What You Can't Say (2004)

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

by georgecmu • 7 years ago

241 217 7 years ago

paulgraham.com

masonic2• 7 years ago

Most active recent past posting, 120+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18221049

dang3• 7 years ago

(Edit: just to be clear, links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted! Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so—this is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Had this repost had been a bad one, we'd have marked it as [dupe] in the title instead. The purpose of linking to previous threads is that readers find those interesting.)

Also, from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952908

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956884

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581050

Those are the big ones.

masonic2• 7 years ago

links like this don't mean that the article shouldn't have been reposted!

I didn't say, or even imply, that. I just thought reference to past discussions would be useful.

kristianc• 7 years ago

The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.

But yes, this has also been discussed a lot here before.

mikelyons3• 7 years ago

Selfishness is devilry, and devils make Truth out as falsehood and spin falsehood as true.

chimi• 7 years ago

This is pervasive in society right now. It's rampant in politics, advertising, dating... and it seems to be getting worse not better. It's almost like we don't have time to evaluate honesty. Politicians win, not because they will answer a question honestly, but because they will repeatedly deflect and they get away with it.

Why do we allow it?

Sniffnoy2• 7 years ago

This isn't a matter of selfishness, but groupishness.

gruez4• 7 years ago

The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.

examples?

johnr2• 7 years ago

examples?

Person A is accused of criminal act X.

Person B: "It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place."

Person C: "X-apologist!"

umvi2• 7 years ago

"Jane got black out drunk around strangers and then she--"

"Wait before you say anything more, that seems like a poor choice, but go on"

"How dare you! Victim shaming is not ok!!"

siruncledrew• 7 years ago

Good quality debates are becoming much rarer among websites and social media with larger pools of users.

Here’s a very old debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate

There’s a good quote inside:

”Let us ever apply ourselves to the task, feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and by exercising improve our intellectual faculties, the more worthy shall we be, the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God.”

The gist I get from it (not saying it’s 100% right) is that we enrich ourselves by exercising our mental state, which means challenging ourselves, exploring new intellectual points, and having the fortitude to go through with it (and hopefully find meaning).

Instead, the easy way is to forgo such “intellectual exercise” and simply regurgitate the same sentiments back to ‘the group’ and drown out the ‘other side’ with self-serving, dribbling retorts.

With respect to “What can’t be said”, this reinforces conditioned thinking that is black or white with no gray area in between to formally discuss. Instead, the ethos is “You’re either with us or against us”, and challenging that classification is violating Rule #1.

buboard3• 7 years ago

It's not the inverse , but a corrolary: With heretical ideas being purged from each Church, the churches have doubled down on absurdness

rayalez• 7 years ago

Another somewhat related thing is "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs":

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/ZQG9cwKbct2L...

When more moderate, reasonable, or relatively skeptical people leave the group, people who remain are, on average, more fanatical and extreme. Which leads to even more extreme viewpoints, which pushes out more and more people who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation.

After the [moderate members] escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus somewhere in the “middle.”

This is one reason why it’s important to be prejudiced in favor of tolerating dissent. Wait until substantially after it seems to you justified in ejecting a member from the group, before actually ejecting. If you get rid of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will become the oddball.

AlexTWithBeard• 7 years ago

Right. The revolution devours its children.

CM30• 7 years ago

Not just say things, it seems there's a disturbing trend where any and all behaviour is 'justified' as long as it's someone on 'our side' who's doing it. Especially if the target of said behaviour is the 'other tribe'.

For instance, violence/threats against those with different political viewpoints. Or attempts at justifying actual abusive/manipulative behaviour.

It makes me worry that the goal of civility has been lost, that a depressing number of people actively seem to think they're at war with their opponents and that their goal is not to come to any sort of compromise or get along, but to destroy the other team by any means necessary.

jonahrd• 7 years ago

It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.

Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..)

Quite the hubris to make that assumption!

tomrod• 7 years ago

There is a certain, je ne sais quoi, gravity to it.

voidhorse5• 7 years ago

Totally, it’s the classic blowhard man of science attitude: “I think what I do is more difficult than any other human endeavor and though I’ve never attempted the grand feats of intelligence I claim to be capable of...” there’s a reason actual polymaths and polyglots are rare occurences in history.

