Orthodox Privilege

by razin • 6 years ago

610 874 6 years ago

Good post. A point of clarification though: we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate, and of course either side is going to say that the other is the one with all the power.

dgellow3• 6 years ago

Just to be sure we follow, could you name or describe those two orthodoxies?

sneak2• 6 years ago

I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it).

These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!".

Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.

Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).

TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.

Spooky233• 6 years ago

At a 50,000 foot level, you have:

The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things.

The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.

tenaciousDaniel6• 6 years ago

Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years.

The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.

In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.

Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].

bob332123• 6 years ago

Group A would say they are "Sex and Gender Positive and Inclusive". Group A would also say people who disagree with Group A are "Transphobic"

Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists

throwawaygh8• 6 years ago

Exactly.

Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges.

Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work.

I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture).

Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions:

1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin)

2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal.

None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people.

The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN.

I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help.

Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right".

It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_.

The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.

andreilys2• 6 years ago

Except it spills over into other elite institutions like the NYT, so it’s not exactly self contained.

rukittenme3• 6 years ago

I suppose its worthwhile to make a distinction between "small, private, Christian, conservative, seminary" and "large, public, secular, liberal, university".

I think its appropriate to advocate for gay students at these private schools. But I do question its significance to the economy, society, and public life relative to the university system. And constraining this problem to universities or silicon valley does it a disservice. This is becoming a general, corporate problem.

pjc5017• 6 years ago

It's disappointing that this is being downvoted, because it's absolutely correct.

amadeuspagel3• 6 years ago

Nobody cares about private christian colleges. The fact that you have to speak of "private christian colleges", rather then naming any, is revealing. No one even knows their names. Harvard is the most powerful institution on earth. Try to name a more powerful one, and ask yourself where the people running it come from.

zozbot23412• 6 years ago

Harvard was established as a christian college, a "church in the wilderness" to train strict Puritan clergy. Maybe both Harvard and the later christian colleges you mention can be orthodoxies.

gadders6• 6 years ago

I think the difference is that "Private Christian Colleges" say up front that they are Christian colleges. The obvious implication is that you have to be a Christian, or agree with Christian principles to attend.

If UC Berkeley (say) was called "UC Berkeley Marxist College" then perhaps people would have a better idea of what to expect.

Spooky233• 6 years ago

Alot of the "liberal suppression of free speech" stuff is ginned up grievance fodder for talk show hosts and attention seekers.

Universities are always little labs for weird behavior and disputes, it's part of their nature. There's always something that puts conservative farmers or whatever in a twist. In the Nixon era it was anti-war protestors. In the 90s it was affirmative action. Today, it's the various gender/sexuality issues.

The politics of universities is such that these movements grow and succeed, then become the power brokers. A family member was a leader in LGBT causes on campus in the 90s -- very much fighting an uphill battle for attention, respect and resources. Today, that org is very powerful and alumni of the 90s version are all middle aged folks in positions of real power.

Uberphallus• 6 years ago

From the other side of the pond, I'd like to add, it gets tiring. It's absolutely impossible to have a meaningful exchange with 95% pf the Americans on the Internet these days. Rare are the days I'm not called antifa/communist/libtard/fag and racist/bigot/trumpette/transphobic, often in the very same thread.

For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."

soco2• 6 years ago

I can totally understand why (and by who) this comment got downvoted, but I happen to share its feeling. I won't say it cannot happen everywhere, but the interactions on USA politics have become (newly?) extremely polarizing.

djsumdog8• 6 years ago

I often go back to Brendon O'Neil's video about the right and duty to offend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA

He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.

martythemaniak• 6 years ago

I think this is broadly correct. In the old days when both the political and cultural spheres were conservative, it was clear what and who was unorthodox. Today, different institutions are both very liberal and very conservative so you can actually say anything you want and be considered both incredibly conventional and outrageously pointed, depending on who is listening and where you are saying it.

For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired.

Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.

jes51992• 6 years ago

what we currently call “liberal” is another form of conservatism. It’s just that it’s conserving a slightly different set of principles.

jojobas3• 6 years ago

Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate

In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.

tenaciousDaniel6• 6 years ago

I tend to be on the conservative end of this issue, so I mostly agree with you. However there have been some notable instances of people getting fired for expressing left-wing viewpoints - the ones I can recall were college professors.

So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.

xxpor3• 6 years ago

You haven't been on left twitter enough if you think that's the case.

There's plenty of leftist fights. Trots vs Leninists, Authoritarians vs Anarcho-syndicalists, Red Scare vs TrueAnon, etc.

cowpig• 6 years ago

I really can't stand statements like this.

There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics.

There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies.

To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.

tenaciousDaniel6• 6 years ago

There is more than one dimension

This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true.

If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.

coldtea3• 6 years ago

There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics

Yes, but that's neither here nor there, if most of public discourse falls along two, at best three, lines.

To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.

On the contrary, it's a very useful proxy, and the only sane way to make sense of a stream of 40% opinions towards one direction, 40% towards another, and some opinions all over the place... You prune the statistically irrelevant ones...

beisner• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, when it comes to public policy (at the national level at least), the way our system is structured doesn’t leave room for anything except for two distinct positions.

Symmetry• 6 years ago

That's true but but over the last few decades in the US it's been getting increasingly less true over time as various debates get partisan valence and ideological sorting gets stronger.

baby-yoda• 6 years ago

the greatest lie ever told was convincing the American people there is only a "left" and a "right"; a "correct" view and an "incorrect" view. just like sports teams, bad guys and good guys. one must win and one must lose. perhaps it wasn't always this polar but it feels like the vast majority of opinions are arrived at by simply listening to their pole's consensus and knee jerking to attack "the other", rather than critical thought.

and for politicians, this is the greatest job security they could ever imagine. probably 50%, if not far more, of their votes are gained simply via the letter next to their name. really, does any politician actually care about any national or local issues? why would they even waste energy to think about it. simply follow their tribe's consensus and ensure self preservation, salary, perks, social status and power.

djsumdog8• 6 years ago

I think you're falling into the fallacy described in Graham's article. You've also made a false dichotomy.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions"

We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.

gosukiwi2• 6 years ago

I'm from Argentina, and we have a "different but similar" thing going on here. Extreme, socialist left wing on one side, right wing on the other (note that our right wing could be considered left wing over there). So both could be considered orthodox, the country is basically 50/50, and it's like the article says: You are either X or Y. No middle ground.

People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.

munificent5• 6 years ago

we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions.

This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently.

I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame.

When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group.

But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now.

Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not.

I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.

NhanH• 6 years ago

Related, and still one of pg's best writing imo: "What you can't say" - http://paulgraham.com/say.html

This one, in additional with the previous essay about 2 different kind of centrists really make me curious of what unorthodox opinions PG is holding and can't say right now.

StavrosK10• 6 years ago

Probably largely the same everybody else is holding.

neoplatonian2• 6 years ago

It is pretty clear, if you read Paul Graham's twitter feed, what is it that he wants to say but feels he cannot say. I see where his point of view completely, but having not seen the the other side of privilege: the very real and lived experiences and feelings where cancel culture stems from, I feel this is an issue where he is totally blindsighted. The problem in the US currently, I feel, is not cancel culture per se, but widespread and ever growing narcissism which makes one less questioning about their fundamental worldview than one should be.

Paul Graham is somewhat a victim of this himself.

For example, the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth" in the moral, cultural and political sphere, that there is a "fact of the matter" whether a belief (say one PG holds) is correct or not. Or that that we live in a static world where such truths can even exist, and not, in a fluid, dynamic, politically messy world where contrasting viewpoints interact and produce something not something ever lasting, but something which is fragile and must always be fought for, this fight being a necessary feature for a functioning democracy.

seibelj3• 6 years ago

The power of that article for me, and what makes it interesting, is he never says what it is he can't say. It lets the reader imagine all sorts of possibilities in their mind, and determine what outrages themselves.

josephcsible2• 6 years ago

This sentence really sticks out to me:

I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

0823498723498725• 6 years ago

from http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30 Orwell, "NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)"

"If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.

COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.

