Heresy(paulgraham.com) |
Heresy(paulgraham.com) |
What a ridiculous false equivalence.
> Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else.
How is that overlooking it?
Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions.
I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it?
My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them.
Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use?
Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.
This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"
There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.
However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.
If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.
What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...
Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.
It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?
Here is the discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147
The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.
Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!
I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.
That you feel differently about "Milikan, Shockley, and Watson" is shocking. You really think a mentally ill rapper deserves worse than eugenicists and thieves?
Despite that, half of Democratic Congressional representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, just voted to cut aid to Israel.
Further reading for those interested: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.
What the above poster listed is just a brief overview of the opposite, which has been the status quo for the past like 50 years here.
There is a lot of noise against Israel, but all the action is in the other direction, so to speak. And there are comical pains being made to absolve Israeli society for the country's actions even though it's a democracy that has voted for the very policies people are increasingly discovering and labeling abhorrent.
I say this respectfully because it's your wife, but if one can see the acts that Israel has been committing and how it plays in the US political process, but feels attacked when people react strongly and do things like try to boycott the country, then some introspection is required. Really needs to be a "are we the baddies" moment.
It's good she's here and that your children will presumably be raised here. It's not good to be in the kind of society that is under the grip of such an ideology as prevails over there.
even though it's from 2022, it still resonates with how I got fired just recently. something that Warhammer's Imperium calls out and does with no shame, publicly, is being built out silently or with euphemisms in our world.
ever more reasons to appreciate Warhammer as an unfortunate parody of our own little rock ball. and here I am, jobless, for calling Claude Code "a decent search engine"
I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.
Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.
You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.
Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.
I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.