The very attitude itself shows that what someone has in specialized knowlegde they clearly lack in wisdom, which makes it highly unlikely that such a person is actually capable of their prideful delusions of grandeur. He has a point about the sokal hoax but the proper conclusion from that is that there are issues with the academic system and structure around work in the humanities—not that physicists are “smarter”—we’re talking about a system thats largely free-form vs one that’s inherently rigorous—theres no reasonable way to derive any strong claims about general intelligence based on this. The only reason physicists wouldnt get tripped up by hoax is because theres a centuries long system of rigor around what they do that makes it very hard fr them to let anything bogus slip in—its proceedure—they have a way better instrument backing them up, it has nothing to do with the intelligence of individuals, only learned behavior and functioning within prescribed systems.

It’s hubris that’s a product of our age. Technologists, even more so than scientists at this point, are supossed to be the priestly class capable of miracles (while in reality the vast majority of them, even the brightest, have at best a passing knowledge of the humanities just like humanists have scant expertise in the sceinces! In fact such a reality is practically deterministic due to the hyperspecialization of knowledge)

Paul Graham’s writings, at least what I’ve read, annoy me. No matter how much studying he may have actually done in reality, he always comes off as an individual that assumed he could play at philosophy and cultural critique just fine while maintaining a total disregard for the tradition and without ever having engaged with it in a deep way. Makes for literature that sounds very self-assured and pompous with little to back it up. Kind of like reading the incredibly naive thoughts of a cocky teenager with slightly more life experience. This essay for example, covers subject matter (moral relativism, bleeding into relativism in general, as well as the engine of history) that has been examined to death in the history of philosophy, yet paul graham doesn’t cite one person from that tradition. Why? Because, at the time, he was totally oblivious and had a superiority complex that wasn’t at all critical, self-reflective, or intelligent, which probably kept him from engaging with people that might’ve pointed outthe vast history of exploration into the topic that he handles as though man discovered history yesterday. Of course this doesn’t actually matter, because his target audience is totally oblivious too (people who, through no fault of their own, have been pushed into a very narrow specialized sphere of life—note this isn’t a sufficient condition for “smartness”), and we’ll all remain blind and blundering until we really introduce some cross-disciplinary study back into schooling and life itself.

porknubbins• 7 years ago

You described how I’ve always felt about Paul Grahams writings except maybe the startup or programming ones on which I defer to him as more of an expert. He is sometimes an engaging essayist and doing what I guess essayists do which is describe the world from their perspective without letting too much rigor get in the way of an interesting story. I just get turned off by making a point like “we don’t say fuck around kids because of our precious taboos and because we want to think of kids as innocent” which is not particularly wrong but so oversimplified as to be not really worth saying except to imply that the writer is more enlightened than the rest of us.

jf-4• 7 years ago

We can pretend to be outraged by it but he’s very likely right. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s unacceptable to say that people have different levels of ability or that some professions require more than others.

(And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)

voidhorse5• 7 years ago

But it’s a very naive and limited conception of intelligence that equates intellegence strictly with mathematical reasoning (and perhaps experimentation).

There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing.

And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. Hardly skeptics. In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.

undefined1• 7 years ago

Paul's response to this:

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

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?"

http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

lazyasciiart5• 7 years ago

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

bsanr23• 7 years ago

That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.

musicale• 7 years ago

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

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

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

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

anatoly• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair happened in 2002, before Paul's article in 2004.

twic• 7 years ago

As long as the French literature professors are allowed to publish on string theory, they're probably fine.

dmurray• 7 years ago

The follow up [0] to this essay tells how he didn't want to explicitly claim anything as an "unsayable truth" today, but that he snuck this one in anyway. It's...controversial, not PC and quite possibly wrong, but it has some chance of being one of those truths.

Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up...
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

rland• 7 years ago

Statements like these are STEM vs. Non-STEM version of "why does Twitter need 4000 software engineers? I could make that in two weeks!"

Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?

bgrainger• 7 years ago

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

Retric• 7 years ago

That’s a rather poor example as you can say all this stuff: https://github.com/twitter

Also, Twitter does not have 4,000 total employees let alone software engineers. It’s core software was initially built by a tiny team, with the company only growing to 130 people in total after two years.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

Such statements aren't about "4000 software engineers" but "4000 employees", and the answer always is, "3960 of those are in administrative or sales and marketing roles".

lawnchair_larry• 7 years ago

It’s a sign that we are in crazy times when people even think his claim is debatable. Come on. Whether it’s divisive or insensitive is irrelevant. It’s true.

hinkley2• 7 years ago

There is the concept of a polymath. There is overlap in that group with autodidacts (people who can teach themselves about anything if they only want it badly enough).

I think Paul may be falling prey to a correlation issue here.

If you are an autodidact and a polymath, are you more likely to end up as a scientist or engineer, or as a professor of French Literature?

Very few people in the CS program understood why I was contemplating 300 level French classes (I placed out of 4 semesters of french, and that left 2-3 200 level classes and then you were into the hard stuff). A lot of them could not have 'suffered' through twelve semesters of French, no matter how much you bet them.

tempestn• 7 years ago

If you're saying that more polymaths are likely to end up as physics professors than French professors, doesn't that actually support the point he's making?

toasterlovin7• 7 years ago

It appears that nobody in this thread has gone and tried to find it, but I believe there is research showing that hard scientists do actually tend to have very strong verbal skills in addition to their strong quantitative skills, whereas non-quantitative academics tend be strong only with verbal stuff.

aazaa• 7 years ago

This quote is eerily prescient:

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

It's especially powerful when paired with this question:

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Combining the two yields an odd idea. The group likely to have the most things they're afraid to say out loud will be the group that was recently strong enough to enforce taboos, but is not now.

One such group is white, straight males in the US.

rocqua2• 7 years ago

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

Later, Paul Graham comes with the following variation of the above:

What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress?

Which I think is better. The difference is "weak enough to need taboos" vs "nervous". The group just needs to feel their power slipping away. This makes it a lot more applicable to your white males comment too. Whether white males' position is "weak enough to need taboos" is much more up for debate than whether some are nervous that their power is slipping away.

traderjane2• 7 years ago

Which group is countering the strength of straight white males? When one looks at the faces of the powerful in America, what do they see? Gay black women?

jf-4• 7 years ago

It’s the most currently socially acceptable way of agreeing with the argument. Which is in itself a wonderful way of highlighting what you can and cannot say, not to mention the punishments doled out for doing so.

yourbandsucks5• 7 years ago

Different arenas.

You're talking about representation among the powerful in mainstream America, but OP was talking about accepted speech in tech/academia.

You can both be right.

BigJono• 7 years ago

What moral taboos are enforced by straight white males?

lazyasciiart5• 7 years ago

Ideas suggesting that being a straight white male might give a person advantages.

Udik4• 7 years ago

I personally find this idea pretty weak.

The main problem I have with it is that these taboos are enforced precisely by the members of the group that would be the "weak" group now. As the most recent and obvious example, the #metoo movement has thrived with the fundamental support of powerful white men. The taboos of religion are, or were, not imposed by a powerful group of priests to a subjugated population, but instead they were enforced collectively.

There is a taste, a natural instinct, for just conforming with mainstream opinions, not out of fear but with sincere conviction, sometimes beyond any logic and reason. Once some ideas get enough traction, and non conformity is met with enough execration, then people just tend to join in with real devotion.

john-radio• 7 years ago

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist"...

This made me remember the essay "Against Murderism" by Scott Alexander. If someone would like to read a somewhat similar article to what's posted here, written by (in my opinion) a devastatingly better essayist than Graham with a lot more knowledge about human psychology and understanding of how culture works, I definitely recommend it and Alexander's popular blog, "Slatestar Codex," in general.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

spumoni4• 7 years ago

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

yourbandsucks5• 7 years ago

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

rocqua2• 7 years ago

What is scary about this approach is that it tends to favor conservatism. Any change achieved politically can easily be dismissed as a moral fashion (immigrant's rights, racial equality being ideal, same-sex marriage, women's rights).

This is much more of an issue when you use the methods outlined to argue against an idea. If instead you use these methods internally, this is less of an issue.

malandrew• 7 years ago

Neither conservatism nor progressivism is necessarily correct or better. Sometimes conservatism is worse because it preserves things that we should change for the better. Sometimes progressivism is worse because it doesn't fully understand why society arrived at a solution so progressives try to change things in a way they think is better but then there are all sorts of unintended consequences that turn out to be worse that what progressives were trying to change for the better.

