh? I can agree with that and not care one bit.
Second one, impossible because there's no such thing as race scientifically, in the sense the common person uses that word. You could make such a conclusion about groups with particular genetics, but you can't tell those by eyesight.
Imagine we managed to create a good enough model of the society. Kinda similar to what engineers use to design bridges or combustion chambers.
Then we create a target function - minimize the number people below poverty level, minimize the weighted number of crimes, maximize productive life longevity - and so on. All good things.
We run it and the model tells us: (1) mandate every woman have three kids by age of thirty (2) promote currently elected president to the king and make it a lifetime hereditary post and (3) make sure everyone goes to the church every Sunday (4) sell Alaska to China.
We shrug, check things here and there - and no, there's no mistake, the solution is stable and whatever we thought were unresolvable problems of monarchy actually do have simple solutions which noone thought about before.
Impossible, we'll never agree on the target function.
Eg, "minimize people below poverty level" -- this isn't universally wanted. Some people believe in fact that it's fundamentally impossible and that if anybody is brought up, that can only happen by bringing somebody down, and at best this is achievable by averaging everything to mediocrity, and they hate the idea of that.
Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
For the definition of "better off", see [1]
[EDIT]
Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
The caveat: you will have to unconditionally accept the outcome. You cannot keep tweaking and rerunning until the result matches your ideas of perfect society.
> Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
Not everyone wants that either. Some enjoy having inferiors.
> Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
What does that have to do with science or what we were talking about? That's extremely subjective.
I think you have picked particularly bad examples for this. Both the model and the target function have real, practical considerations that make them probably impossible. If, however, you did make such a model and such a function then the running that model in every possible configuration space would be a problem of such massive scale that you couldn't ever hope to find the best configuration.
I think if you have some sort of point you are trying to make, you should confine yourself to something more practical and easier to have a definite answer. If you so I think you will find that, eventually, the invalidated belief will be dropped except by a small minority and the consensus will shift to encompass that viewpoint.
Your scenario requires a lot of people to give up their personal freedoms and happiness for the good of whichever individuals' lives would be improved by their sacrifice. Let's add in that all men not married by the age of 21 should be castrated. It's for the good of society right?
What's the point of this? If/when those things would hypothetically be found, we'd have to come to terms with it. However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
That's completely missing the point. The point is, do you accept that unpleasant Truth, do you reject it, or do you weigh whatever other values you have against that truth and ignore it.
You can't make that question in the general sense and draw useful conclusions.
Eg, it's an "unpleasant Truth" that you're at a risk of dying in a car accident. But yeah, we just decide it's worth going out anyway, and ignore it.
But that isn't applicable to a similar "unpleasant Truth" that welding on a gas tank could get you killed. The task is different, the risks are different, the tradeoffs are different, the ways to compensate for danger are different.
All such things are very contextual. Trying to divine some sort of general rule or philosophy doesn't really work.
Honestly, both of these, the car accident and the gas tank are being treated exactly the same here. You've looked at the given "truth", evaluated it, and then come to a decision on whether it's worth it or not. It's explicitly making that decision and that trade off.
what andrepd said felt far more like a handwave
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
It's a denial of a hypothetical, which is not engaging with the core point, but instead attacking the analogy instead. It's a standard (and often unintentional) logical fallacy.
This is my interpretation of the conversation. Please avoid approaching this from the "perfect hypotheticals" perspective, their perfection is besides the point.
A: We have a perfect target metric, and we've found that C, which we philosophically like, performs far worse than B, which we find abhorrent
B: There's no perfect metric, and if there were, we've already found C is better, and there's no way how C could be worse.
It's deliberately avoiding the point.
To break it down even further:
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society.
If you didn't want downvotes you could have left out the particulars especially untimely is the inclusion of vaccines cause autism. The whole debacle was fueled originally by a lying sack of garbage who was drummed out of the medical profession for faking his results and just took off from there.
Well, I mean, he makes it clear enough that those are just examples for the sake of argument. I found the examples useful to understand the scenario he was proposing.
> Try to teach someone mathematics where every time they get the wrong answer, they get shocked. Not a good learning environment.
The problem with the analogy is that the underlying assumption is that the people learning math want to know the truth and are acting in good faith even when they get the wrong answer.
On the other hand, there are people, powerful people, who push ideas that don't care about the truth. Here is a specific example. As the Republican nominee in 2016, Donald Trump tweeted that 81% of white murder victims were killed by black people. This is *wildly* wrong. When he was corrected, he didn't send out a correction, he didn't even remove the old tweet. The point is he was sending a message to his target audience that made them feel a certain way, and that was his goal ... not communicating the truth.
Politicians who are crafting policy are certainly a different category.
Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.
100 years ago, academia was at the forefront of racism due to some flawed philosophies and bad science. Should we really expect the average layperson to be ahead of those scholars just because some time has passed and they hear "racism is bad" a thousand times? No. The education needs to happen, and being wrong is a starting place.
There's also been a general failure by academia to explain modern racial concepts. Many people don't understand why it's OK to discriminate against asians in college admissions, for instance.
It requires you to go with a very different axiom of equity over equality, basically. Asians do well at exams for some reason, therefore to ensure that there is an equitable distribution, we then sacrifice the level playing ground of equality in favour of the outcome driven goal of equity.
Equality focuses on normalizing the distribution of resources, while equity distributes resources to normalize the outcome.
Equality, given a group of people, would aim to put them on a level playing ground by allocating the same level of resources to each. Equity however, would allocate resources to try and achieve similar outcomes across the people. People performing worse would thus get more resources in equity, but would receive the same amount.
The two are thus mutually incompatible. To a certain extent, some games can be played with the definition, such as what to include under the "level playing field". An example here would be the inclusion of natural talent and propensity for work that is generally considered innate. Should this be
I disagree, there can be conflicts between the two goals when resources are limited, but I think systems can be defined that support both.