TROTSKYIST: The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses.

PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial."

(With hindsight, we see the irish nationalist was less conflicted than Orwell had been willing to admit to himself. Or am I missing something important, given that this was written in 1945 and not 1922?)

As far as Orwell's most famous book goes, my heterodoxy of the moment is that I'm convinced the frame story in 1984 was not a jeremiad of warning about a future to avoid, but instead a cathartic story about a past young EA Blair had suffered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457

core-questions6• 6 years ago

It doesn't have to be beyond the pale. There are plenty of totally scientific and statistical facts, observed many times over by many different studies, that reveal uncomfortable truths you will be cancelled for talking about.

Whether it's IQ or crime demographics, or something more esoteric, we're increasingly entering into a time where you have to toe the line of orthodoxy or risk losing your livelihood. This means we can't actually get better studies into these areas, nor can we propose policy mechanisms that might actually work towards improving reality, because we are incapable of basing policies on unorthodox facts.

watwut10• 6 years ago

There is nothing uncomfortable about being told that you are genetically superior.

flixic• 6 years ago

Why? 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.

This sentence usually ruffles some feathers, and is a good, even if weak, example of things you "can't say".

ivankirigin• 6 years ago

"Things you can't say" is interesting because the reason it's dangerous is that a mob might react badly to it. Who is to say that the specific wave washing over social media will hit some people with this orthodox privilege or not?

I think you can mine these things by looking at diverse conversations - including those you don't find online. What sentence would you be afraid might be misinterpreted?

andreilys2• 6 years ago

The best part is that an innocuous statement in 2006, can actually be a dangerous one in 2020.

Norms change. Nobody knows how but one day something is okay to talk about and the next it’s not.

mc325• 6 years ago

Progressive statements from 2006 can today be considered dangerous.

People don’t care about context at all. But, interestingly, they’ll also gladly ignore massive taboos (from their POV) if it’s in their favor. For example because Bernie makes some good arguments for progressive causes that he was against immigration undercutting wages many years ago, is ignored today, but if someone else had that history as a politician they potentially would be brought down, if they were more moderate (in either party).

Tenoke• 6 years ago

The post points to a true thing, Orthodox Privilege definitely exists and we see examples of it quite often. However, to some extent it exists within bubbles.

For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.

pjc5017• 6 years ago

Dogwhistles work because they are not obviously false.

The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.

It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".

(There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!)

(I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)

msandford• 6 years ago

The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.

I'd respectfully disagree on this issue. I think it's possible to be worried about police abuse of force from the context of being a person who is a mere citizen and thus has a lot less rights than the police. No ethnic group has a truly zero chance of dying at the police's hand. Do white people have it better? Yes absolutely. But it's not as though the police only use excessive force against black people.

I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way. The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct. And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground. It's pretty tragic.

throw_m2393394• 6 years ago

The problem is when the general population assumes that only the far right uses racist dogwhistles.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/25/abolish-wh...

She tweeted on Tuesday: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives” and “Abolish whiteness”,

I'm sorry but no amount of "academic context" makes these sentences any less racist.

It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".

No it isn't, your argument is fallacious, no organization came with a "9/11 plane crash matters" slogan at first place.

"black lives matter" is a bad slogan because it both doesn't mean what it says and is divisive by nature. "black lives matter" is black people telling white people that "black lives matter too". It's incredibly patronizing. The great majority of white people do understand that black lives do matter, as much as white lives and that police brutality does affect all races.

If you design a slogan in such a way that it is divisive by nature, then disallow anybody else from fighting for their own cause or even broader causes, then you are not seeking a solution involving everybody, but just more racial strife, as you are claiming the exclusivity on victimhood.

Nobody can come here telling me that no white people has ever been beaten or killed by the police abusing their power.

malandrew12• 6 years ago

Even current popular use of the term "dogwhistle" has become a dogwhistle in and of itself.

In current contemporary use, members of the blue tribe use it to communicate to other members of the blue tribe that they believe they have identified a member of the red tribe and want other members of the blue tribe to join them in the tar-and-feathering of the suspected red tribe member.