For example, at one time progressives were trying to end segregation and promote judging someone on the content of character and not the color of their skin while conservatives fought them on this. Now progressives are trying to reinstitute segregation and promoting the idea that people should be judged on skin color and not content of character while conservatives fight them on these changes.

Tronno• 7 years ago

"Now progressives are trying to reinstitute segregation and promoting the idea that people should be judged on skin color and not content of character while conservatives fight them on these changes."

That's quite a statement. Could you go into more detail?

dextralt2• 7 years ago

in case you haven't noticed, progressives have long since moved on from the idea of "equality" of races and sexes.

liara_k2• 7 years ago

According to whom? The propagandists of their political adversaries, I'd wager.

iconjack• 7 years ago

Things you can't say in the tech world, 2019: * global warming is junk science * there are approximately two genders * Trump is a great president * the US is not a racist country * Apple sucks

Edit: If you're one of the many downvoters, who presumably disagree with this, I dare you to say any of these things if you work for a tech company.

sincerely• 7 years ago

"Apple sucks" got 1000 upvotes yesterday on this exact website.

armenarmen2• 7 years ago

downvoters proved that rather quickly

topmonk• 7 years ago

African Americans consist of only 13% of the population yet commit over half of the crimes.

Asians and Whites score much higher on IQ tests than African Americans and Latinos.

Women have innately different interests than men.

spumoni4• 7 years ago

Researchers are able to correctly classify human skulls into black and white Americans a vast majority of the time.

lazyasciiart5• 7 years ago

* 2 + 2 is a color * there is a worldwide market for about 6 computers * by the year 2000 we will all be living in space.

I don't think you're wrong - I just think that your examples are about equivalent to mine, and nobody is upset by the constraints of society refusing to listen to those.

gruez4• 7 years ago

Edit: If you're one of the many downvoters, who presumably disagree with this, I dare you to say any of these things if you work for a tech company.

"Apple sucks" is pretty safe to say. The other ones are dead on, though as evidenced by the downvotes.

georgewsinger• 7 years ago

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

This is interesting. I've heard multiple people say that there have been two political correctness peaks: one in the early/mid 90s, and the other starting from about 2013 to now.

Are we already coming down from our current PC peak? I think we might be, even though it seems weird to say (given that we're still near the peak, so that political correctness is still high). Some evidence for this:

1. There seems to be a larger and larger cultural awareness of the toxicity of political correctness, so much so that it's starting to no longer be counter-cultural anymore, but just a well-represented view. The IDW is becoming more mainstream (which means they need to stop representing themselves as a persecuted group, lest they become stuck in 2017). For the record I'm a huge fan of the IDW. I don't want to see them stagnate.

2. Leftists -- usually blamed the most for political correctness -- are even now able to discuss a few ideas in public that they weren't formerly able to quite as easily: (i) they can more openly discuss the merits of socialism (using the "s" word) and (ii) they are free to question the orthodoxy of traditional free trade. In fact nearly every major candidate for the Democratic nomination has denounced free trade in some way. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago.

There's still a long way down from the peak, but times feel less PC now than they were say in 2017.

ixtli5• 7 years ago

What is the IDW?

taylormckay• 7 years ago

From Wikipedia:

The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a neologism coined by American mathematician Eric Weinstein, and popularized in a 2018 editorial by Bari Weiss. The term refers to a group of public personalities who oppose what they see as the dominance of progressive identity politics and political correctness in the media and academia.

primroot• 7 years ago

two political correctness peaks: one in the early/mid 90s, and the other starting from about 2013 to now.

Could this be related to economic circumstances, and a spread of a sense of defeat among adherents of economic progressivism? Postmodernism came around the time, when knowledge about communist atrocities became more established. The political correctness peak of the nineties maybe reflected changes in the dominance of the Neoliberal End of History way of thinking. 2013 occurred four years after an event that threatened the Neoliberal economic narrative. I mean, the US is special in the way the Neoliberal ideology almost takes a new shape, by itself making political correctness into a useful mask. In the third world, religions such as postmodernism do take a steady hold. I see it as reflection of the hopelessness around the (geo)political and economic systems.