College admissions is a strange place to promote the idea of equity since it is a fundementally inequitable process that is designed to find people with advantages and give them bigger advantages.
By introducing race based discrimination into college admissions you are reducing equality in a way that that doesn't create a more equitable situation. Anti-asian racism will handicap these students in other parts of their professional life so using the argument of "promoting equity" to discriminate against them in college admissions as well seems purely pernicious.
If you truely want to improve college equity, you need to first make changes to what is required for success at college and then adjust the admissions process to find candidates that can succeed.
> Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.
In my specific example, there was nothing well-intentioned our complex about it. He was off by a factor of more than 5x. When his error was pointed out, and it is something trivially confirmed, he didn't fix it.
The scariest thing about Trump is not that he lied like crazy. It is that he really had an audience, and that audience is reasonably close to half the country. If you're a progressive, it is worth spending some time thinking about how to reach out to and get support from that half of the country. Because attempting to govern without them is a guaranteed disaster.
That ship has sailed. The progressives have been playing the strategy 'if we just follow the rules of the game, eventually they will play along'. But the populists completely threw out the rulebook a number of years ago, they no longer want to play the same game. And now there is a new breed of younger progressives coming into power who recognize that and also want to throw out the rulebook. Interesting times coming.
Yes, and if you read https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/d... you'll realize that once democratic norms have broken down on both sides of the aisle, the next thing that happens is the replacement of democracy by a totalitarian state.
>Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse.
I completely agree with that.
Just to keep an eye on matters, and you never know how you need to set up your life going forward, lately I've made an attempt to eavesdrop on snatches of private conversations.
I'm blown away by how radicalized people are becoming, and not in a way that progressives would like. Formerly, these people were essentially indifferent. Now, not so much.
Good one, thanks. It conflicts a bit with the "assume good faith" guideline and sometimes I find it hard to figure which side should win.
(Note: in hindsight of course a comment that suggests mass murdering people is a troll post and not written in good faith, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I'm not debating that, just saying that it's hard and appreciate the nudges)
Imagine your mom is racist. Will you go to each and every house on her street telling everyone not to talk to this racist bitch who is not willing to admit she's wrong? Or you will spend time after time after time leaving no avenue unexplored trying to see what is she coming from and why is she wrong?
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!
When I'm stuck a day
That's gray
And lonely
I just stick out my chin
And grin
And say
Oh
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So you gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So you gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
People are expected to learn not to be racists and sexists growing up. Those who don't learn then are rarely reformable but at least they can learn to be silent.
>I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.
The tech industry was just an exception for a decade or so because it was fairly non-corporate. Go to any conservative law firm or traditional management and try to start a fiery political debate, and see how that goes. There was never any lively democratic discourse or tolerance in any corporate environment, or any other private environment for that matter, ask any gay person that's older than 25 and doesn't live in a liberal state. George Carlin made a career of saying 'shit' on television, that's how free-wheeling discourse was.
Also as a sidenote on that Damore debacle, he got canned because of his presentation. You can cite 100 studies, when you start to argue that women drop out of high stress jobs because they're neurotic you might as well commit seppuku. He should have passed that manifesto by someone who isn't on the spectrum because anyone could have seen that trainwreck coming a mile away.
I know several people on the autism spectrum. They say Damore was an asshole. It frustrates them so many neurotypical people casually equate those things.
May be he's an asshole. Isn't it what tolerance is about?
Having nothing against gays is not tolerance. This way people are also tolerant to microwaves, ceiling fans and aluminum foil: they have nothing agains all these things.
Tolerance is hating gays passionately, but still tolerating them and serving them in your store. Thinking that women should not be in the workspace, but still treating them equally and professionally.
Hating someone and treating them "equally and professionally" is indeed the epitome of tolerance. However, I think your examples do a good job of illustrating the limitations of tolerance, perhaps inadvertently.
First, a world where most store owners hate me but serve me and most of my coworkers think I shouldn't be there but keep quiet about it is, bluntly speaking, a shitty world. Obviously, that world is better than one where people are outspoken about their bigotry, but I would strongly prefer a world of widespread acceptance.
Practically speaking, someone who "hates gays passionately" or thinks that "women should not be in the workspace" will probably treat their gay customers or female colleagues worse, even if they are trying to be tolerant.
Finally, I'd like to emphasize that these situations aren't academic to me. I'm fortunate in that I don't regularly experience homophobia in stores or misogyny at work but they're a real risk I face.
"Tolerance is hating gays passionately, but still tolerating them and serving them in your store. Thinking that women should not be in the workspace, but still treating them equally and professionally."
I have never seen that work. The hate usually manifest in various hidden and subtle actions. Intrigues. Plots. Leaving everyone involved with a bitter feeling and pure drama after a while.
If I am hated, I prefer open hate. Then I know where I am and can just go to a place I am truly welcome.
True tolerance in my book, is actually tolerating and accepting that life and humans are very diverse. Live and let live. And I can tolerate a lot of things I don't like for myself, as long as it is no direct harm to me.
I know people with every combination of on/off the autism spectrum, who like/dislike Damore. Given that, anecdotes from any particular perspective aren't very telling.
"similar to criticizing blind people for being bad at riding bicycles"
I am not aware of a debate where people get blamed for being blind.
But it makes sense to me to critizice people who want to ride bikes but have not the ability to do so in a safe way, that not endangers other people participating in street traffic.
Now if a blind person learns to ride the bike reasonable well (with technical help) so he or she can actually ride with safety and not endanger others - fine with me and probably most other people.
The authors underlying point is that factoring in traits of the population — as described statistically and not anecdotally - is the way to make social structures more inclusive.