Both the blue tribe and the red tribe are mirror images of one another in far more ways than members of either are willing (capable?) of acknowledging.

adolph• 6 years ago

What evidence is there that it is a "racist dog whistle?" What "action" has the phrase prevented from being taken?

Is it "racist" in the DiAngelo definition, a reflection of white people's innate racism and thus like anything a white person might say or do outside of the anti-racist activity of contemplating one's own racism?

Is it a "dog whistle" because it summons racists like a bat signal, "Hey white supremacists, time to do some racism!" How is it that so many people who can hear a particular phrase immediately denounce it as a "racist dog whistle?" Is the denouncement part of systemic racism whereby white people can pretend to be allies and yet still demonstrate their white supremacy bonafides because they can hear the signal?

curiousgeorgio5• 6 years ago

The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people.

Have you considered the possibility that a lot of people agree that action should be taken, and that statistically-speaking, that positive action will reduce unnecessary deaths for all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity?

If a software bug is reported to affect a certain subset of users more often than others, but upon investigation, it turns out the bug is a duplicate of another more fundamental bug that affects all users relatively equally, are we preventing action (or discrediting that subset of users who reported the bug) by marking it as a duplicate and giving priority to the fundamental issue so as to fix it for everyone?

Just as Black Lives Matter supporters often claim that the phrase is misunderstood by those who question it, All Lives Matter is misunderstood by many who think it takes something away from the black community. It's not a denial of anything, but rather a recognition that the problems actually do statistically affect everyone, and singling out one race (when all are affected) actually does more harm than good when it comes to ending racism.

dsr_4• 6 years ago

It's both obviously true AND a racist dog whistle.

Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.

Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.

golergka• 6 years ago

Problem arises when you assume that everybody exists in the same context.

faitswulff3• 6 years ago

Placed in the context of BLM

80 to 90% of the times I’ve seen this phrase, it’s been used in response to Black Lives Matter. As opposed to being used in the positive for, say, universal healthcare, food assistance programs, and initiatives to house the homeless.

Finnucane2• 6 years ago

Exactly this. A lot of people who say 'All lives matter' as a response rather pointedly refuse to say 'Black lives matter' because that would be admitting that the problems of institutional racism that devalues black lives are real problems that need to be addressed.

rukittenme3• 6 years ago

The thing about protest is that it has the capacity to be misunderstood. They misunderstood you. You misunderstood them.

it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.

Like you did here. In my experience, an "all lives matter" activist is quite happy to both acknowledge racism and have a discussion on the nuance of racial treatment in the United States.

Where the two sides really differ is in their general view of America. Whether its optimistic or pessimistic. Whether its isolated or systematic. Whether its "racial" or "cultural".

To be blunt, its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle". Its either an overt, racist megaphone or just a difference in opinion.

djaque2• 6 years ago

Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.

You can't strip phrases like that of context. "All lives matter" isn't just a statement, it is a direct response to black lives matter (too).

Anybody who's been half paying attention to the news for the past few years understands that and is not making an utterly harmless assertion.

malandrew12• 6 years ago

The problem with the slogan black lives matter is that it is so obviously a straw man as are all "____ lives matter" slogans. Except for some truly tiny pockets in the US, the overwhelming majority of people believe black lives matter, even most that use the expression "all lives matter" in earnest. My observation is that almost everyone I've seen use the term "all lives matter" is doing so as a response to a straw man. Most people who have been arguing on the internet long enough can agree that as satisfying as a straw man argument is to use, it's almost invariably counterproductive to convincing your interlocutor of responding positively to whatever point you're trying to make. Why? Because by responding with a straw man, you've demonstrated that you're not going to interpret any response from your interlocutor charitably and that's just getting off on the wrong foot.

The slogans black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, etc., are all straw men slogans/arguments that communicate to whomever you're speaking with that you're not planning on interpreting them charitably.

throw_for_obv• 6 years ago

You are confusing disagreement with racism. Saying "Black Lives Matter" has the connotation that the police force has "systemic racism" against black people, and the phrase "All Lives Matter" is intended to explicitly affirm the literal aspect of the phrase while disagreeing with the connotative element. Disagreement with important, factual claims is not racism.