Uehreka2• 7 years ago

Having seen many articles on this topic show up on HN, and this one in particular recur like a comet every year, I’d like to note a trend I feel like I see in the HN comments every time.

First I see a highly upvoted top-level comment talking about how tragic it is that thoughtcrime is such a capital offense these days, and lamenting that surely the HN thought police will be coming for their head, but they still feel the need to speak their mind about this because it’s true despite the surely inevitable downvoting.

The most upvoted reply concurs with the GP, adding a corollary about how the current social justice climate is particularly nasty because of “X”, and of course this miasma is so thick in the Bay Area that you simply can’t escape it. Then their most upvoted reply is also someone shaking their head about how no one is willing to question the SJW status quo.

Soon, a crystalline structure emerges: layers upon layers of contrarians agreeing with each other, reflecting forlorn looks and awaiting the scythe of politically correct criticism that is surely coming any minute.

Folks, let’s take a breath.

To be sure, there exist people on HN who hold liberal or leftist beliefs, and there exist similar people in the Bay Area. But you know who else lives in the Bay Area? Paul Graham, the guy who wrote TFA! Peter Thiel! A veritable army of libertarian crypto enthusiasts!

I won’t deny that political conflict exists on HN, in the valley or elsewhere. I just wish people would stop acting like no one agrees with them.

hollerith• 7 years ago

sure, there exist people on HN who hold liberal or leftist beliefs, and there exist similar people in the Bay Area. But you know who else lives in the Bay Area? . . . Peter Thiel!

Uh, he moved to LA " — a move his camp describes as a bid to escape the political hegemony of the San Francisco Bay Area":

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-peter-thiel-20180215-...

Uehreka2• 7 years ago

Womp, fair enough.

That part notwithstanding though, I think the overall point stands.

ecuzzillo• 7 years ago

PG moved to England, afaik.

chrisdhoover• 7 years ago

Yet we are governed by a clown posse of low intellect and corrupt officials. Sherriffs who sell Concealed carry permits, legislators who outright run guns, senators that grease their family businesses, a board of supervisors that ignores real issues in favor of voting on symbolic gestures, and a governor who not surprisingly slept with his best friend’s wife. Somehow i was unable to squeeze in the current senator running for president who got ahead through blowjobs and being the venal-worst human through zealous prosecution of anything she didn't like or anything she thought would move her personal career forward in the sentence above.

We may a few free thinkers and intellectuals but increasingly it seems we live in a bad and watered down version of “The Death of Stalin.”

yourbandsucks5• 7 years ago

It's possible that such comments are popular here specifically because there are a lot of people who feel they can't say it at work. Catharsis behind pseudonymity.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

But you know who doesn't live in the Bay Area? Most of HN. The site has a global audience now.

moksly• 7 years ago

What about the people who aren’t afraid to provoke their peers? They seem to neither fall into the “stay silent out of fear” or “you just believe what you are told” categories.

mips_avatar• 7 years ago

I'm confused about the comments section, maybe it's better to keep taboo comments to myself, or consider HN my confidants and enrich my belief.

sterileopinions• 7 years ago

What about the things you can't say on HN

yzh• 7 years ago

Just look at all the comments that got turned to grey. I bet there are patterns, and if looked over a long period of time, would seem like fashions too.

ascertain• 7 years ago

But the comments that got turned to grey are things that people can and did say.

chess93• 7 years ago

My belief is that people believe whatever they want to believe. If you are liberal it is because you want to be liberal. Alternatively you might just not want to be conservative. Same for the other direction. Naturally formed beliefs are just an afterthought. It goes without saying that this might not apply to everyone or to every belief.

For the record, I recognize that perhaps I believe this belief strictly because I want to believe it. I also think many people don't want to believe it.

undecisive• 7 years ago

I'm not sure it's that simple. As Mr Graham points out, we are shaped by our echo chambers, the chorus of voices that shout out against our fellow "heretics". As children, those chambers come from our families and religious / community institutions, as dictated by our elders. As we reach our rebellious phases, sure - we scrabble around and find beliefs we want to believe in - but the effort expended in doing so is difficult and the reward is little. From a social perspective, a little deviation acts as a differentiator - we are made interesting within our peer groups by our rebellions - but too much heresy makes us "other". As we get past that, self-realisation comes in waves; nestled between desires of belonging in a new group, we find moments where we are invited to re-evaluate some deeply held truth. Rarely is the re-evaluation self-driven, and almost never is that belief so different that a nearby echo chamber is not crouching nearby, waiting to nurture our newfound "chosen" belief in it's warm, corroborating belly.