For example, let’s say that statistically it was discovered to be that more women prioritize work-life balance over all else. Let’s also assume that you want women to feel included in that little “meritocracy” you created. Is it more or less inclusive that your corporate strategy for promoting favored women who sacrificed their work life balance by working on weekend?
The irony of the response to that memo, and to cancel culture more widely, is that reasonable people who read it and don't agree with everything it says, but at least agree that some of it is worthy of discussion, are more likely to be radicalized than side with the cancelers. The diversity and inclusion mob is tolerant of diversity only when it satisfies their narrow definition of what that is.
I don't understand why Damore is the hill people are always trying to die on. He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas. He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time. Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever so I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them.
It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.
> It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity
Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.
Huh? My description is completely accurate. I feel like a lot of people didn't actually read Damore's document, or perhaps read it and were shouting "YES! YES!" so loudly as they read about Google's supposed left-wing bias that they can't actually perceive the words written.
Damore says straight up and in so many words that Google should end all of its "diversity" hiring initiatives because he believes they're discriminatory against himself, this is just not an arguable issue.
I can see how you could get that Google should end "diversity" hiring initiatives as one of the core messages, but not "all" of them, and "he believes they're discriminatory against himself" is quite uncharitable. Having reread it just now after five years, the theme seems to be that he wants to find the intersection of Google being a good workplace for women and Google being successful as a company.
From the memo:
> Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap
> Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s
representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:...
He goes on to list interventions like more pair programming, changing performance evaluations to encourage collaboration over competition, allowing more part-time work, and reducing the stress of the job.
He says Google needs to reduce hiring initiatives which are not backed by evidence, and which are themselves likely illegally discriminatory, like hiring quotas (likely illegal) and implicit bias training (debunked).
It's because he published a memo pertinent to a hot topic at the company and rather than engage him on the merits of his ideas leadership decided to fire him. Is it unsettling that the employees at a company with a global monopoly on information retrieval seem to not tolerate dissent within their ranks?
It was very much within the scope of his job duties. Many of his colleagues were encouraged and rewarded for making presentations on the same topic using company resources on company time (with the opposite conclusions).
The idea that you can investigate something and present your good faith effort at the truth, with evidence, and be fired for that, is pretty scary. Like imagine several of your colleagues do comparisons of PostgreSQL and MongoDB on your internal blog, showing some benchmark results; you think that's not the whole picture and do your own comparison showing some other benchmarks. And then you get fired, not because your benchmarks were less rigorous or your writeup was poor, but because they don't like your answers. That's not an environment that's going to lead to good technology choices and an effective company.
> He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas.
If a forum isn't a "market place of ideas" than it's not a forum.
> He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time.
All of which were not reasons he got fired. And Google actually encourages its employees to do such things, by the way.
And those are all things we have done and is considered normal in most sane workplace. We all posted something not work related to your coworkers on internal forums, including politics.
> Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Which was never the argument in the first place. Nobody is arguing that Google violated the 1st amendment by firing him. But let's not pretend that Google's size doesn't make it a major non-elected influence on our society. We have seen the consequences of that when it came to potential Covid-19 treatments and its origins. The "it's a private company", which hypocritically used by self-described socialists but I digress, doesn't negate the consequences of their actions or their responsibilities.
> Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever
That's just an appeal to tradition fallacy.
> I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
I'm the owner of a big corporations and me and my buddies form the largest group of employers in the country, I don't like your stance on free speech and who you support politically. Yeah but!? No, I'm a private company.
Damore said that men are better engineers than women. That is false. It is also incompatible with an organization that tries to be diverse and inclusive. That's the main reason he was fired.
Getting fired for insulting your co-workers is not censorship.
In society today, we have a "paradox of tolerance". If we tolerate everything, then we tolerate people being intolerant, and many people in our society will suffer. So we must be intolerant of intolerance. This is the only way to build a society of equality and justice.
Oh, right. You can't. Because he never said that, nor did he say anything that amounted to that. When it comes to false claims, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that.
Ironically, the paradox of tolerance is often used to justify attacking almost any opposing view, as almost any view can be framed as some form of intolerance.
I believe the paradox of tolerance as a useful idea is empty and bunk
We haven't lost our tolerance for free speech, we've lost our tolerance for listening to people who claim society has to listen to their bullshit because of the first amendment rather than because they present a compelling argument in a positive way.
The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around.
Open discourse can exist as a value too. And Google, one of the most influential entity in the US and the world, has decided that it's not something that should be promoted. Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China. But let's not fool ourselves about who's on the right side of history.
> The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around.
Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no?
Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason."
> Open discourse can exist as a value too
It does (are we not engaging in it right now?).
There were (and I assume still are) plenty of random internal mailing lists where those types of discussions happened. I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that.
> Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China.
I guess the NBA and China is the Godwin's law equivalent for free speech. He has the legal right to say what he wants, he doesn't have the right to have what he says have zero consequences (which is what the comic says).
You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.
> Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no?
> Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason."
Free speech as in the 1st amendment, sorry I wasn't clear enough. Yes Google "has the right to fire people as they like", but it's not free speech as a value, which can and will cause problems down the line on a societal level. Would it be all right for FAANG to fire all Republicans? All pro-unions people?
> I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that.
Good for you, but his post was was about Google's internal policies and work, which is work related.
> You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.
I don't get why you insist on showing a total lack of social conscience like a crony corporate lawyer who likes to brag about how he shipped well paying jobs overseas. Yes it is legal right now, it doesn't mean it's right thing to do.
I guess when they will use your data for salary and hiring purposes against you then you will change your tune. P.S.: do not talk about unions ;)
>I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech
I think you're confusing lost tolerance for free speech with 'raising the value of the speech of traditionally marginalized groups.'
A man at Atari in 1976 who argues women are worse engineers than men mostly broadcasts to an audience of empowered men and disempowered women. So his 'free speech' is respected while those women's is not.