For the record, I want to believe your belief. I recognise that this autonomous self-truthing could be the pinnicle of what we as humans could become. I also think the very concept of society becomes a meaningless nothing if it were possible.

tlb• 7 years ago

How does that theory explain large scale social changes over time? Why do peoples attitudes change in sync?

toasterlovin7• 7 years ago

FWIW, I think that a huge amount of political alignment in the U.S. derives from aesthetic sensibilities.

The thing last year where Trump ordered McDonald's for the college football team that was visiting him because the White House cook staff was not working due to the government shutdown is basically the perfect example of this. The left though it was the most gauche, trashy thing that ever happened, as in, "I can't believe someone would server toxic trash food to a guest in their own home." And right wing people mostly though it was totally normal, as in, "Of course you would order McDonald's if something came up and you couldn't serve a home cooked meal to a guest."

edflsafoiewq• 7 years ago

Feels like topsy-turvy land. The right, as the defenders of monarchy and aristocratic taste, should obviously be horrified that the King is eating fast food, and the left, as the voice of the people and universal equality, should be delighted that the Chairman is eating the food of the common folk.

kaens3• 7 years ago

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

- Karl Popper, Open Society and it's Enemies, 1945

lone_haxx0r3• 7 years ago

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

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

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

Jarwain• 7 years ago

I think that if one were to draw the line between tolerant and intolerant ideologies, that line shouldn't be drawn based on the content of the ideology but rather how that ideology spreads. Specifically, based on this quote

they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols

The only ideology, the only Belief, that should not be tolerated is the belief that ideology must spread through violent means.

That in and of itself is a belief, but it is a belief that can be discussed through rational argument, and only calls upon violence when all else fails.

rjblackman5• 7 years ago

Who is going to define that line?

It will be defined through rational argument.

blub• 7 years ago

How can fighting intolerance "suppress things the mob does not agree with", if that is in itself intolerance?

The whole point is to allow different ideas to exist.

Gormisdomai• 7 years ago

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

I don't think this is true. The person in power can be wrong (e.g.) 10% of the time and you'd still have a mostly stable and tolerant system.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

I think it's the mobs that need to be fought under Popper's thesis.

It's simpler to see if you apply the Paradox recursively. There's a reason for an exception to tolerance. It's made only in case of people who directly want to get rid of other members of society. Society needs to get rid of them first. But if, in your quest of chasing out the intolerant, you extend the meaning of intolerance to anything beyond immediate threats to people, or if you start claiming collateral damage, then you are the intolerant that the society needs to get rid of ASAP.

The groups currently wielding the Paradox as justification for their actions? If they actually believed in it, they'd dissolve.

armenarmen2• 7 years ago

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

― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

eebynight• 7 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/rant

rjblackman5• 7 years ago

the decision will be made through rational argument. if you are not willing to debate or argue then your position is forfeit (I.E. you are the one with the intolerant philosophy).

scarejunba• 7 years ago

It isn't mechanically executable but it does present a strong heuristic: resist all attempts to dismantle the discussion. You want the structure to remain even if you lose an individual argument.

knzhou3• 7 years ago

That's a facile response, because it works for everybody. Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe.

kaens3• 7 years ago

Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe.

This is 100% not true.

jonahx2• 7 years ago

Let's assume this is true...

What do you conclude from this (I'm asking honestly)? That Popper is wrong and unlimited tolerance is the answer?

ixtli5• 7 years ago

This strikes me as wishful thinking possibly born of not having had enough conversations with concerted racists. The ones who are not afraid to tell you what they really believe will do so without the sort of equivocation you get from crypto-reactionaries who talk about "free speech" and "tolerance."

watwut• 7 years ago

That is because people around you see tolerance as good. I know people who see themselves of guardians of rightful effectively and see intolerance as order.

danShumway• 7 years ago

The Paradox of Tolerance is just a rephrasing of the Paradox of Pacifism. I'm not convinced it brings anything ideologically new to the table.