A man at Google in 2018 who argues the same thing has to deal with the consequences of women's speech, but to him, that feels like a chilling of his free speech.
I'm fine that we are in scenario 2, having listened to a lot of other ill-informed white men give heir 'opinion' on things for no true reason.
Honest question. Have you ever actually read the memo?
If you have, please tell me what passage makes you think that it says that women are worse engineers than men. Because as far as I can tell, there are none.
The topic at hand is controversial enough WITHOUT making up stuff about what was said.
>humans are generally biased towards protecting females.
>These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics
>This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
>Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
I think the disconnect here is that the author is couching his claims with strawmen 'women prefer' and links to small-n surveys that you find sufficient (but most do not). Maybe if we refactored some of what he said, it would make sense:
> people who excel at math are generally biased toward being short and unfriendly.
>These two differences in part explain why STEM students relatively prefer working long-hours and avoiding meaningful human connection. More liberal arts students may like socializing because it requires EQ and even within startups, comparatively more PMs and SDRs have significant others.
>This leads to engineers generally having a harder time receiving criticism, asking for help, staying out of others business, and collaborating.
>Engineers on average look for peer praise while SDRs have a higher drive for wealth accumulation.
Nothing you've quoted says that the author thinks women make worse engineers, only that people are different. If you think it says something else, you should search within to find out where you generated that meaning.
You think saying that women have a harder time speaking up and leading has nothing to do with engineering?
Where exactly have you worked as an engineer where leadership didn't matter and people weren't encouraged to speak up?
EDIT: To be clear about the point here, none of these claims are sourced! He's just insulting women in 'kind-sounding' language! I think women are very unprotected in modern society! I think women LOVE systemization! The insult is the unsourced claim!
LOL, disempowered women in 1976. The real student revolts took place in 1968-1970 and produced hippies, free love, another instance of feminism (second wave I believe).
It was probably a better time for being a woman in CS than now, with disingenuous bros paying lip service to SJW causes in order to keep their > 250,000 salaries while not having a clue.
College's changed; It used to be free speech focused with debates and exposure to a wide set of ideas being seen as critical to a well rounded education. Now you can't even get vaguely controversial speakers on campus.
Tech workers tend to be younger so the more recent changes to the political views of colleges effect them first.
Are people on college campuses generally clamoring to see a standup routine from Jerry Seinfeld? As the article points out, he's 66 years old and his humor is self-described as "observational". Maybe today's college students just don't connect to the observations of someone two generations older than them?
But why perform for an audience full of people who won't enjoy it? In my experience, performances hosted at colleges overwhelmingly attract audiences of students. It's nobody's fault that his humor doesn't land with that audience, but it is his fault that he's blaming the students for it.
College campuses are where you are supposed to be confronted with challenging ideas and different perspectives. That's one of their great gifts. But even mainstream Jerry Seinfeld, who created one of the most popular sitcoms of all time and doesn't even swear, is now considered too controversial?
It's not just him. Dave Chappelle and many other comedians have been saying the same thing about college audiences.
Consider that maybe people agree that being confronted with challenging ideas and perspectives is valuable but they don't find the same value in Jerry Seinfeld's comedy as they do in, say, a lecture by someone with radical beliefs.
People are going to love Jerry forever because of the sitcom. His standup isn't a big hit with the kids these days but everyone still knows the sitcom.
Chappelle is one of the biggest comics alive. The people who are bothered by trans jokes are a small, humorless minority.
The problem with trans jokes is there's basically only one of them that most comedians tell. It's just degrees of incredulity about the variety of things that people identify as.
Patton Oswalt's version got chuckles out of me though. His take was basically "I'm on your side, I'm just old and don't know what you're talking about", which is at least poking fun at the incredulity, rather than the variety.
Seinfeld currently has 2 routines, one is for the normie/mainstream crowd which is what you expect from his TV show. The other is his totally uncensored and cutting edge written material he only performs for younger audiences or in other words 'people not expecting TV Seinfeld' and it definitely would be blacklisted on any campus.
> it definitely would be blacklisted on any campus.
They don't blacklist anything on college campuses anymore. They naughtylist it, disallowlist it, or ungoodlist it... presumably so anyone descended from regicides won't be triggered by Charles II of England's words appearing out of context.
I have a good sense of humor. Making fun of a group that is persecuted is not funny to me because I don't find anything amusing about taunting the disenfranchised.
So tell me so good trans jokes and change my mind, eh?
I mean, I just googled "trans jokes" and the first hit was "18 trans jokes by actual trans people" that weren't funny. I was hoping for some raunchy limericks or something. Instead I got pages of results just saying how so-and-so shouldn't make trans jokes.
Having that powerful of a chokehold on media and search results is the opposite of "persecuted" and "disenfranchised". On the contrary, that's a terrifying amount of political clout and power to steer discourse.
> I was hoping for some raunchy limericks or something.
Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho!
OK, here's my own joke. I'm trans and this is a trans joke taken from, like, life, dude.
There's this guy sitting with four ladies and another
guy and he starts saying how he knows a tranny when he sees one.
"I mean, they all have like, what, size-7 feet? I mean come on, it's so
obvious!"
"I got size 7 feet" says one of the ladies.
The guy blinks once, then goes on:
"And their hands! Have you seen their hands? They're like two times the size of
my hands!"
The second lady holds up her hands. "My hands are bigger than your hands".
The guy pauses for a mere second and goes on.
"But the dead give-away is their voices. They have loud, booming, bass
voices..."
"I can sing in the entire baritone vocal range" says the third lady.
The guy stops, clears his throat, looks around, then leans in conspiratorially.
"You know what's the real way to tell a trannie apart? They can explain the
offside rule in soccer".
"That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any
of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of
the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the
second-last opponent".
The guy is now sweeating bricks. He turns to look at each of them carefully.
"OK" he says. "Was even a single one of you born female"?
> Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho
To be fair, while that is a common attitude toward trans identity, it’s also a common attitude toward humor (that is, lots of people equate good jokes with raunchy ones.) It’s hard to tell which consideration is in play.
> "That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent".
<ex-ref>
But that is just explaining offside position, which is only part of the offside rule.
</ex-ref>
> On the contrary, that's a terrifying amount of political clout and power to steer discourse.
This one reminds me of the old joke about Jews controlling the media. One jewish man asks another why he's reading all those tabloids that are full of antisemitic lies. The othere one replies that no matter how bad things are in real life, the newspapers always make him feel great because according to them the Jews control the banks, the media, the world governments and everything else.
Look, I'm willing to judge a joke on its on merits but there's some territory that's trickier than others: when the subject is a member of the underclass.
Trans people are literally being legislated today and actively demonized by the right. Do you remember the trans bathroom laws that were all the rage? Do you remember all the attacks by trans people that precipitated them? No, because it's manufactured fear.
You finding pages of individuals speaking out against that and that's terrifying? More manufactured fear.
I'm not sure what iteration of Chappelle's jokes they are addressing in the indiewire piece, but here's what I could find, and it seems very different in tone https://youtu.be/r_EXb8_8xlM
First joke aside (which I'd guess is older material than the rest) if you stick with him and don't cherrypick quotes, it's almost entirely self-deprecating. Even in the Caitlyn Jenner joke, the punchline rests on him acknowledging his own failure to resist his impulses. Don't forget the layer where he is acting out the role of a horrible, insensitive person throughout this so the audience can laugh at his oversimplification and ignorance. That's a big part of comedy and it does not translate over to quotations in prose.
Hopefully I didn't kill the frog, but he's absolutely not punching down from what I could find.
> I have a good sense of humor. Making fun of a group that is persecuted is not funny to me because I don't find anything amusing about taunting the disenfranchised.
If your humor is subservient to your social/political beliefs, you don't have a sense of humor.
Just a minute there. Putting aside the other comments that pointed out that you're probably making this up... are you saying 18 year old women shouldn't feel empowered to date whoever they damn well please? Who are you to decide an adult woman's rights over her own body? That's creepy fascist territory.
AFAIK, he is only know to have done that once (and they first met and went out, though Seinfeld said later that they weren't “dating” yet, when she was 17, not 18.)
Large corporations are very pro censorship and anti free speech these days. Amazon bans books even though it’s the worlds biggest bookstore. AWS, Apple and Google all ban businesses, apps and content that they don’t like through selective enforcement of TOU. Netflix and Prime Video refuse to carry certain content.
Inside these companies, a few loud voices control the Overton window, and management kowtows to them either enthusiastically (many of them agree) or at least resignedly (easier than taking the bull by the horns and potentially alienating large swathes of employees or customers.
The reason that radical ideas with marginal support have this level of impact is the total recalcitrance and volume of the proponents. I don’t need to reason with you; i just need to shout you down and label you a moral pariah (“racist”, “white supremacist”, “climate denier”, etc). Natural self-censorship will cause almost everyone to shut up so I don’t unleash on them too.
Part of it is being scared. But in the world of 24/7 surveillance I think it's more that anything you say can haunt you for the rest of your life. It's not OK to make mistakes or slip up because it's captured and stored forever. People aren't allowed to debate, learn, and change.
Anecdotally, most of my interactions with friends has moved offline. I wonder whether that's a broader trend, and whether it will be sustainable?
Like, in the same way I learned not to post personal stuff on Livejournal (then MySpace and Facebook), will we just... log off half the time, and treat the rest as a resume? Or will we hole up in private discords/IRC/Matrix/etc groups?
(* and for anyone wondering, we're all fairly left-leaning, pro-social-justice people. we're not hiding from Cancel Culture, we just feel more free in smaller groups.)
Basically, yeah. There's no expectation of permanence like there is with social media. Recording/transcribing and publishing would be a gross violation of trust.
Someone could point a directional microphone at you in the park, too, but one doesn't typically worry about that.
It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that.
FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts.
I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow.
--
[0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.
They went mainstream. As soon as your trying to sell kids TV (on Netflix, YouTube, Apple/Amazon TV etc) suddenly your have to be 110% boring and vanilla. No more space for constructive disagreement or controversial content. Just colourful shapes and a laugh track please.
I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I heard someone on Memegen say that due process (ie, trying to understand whether a complaint occurred) was a legal constraint that Google didn't need to adhere to when adjudicating intra-employee complaints (eg harassing comments).
IMO it's pretty straightforward, in Google's case at least. They scaled wildly in terms of headcount (I think they have a bit under 10x the headcount they had when I joined), right when competition for the best tech employees exploded. They obviously had to lower their bar[1] significantly to keep growing, and they ended up scooping up masses of coastal urban[2] midwits, precisely the population that was most susceptible to and hit hardest by the religious awakening that occurred in the early 2010s. A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc.
[1] I'm not suggesting that a binary switch was flipped, and that I personally made it in right before they started dumbing down their hiring. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar was higher a few years before I joined, and I can't say whether I would've met that bar. It's an iterative process that sped up over time and the company started to suffer the cumulative effect in the quality of their employee body.
[2] This isn't implying that being coastal and urban makes you stupid. I myself am very much coastal and urban and have been my entire life. These are just the areas that were hit hardest by these ideologies, and "midwits" (to borrow a term from Taleb) are fertile ground for new mass movements.
> A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc.
I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.
> I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.
Fwiw, I didn't practice for my tech interviews and found my Google new-grad interviews pretty easy. IIRC, the questions were "implement a cache" and "turn a sorted array into a binary tree". I haven't done work similar to algorithm problems for a decade now, and I'm pretty sure I could ace that interview again with my eyes closed, using skills that are relatively useful for a general SWE job. Though obviously I was much closer in time to the algo questions of my CS education, and most of the complaints I've heard about the process are not centered around new-grad interviews.