I'm not a pacifist, and by extension, I don't believe we should tolerate everything. I agree with Karl. But I still get very suspicious of people who bring this quote up, because they're arguing about something very basic that pretty much everybody already knows, and they're not answering the more important question: which things should we violently oppose, and how should we oppose them?

Most people already don't believe that we should tolerate 100% of literally everything, and the people who do are not going to be convinced by an argument they've already heard 1,000 times. I promise that pacifists already know how sometimes violent people kill pacifists. Advocates for universal tolerance already know that their philosophy can be abused. This argument was around for thousands of years, even before Karl Popper was born.

So ignoring the pacifists that will all just roll their eyes when they hear this quote, and assuming that someone isn't a pacifist (ie, the vast majority of people) the more useful followup questions are:

- How do we define the intolerant? Is it literally people who fight against tolerance, or is it about causing harm, intentionally or incidentally?

- Is (in)tolerance fungible? If someone tolerates an intolerant person, should they be treated like a similar liability? How many degrees of fungibility should we go down?

- How long should we wait before we decide that suppression is necessary? Is it justifiable for us to preemptively suppress a community that is likely to become violent in the future?

- What means are acceptable during suppression of intolerant ideas? Are there lines we can't cross? Are we forbidden from using stuff like propaganda?

There are tons of smart people who have smart, interesting takes on those questions. And if you go through history or even current-day events and look at different communities, you'll find that they all kind of come up with their own answers.

So when people pull out this quote, it's like walking up to two people debating whether we should ever assassinate a dictator and saying, "sometimes wars are justified." Well, yeah, but we knew that. Is this particular war justified?

jonahx2• 7 years ago

because they're arguing about something very basic that pretty much everybody already knows

One would think...

Unfortunately, many people believe that all intolerance stems from bad treatment of some kind, and that the intolerant can be swayed, eventually, given enough tolerance.

austincheney• 7 years ago

Tolerance is acceptance or appreciation of difference or disagreement with the intent to make peace or extend understanding.

That word is often abused by ignorant, stupid, or self-serving narcissistic people to mean something more like conformity or agreement. In this context tolerance becomes an empty meaningless word used as a weapon to attack people with, which is the opposite of its intention. This best description of this internalizing self-serving behavior is hypocrisy. Whether its because such people are dishonest or are simply stupid I despise these people. I would respect these silly people much more if they simply used just words correctly in acceptance of a self-serving nature.

golemotron• 7 years ago

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is not falsifiable.

ggm• 7 years ago

Are you saying only falsifiable things are tenable? Axioms (which it is not) are also unfalsifyable. If you change axioms you're in a different system.

Or if you don't like axioms, principles.

Paradoxes are by design, not falsifying?

hydrox24• 7 years ago

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is an investigation of moral axioms, or principles. It is not Science.

So it's okay that it can't be falsified.

throw1747hhd• 7 years ago

This is quite amusing in the context of the article. 'Rationality' a word which is entirely without meaning, riding on the wave of supposed European 'enlightenment', is little more than first order logic with all it's fundamental assumptions being b based, either on European secularism or Christianity.

The suppression of thought comes about not because of the lack of 'rationality' but from the lack of agreement on fundamental dogmas. For instance how are going to argue with a Christian or Islamic fundamentalist for whom the very existence of others is a prickly aspect; this being served entirely from the scripture ?

buboard3• 7 years ago

intolerance guarantees stagnation. tolerance has more optionality

coldtea2• 7 years ago

And who judges what is intolerant, and should therefore be suppressed ("by force", none the less), over simply what those who yield the power don't like, or the ideological fashions of the "good people" of the times don't like?

toasterlovin7• 7 years ago

The problem with Popper’s proposal that intolerant ideologies must not be tolerated is that it fails Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance test. If you really think that intolerant ideologies must not be tolerated, then you should feel comfortable about your political enemies being the ones who determine what constitutes an intolerant ideology. If you feel that things would not go well, then perhaps the idea that we should be able to persecute ideologies which are “intolerant” is bad and we shouldn’t give that power to anyone.

evrydayhustling• 7 years ago

I'd like to think that, like opening paragraph brings up, this piece is an old snapshot that brings some embarrassment today. At the time it was posted I would have been excited about it. 15 years later, indulgently and exhaustively defining the well worn subject of heresy feels pretty dull.

Like most celebrations of heresy, this skips the fact that orthodoxy has its own value: coordination. Parents teach their kids to avoid bad words so that they can coordinate with others. This is not a bad thing.

A better thing still is for kids to understand that words aren't inherently bad but that being conscious of how others feel about them is good. The impactful heretics do the hard work of helping the orthodox world adapt to what they have discovered.

And meanwhile, the vast majority of heresies are authentically wrong. Celebrating being heretical for its own sake, rather than a combination of truth seeking and empathy, had enabled all manner of jerks and frauds over the years. Tech culture needs a more nuanced view of this topic.

codr7• 7 years ago

The point stands, allowing your mind to roam freely without paying attention to what others might think is the only way to find truth within.

The vast majority of heresies are authentically wrong? How exactly did that happen? The opposite sounds more likely to me.

I used to enjoy PG's writings a lot more than anything that ever came out of YC, that much I know.

tshaddox• 7 years ago

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told.

I’ve never quite understood this argument, because it seems to imply that people’s beliefs are or should be a random, unpredictable process, and that any regularity in the data should be treated with apprehension. But if beliefs are not in fact random, but can be guided by some common forces, then it wouldn’t be strange to expect people’s beliefs to in some cases largely converge. Should I “stop and think about” the fact that I oppose murder, even though my parents and all my friends and even most of my “enemies” hold that same belief?” Of course not.

lmm2• 7 years ago

If someone claimed to have done detailed fundamentals analysis on which stocks to buy, and the recommended portfolio they came up with was exactly the S&P 500, you'd be dubious that they'd actually done the analysis, right? If someone was doing a book report and came up with exactly the same analysis as a well-known essay, you'd be sceptical that they'd read the book themselves. Of course there's an underlying reality and you'd expect everyone to come up with the same broad themes. But there's enough noise that you also expect individuals to come up with some idiosyncratic differences.

baddox• 7 years ago

There are obviously different levels of detail. I would be suspicious if two book reports contained significant passages with the exact same phrasing. I wouldn’t be surprised if two book reports for the same book noticed very similar themes.

buboard3• 7 years ago

TL;dr Progress only happens at the borders.

This long piece of wrongthink is such a great handbook for the 2010s

jonny3833• 7 years ago

You mean like, there are only two biological genders, and you were either born a male or female?

paulcole• 7 years ago

Is this something Paul Graham has said?

rmilejczz• 7 years ago

Honest question, has anyone ever been fired, imprisoned, or killed for saying that?

psilocipher2• 7 years ago

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/teacher-fired-refusi...

jonny3833• 7 years ago

My brother in law was fired from a law firm for stating (at a casual drinks night) that he believed that, legally speaking, people should not be allowed to change their gender on their birth certificate.

He had worked there for six years as a para-legal, soon to be lawyer. I don't think his cause was helped that the director of said firm had a transgender sister (or brother). He was unaware of this.

EDIT: Typo.

hailk• 7 years ago

I think there is a law in Canada against mis-gendering people. Lot of popular tech companies have explicit CoC guideline against mis-gendering. StackOverflow recently fired a moderator for proposing to use gender neutral pro-nouns instead of individual preferred pronouns, even when there is no official CoC defined as such.

cc812• 7 years ago

How do you view intersex people?

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

jonny3833• 7 years ago

Fair point. There are two genders, and you were either born (male or female) or (with a medical condition).

toasterlovin7• 7 years ago

Exceptions do not invalidate categories. We do not say that humans have between 0 and 2 hands because some humans are born missing one or both of their hands. Such people are exceptions.

tyrust2• 7 years ago

If you adopt more accurate terminology by substituting "gender" for "sex" you shouldn't have an issue.

umvi2• 7 years ago

I mean, there are some extremely rare, extremely weird biological corner cases, but for the overwhelmingly majority there are only 2 chromosome configurations: XX and XY

eric234223• 7 years ago

The Norm is changed by the trouble makers and impulsive people who don't think about the long term consequences. Being selfish I don't want to be one of them but i am very glad they exist.

What You Can't Say (2004)

Related Stories