Though perhaps that's your point? As the size of the organization scaled, perhaps they moved away from the type of interview I got, towards interviews that more closely match your complaint. Conducting an interview that accurately predicts job performance is basically an impossible task, so I wouldn't be surprised if, speaking generally, the quality of their interviews suffered from their scaling just as much as their candidate pool did.
I've never interviewed at Google personally, but I've heard lots of people complain about the needless difficulty of the questions so I assume they're something harder than just turning a sorted array into a binary tree.
It's not worth paying attention to vote counts on HN; it's been years since I've taken them seriously. It's worth hanging out here for the smart people that remain, but there are a lot of dumb people with aspirations to the "magic" of success in SV that don't realize that being aggressively narrow-minded is explicitly counterproductive.
I think this is just the lifecycle of any space with low barriers to entry full of smart people. There are positive effects from smart people interacting openly, dumb people notice the effects and want a piece, and they flood the zone with their dumbness without realizing how anathema it is to what attracted them there in the first place.
The flip side is what exactly do you need to say that you're silenced from saying. Our natural instinct to enter debates and "win" them really leads otherwise smart people astray as well.
Let the activists yap. And you do what you want to do.
We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate our actions better. And actions still speak loudest.
Likewise. A few weeks ago someone took enough of an exception to me writing here that (COVID) masks are trivial that they went to my blog and vented quite unpleasantly. I know others who have had it much worse than me.
Similar thing happened to me. Last week I compared ignoring COVID guidance to reckless/drunk driving, and someone actually took time out of their day to look up my personal E-mail address and send me some unhinged rant, rather than just reply here. I don't know what it is about COVID but it's got some people totally off their rockers.
Masks are not yet "trivial" and it's stupid to argue otherwise. You don't need anything other than logic to see why: a great number of people in the US and elsewhere remain unvaccinated. And relying on the honor system to identify them (given the mentality one would expect of much of this group) is patently insane. So it's best, for now, to keep the masks on. This isn't about your freedom and it isn't even really about the direct mortality rate associated with COVID. It's about not flooding hospitals.
You don't need to worry about being canceled. In this case, it's sufficient to apply just a tad of critical thinking.
Something is asymmetrical here. Those who cancel are also communicating things. Why don't they face pushback from what they say? Why don't they face consequences?
They do face consequences. Turn on Fox News for 5 minutes and you're bound to hear some talking head spreading alarmist narratives about cancel culture. Social Justice minded people get doxxed and dragged through the mud for their speech every day.
You seem to be complaining that "those who cancel" aren't being stripped of their voices. That's not a valid complaint if you care about free speech.
Free speech means you can say whatever you want about anything you like. It also means, that after hearing what you have to say, I can say whatever I like about you and your opinions. I can disagree with you just as much as you can disagree with me.
Disagreement isn't censorship, it's free speech. Social consequences are a natural counterpart to speaking your mind. People are allowed to draw lines, judge you, and cut you out of their lives for what you say.
Free speech applies to everyone with a voice, not just you. Censorship is when you aren't allowed to speak, not just simply facing consequences for what you choose to say.
Let's say I post something online. And let's say that 100 people decide, not just that they disagree, but that they want to destroy me. They send anonymous rants and threats to my employer, my family, my neighbors, and my friends. They dox me, so that I have to worry about physical harm from any random nutcase who agrees with them and decides to bother.
What consequences do they face? Does anyone go to their boss (times 100) and say, what this person is doing isn't right, and is making your company look bad? Does anyone dox the doxxers?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen to Social Justice types. I'm saying, whoever it's done to, do the people doing it face consequences of their own? (If the Social Justice types are doing this themselves, then in their case the answer is yes.)
It's easy for a group of 100 angry people to cover one person they decide to destroy. It's less easy for the one person to return the favor to all 100 of them.
You say (paraphrased) that free speech still has the consequences of the feedback. That's fine. But the feedback has to also have the consequences of feedback.
Yes, people do doxx the doxxers, and yes those people get calls to their bosses when that happens.
The reason so many of them are pseudonymous is precisely because of that. Hell, 4chan and 8chan used to have three threads active at any time to do so until they banned it from the site (it moved to other places).
One of the key takeaways from Mr. Andrew Ng's course on AI was that AI is not some kind of magic. There's always someone who attributes magical abilities to "lie detectors" and such wonders of technology. I think he was cautioning against such thinking. AI cannot do things a human expert is not capable of, for example predicting the stock market with 100% accuracy. It can only make predictions approximately as good as human experts.
In other words, if someone wanted to match your writings with linguistic analysis, and that were possible with AI, then they can do that today with human experts. The fact that you don't see it happen, and if anyone even tried they'd be met with great skepticism, means what you imagine probably isn't possible.
Strongly agree that AI isn't magic, but I think you're making too broad a statement here. AI can certainly be superhuman in some areas, eg. chess and go. Whether or not human-level is the maximum depends on how the training data is created. If you have to rely on human experts to produce the labels (this is a dog, this is a cat, etc.), then it's going to be hard to design a system that can beat human performance. But for chess and go, you can get around that by using self-play.
In the case of matching writings, you can get around it by having a bunch of people create several pieces of writing each. Even if no human expert could tell whether two pieces were from the same person, it's still possible to give the network the correct labels when training because we know the ground truth of who wrote what.
Of course, a model can only work with information that actually exists. My gut says that writing leaks plenty of information about identity, so it should at least be possible to identify the author of large chunks of text (over 1000 words, say). But I could be wrong about that.
Heh, my day-to-day experience of AI is cutting-edge machines from trillion-dollar companies trying to sell me *takes a quick look* diamond earrings, hair dryers, and universal remote controls. As a man who doesn't own a TV, it's hard to feel threatened by AI tracking online.
Realistically, using language models to change your writing style is probably going to stay a lot easier than using them to identify people.
It can be both, depending on the why. Leaving Twitter has been great for me, but I didn’t leave it because someone was threatening me. I do know someone who left Twitter for that reason.
Politicians, journalists, academics, every celebrity ever, etc aren’t on 4chan (or at least trying to have serious conversations there). This isn’t a good comparison.
Twitter is the public square more than it a news source. The effects of loud voices there lead to global, real world change. Journalists talk to and police each other there. Celebrities influence millions of people there, enough to where people pay them to tweet certain things advantageous to them (“buy these cool Nike shoes!”).
4chan is an anonymous, interest-based forum that is more or less irrelevant to most non-internet people.
> There's definitely some influence there, but the twitter's importance and impact on the world is severely overhyped.
I'm not sure I would make the same claim. Twitter is wildly popular among journalists, pundits, and other members of the media. Due to its outsized importance within these groups of people, I can easily see Twitter playing a large role in shaping media narratives.
There was a post here a few days ago that would analyze your hn comments and output the most identical looking other accounts. Lots of people wrote it output their alts and throwaways.
I believe you (and Snowden) are catastrophizing, or in other words self-cancelling. You have chosen to dramatically curtail your self-expression out of fear of social consequences.
It seems that what you fear is being "attack[ed] publicly." If that's the case, what you fear is that others will express themselves in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Wouldn't the cause of free speech be better advanced by defending to the death their right to express themselves, rather than by casting that expression as the death knell of modern society? If your side were to "win" this culture war, a whole lot of speech would be suppressed by new social norms. Free speech for me but not for thee.
If you walk into a bar and start mouthing off, there's a decent chance you'll get punched in the face. This is bad and a crime, but I never hear anyone talk about how it's a sign of the deterioration of free speech norms. Why is that?
This is what I mean by catastrophizing. In response to speech that makes you uncomfortable you have chosen to give up on self-expression on controversial topics (except this one apparently) and martyr yourself. But no one is forcing you to do that. The arena of public discourse is still open to all comers.
To the extent that I see any coherent position in the free-speech-substack cinematic universe, it's rather anodyne: "people should be nicer to each other." True enough as far as it goes.
Not OP, but there's a difference between having a legitimate and interesting discussion involving unpopular opinions and simply mouthing off at a bar. However, the reaction on the internet today tends to be one and the same for both cases: the online equivalent of being punched in the face. Being attacked publicly can go beyond uncomfortable in many cases (complaints to your work, family, death threats, etc).
The written word used to involve significant barriers that made one consider everything they said. It was also taken as a more formal medium, as it tended to be more permanent. Today, instead, you can express yourself online with next to no effort, and the majority of people write down thoughts as if they were in a verbal conversation, which has a far different permanence to it. I occasionally scroll back through comments I've even made myself on this site and have no recollection of what I was thinking or the comment when I said it. Yet there it is as a permanent record of who I am/was. Given that, I'd rather keep my controversial opinions to myself on social media, as I may not even hold those opinions in the future. I'll use meatspace discussions with friends, colleagues and others I respect to refine them, rather than the 'arena' of public opinion.
> In response to speech that makes you uncomfortable
It is not in response to speech that makes people feel uncomfortable.
Instead it is in response to people attempting to dox you, target your friends and family and children, as well as possibly people's workplaces, and in the most extreme cases, make threats or attempts on one's life.
> The arena of public discourse is still open to all comers.
If your family gets threatened, and your children get stalked, due to things that you say, then in those cases I would not describe the area of public discourse being open.
All the things that I have described, are a threat to free speech, even if it isn't literally the government stalking down children, due to dislike of things that people are saying.
The point is that the social consequences of a comment can be catastrophic. There is the potential to lose your job, lose your friends, lose your family. Even if your opinion was just miswritten, misunderstood, misquoted, outdated, or immature one can be attacked for seemingly random reasons.
But don’t your friends and family have a right to come to their own conclusions about you? Maybe they learned something new about you and don’t like you anymore. maybe that’s unfair, you feel you’ve been mis*. But lots of things are unfair. Lots of people are misunderstood all the time. There is no affirmative right to have your coworkers at happy hour find you charming. Why should there be one for online discourse?
I don't think anyone escapes some kind of discrimination in such a deeply toxic society. It's maybe less obvious for cis, straight, white, and otherwise Default people, but it does happen. The material effects are usually not as severe as they are for anyone else.
yes? isn't this why racism is defined as "power + prejudice"? anyone can be prejudiced for or against a particular race, but only some people are in a position to do something about it.
There's no "power" component to racism. That was recently "added" so that certain groups could claim immunity from being deemed racist. Racism is simply racial prejudiced, or, prejudging someone based on their race. Anyone, of any race, can be racist, no power needed.
The saddest part is that the USA is the least racist country in the history of the world, and were in our least racist era only 20 years ago. Seems like most of the progress of the Civil Rights Movement has been lost since.
> That was recently "added" so that certain groups could claim immunity from being deemed racism
> There's no "power" component to racism. That was recently "added"
No it wasn’t particularly recent in the history of the term “racism”; The popular expression “prejudice plus institutional power” is more than 50 years old (1970), the idea probably older, and the word “racism” itself is less than 120 years old.
> The saddest part is that the USA is the least racist country in the history of the world
The saddest part is that people believe that as an article of faith.
> and were in our least racist era only 20 years ago.
We were in the era of least concern about racism around 20 years ago, which happened to correspond to the end of an expansion that unlike those since had not just strong aggregate numbers bit decent distributional features on both income quintile and race dimensions.
There's a non-trivial number of people who will tell you with a straight face that white people can't experience racism. People have redefined the word to mean what they want it to mean, which may have very little in common with the definition of the word.
> There's a non-trivial number of people who will tell you with a straight face that white people can't experience racism.
I'm not a big fan of the word games that people play these days, but I would otherwise mostly agree with those people. the status of the person/people discriminating against you makes a big difference. the worst example I can think of from my own life was when a DMV employee went out of her way to fail me on my driver's license test. another employee told me she only lets black kids pass. that sucked, but I went back the next day and passed with a different employee.
anyways, all I'm saying is people discriminate on the basis of race/gender/sexuality all the time. cis-hetero-rich-white dudes are not spared entirely, but the consequences tend to be minor in comparison.
Low-impact racism is nonetheless racism. Saying that white people cannot experience racism is logically and demonstrably incorrect based on the universal definition of the word. There's no magnitude threshold that has to be met, only that the behavior is based on the color of your skin.
> They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans.
I don't mean to be snarky since I don't know the specifics of situation your friends find yourselves in, but... is it possible that they should just grow thicker skin? I mean twitter is a cesspool of hate, bitterness, and anger. But you can simply not open it and ignore it, no?
> They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans. They have panic attacks over the guilt and stress
This right here is your indicator that this comment is an entirely made up story about hypothetical friends, with the sole intention of ragging on “liberals.”
Basically, it’s contrarian conservatism that criticizes not-very-controversial values (e.g., general equality) for incredibly vague reasons.
It’s even more ignorant than plain old bigotry because it’s so devoid of ideology. It’s just contrarianism for the sake of not doing what the “liberals” do.
The anti-masking movement of 2020 is the perfect demonstration of that contrarian ideology. Conservatives don’t even know why they oppose masks except that the liberals were putting them on.
It’s pretty sad considering that the first two sentences about ML and online identity were relatively productive conversation that could have gone somewhere thought provoking.
> This right here is your indicator that this comment is an entirely made up story about hypothetical friends, with the sole intention of ragging on “liberals.”
Nah, I’ve been inside some of the fandoms on the Internet before and I know exactly what the commenter’s talking about (and whenever a similar thing happens I do another facepalm.) /r/HobbyDrama has a fuckton of similar stories as this, you don’t need to adhere to a specific ideology to admit that these things happen. (And even the left has criticized idpol for a long time, don’t just assume the commenter is conservative because of this)
As to why people participate in these tribal fights in the Internet… well one of the problems I see in modern society is a severe lack of agency among the people. Fighting on the Internet for a cause (whether stupid or not) gives one a sense of agency that they are alive in this world and changing things. The problem is that most of the agency that the Internet provides is inconsequential for actually changing the real world and is detrimental to one’s mental health in the long term.
> They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans.
It really sounds like they accidentally offended someone, the person who was offended was so much so that they couldn't communicate why they were offended, and then your friends misinterpreted the issue.
That's an odd reading of what they described. It sounds more like there friends did something good in the world but were told to sit-down and shut-up because they were the wrong race/gender/x.
That seems like a pretty ignorant thing to say, that in the sum of all human interactions online, the event OP described has never happened (or is even supposedly that rare). I would like to know why you think that would be true.
It certainly exists and I truly envy the fact it hasn’t affected your life yet. n=1 but it’s affected mine as a recent college graduate and person who works in FAANG.
There's a good example of just this thing happening right here[0]. A group of young climate activists disbanded because despite the good work they were doing they decided their group was too top-loaded with white people and should be led by POC.
If you try to speak for the Black community, and you aren't black, you don't have the "wrong color of skin", you are speaking for others without their permission, and they have the right to correct the record if they consider your take to be inaccurate.
If you try to speak for the trans community, and you aren't trans, you aren't being censored, you are being rebutted. Trans people have the right to correct the record when someone speaks on their behalf in a disagreeable way.
Anyone who sees disagreement as a form of censorship needs to take a step back and recognize that the right to disagree is an important facet of free speech, and attempting to defeat things like "cancel culture" and other vocal forms of public disagreement is a demonstrably larger threat to free speech than anything the social justice community could ever dish out.
Censorship is largely being redefined as experiencing consequences for what one says. This is an extraordinarily cowardly misrepresentation of censorship, that tries to redefine free speech as your speech, and tries to force the narrative that disagreement with your speech is actually stripping you of the right to speak.
Sure, public shaming and doxxing may have a chilling effect on many people's willingness to speak freely, but a lack individual willingness is not equivalent to a lack of permission.
Free speech requires bravery. If you are too much of a coward to speak freely, you aren't being censored, you're just a coward afraid of others' free speech.
> If you try to speak for the Black community, and you aren't black, you don't have the "wrong color of skin", you are speaking for others without their permission
So... wait... are you saying all these white people in BLM marches...
You are misunderstanding. Folks marching in BLM Marches aren't speaking for the Black community.
The poster is talking about things more akin to, say, a non-trans person speaking about the experience of being trans or someone who has never went to college speaking for college graduates - when really, they shouldn't try to speak for groups they aren't a party to.
In other words, I can talk about prejudice and racism I've experienced and witnessed, but this doesn't mean that I have the credentials to talk about what it is like to, say, have dark skin in the US and experience that sort of racism. It just isn't the same, and I don't have that experience. After all, I can (in the US) basically just be a face in the crown in a small town.
Two people with the same shade of dark skin, but different in every other way. Are they both part of the "Black community"? Can one speak for the other?
Or is this "community" thing a political thing, where members share a narrative? If so, why do they get to claim the badge of "Black community" from other dark-shaded folk who aren't like-minded?
There are a lot of topics I won’t touch any more, more every year. Accounts - can’t stay anonymous, ml systems working around the clock to identify posters. My social justice focused friends have it worse, their online “friends” attack them publicly over every single little thing. They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans. They have panic attacks over the guilt and stress