Proziam2• 6 years ago

I know folks, including black folks, who disapprove of the Black Lives Matter messaging and try to redirect BLM conversation towards specific issues while promoting the use of 'all lives matter'

Your statement

Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.

simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.

It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdpIIiBe7Wc

vsareto• 6 years ago

There's a time and follower threshold where it goes from being a bubble to a cultural norm. IMO that threshold has been greatly lowered by all of social media allowing for a relatively quick (compared to hundreds of years of human communication) amassing of followers to form a bubble. In this way, you can mint your own orthodoxy. Having a large number of people following some idea is a powerful force in recruiting others.

And although the threshold has gone down for new bubbles, it has also gone down for when they get removed. It's become normal to churn through a bunch of different bubbles and seeing which one sticks around long enough.

bad_user2• 6 years ago

You're right, except that _the majority_ tends to be one of the bubbles ;-)

It's why I worry about the left promoting and abusing cancel/outrage culture.

Ironically, if you want to protect minorities, then liberal values need to be protected because it is liberal values that protect minorities against the _tyranny of the majority_.

As an example, on the one hand, as a European, I agree with banning hate speech if it is well defined, and I think the western European countries have a good track record in not abusing censorship. On the other hand, censorship can easily be extended to "fake news", or it could be interpreted that a critique of religion is hate speech, the same religion that promotes hate speech in the Bible, with organizations behind it that support conservative values, actively pushing for legislation against minorities.

Why do minorities think that if censorship starts to be more common, that it will be in their / our favor, given the entire history of the human race? It's a mystery to me. And I understand the current phenomenon in the US. The justice system in the US is dysfunctional because systemic racism exists, and it's unjust. So people are taking matters into their own hands. With a dysfunctional justice system, the outcome is predictable.

However, that outcome will not be positive. Sorry but I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks; the instances in history where popular revolts worked to enact positive change are rare and far between.

WhompingWindows• 6 years ago

Do we even have a single American orthodoxy? I think orthodox privilege, like everything now, is politicized and partisan. You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label.

On the Far Left, we have cancel culture and accusing others of racism... Those on the Far Left will not be castigated by their own orthodox community, because the far left is collectively agreeing to see racism in more places than it is likely to exist. Those within the moderate left are then punished by not conforming to the extreme orthodoxy for saying not all implicitly racist actions are done by racists.

Similarly, those on the right will be castigated by their own orthodox community of religious or gun/freedom figures who place devotion to those causes most highly. Any GOP figure is taking a great risk criticizing Trump now, because there is a great amount of orthodoxy behind his policies and the packing the courts with judges...in order to ensure the country is more conservative for longer, at any cost (even Trump).

Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.

PaulKeeble• 6 years ago

If you work with Java now you will probably not do so well on HN, especially if its for a new product. Yet we ought to know mature reliable platforms are a better place to be than the latest hotness that is still changing and evolving and missing major libraries and features. After all its about the product not the underlying technology. You don't see Java talked about much on HN anymore yet its everywhere running the modern web.

core-questions6• 6 years ago

You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label.

If you don't see that those are actually two sides of the same orthodoxy, and that the truly unorthodox opinions are outside of either of those two, I don't know what to tell you beyond "you should check your orthodox privilege". ;-)

When it comes to realpolitik, the Democrats and Republicans are basically only different in terms of the speed at which they implement neoliberal policies and fight neocon wars. The general direction of "progress" is the same.

jkingsbery3• 6 years ago

One of the most important thinkers today on the right is George Will, who is anti-Trump and an atheist. If you look at the National Review, there are lots of writers on the right who are either full anti-Trump or at least don't like him. So I think even within "the right," it's hard to pin down what the orthodox position is.

But yes - on HN, supporting Trump is a big no-no, no matter what the reason (even if roughly half the country voted for him).

skybrian• 6 years ago

I guess a weak form of this fallacy would be "there is nothing true you can't say, provided that you are very careful about how you say it." That is, assuming that the people who get in trouble were speaking too bluntly or imprecisely.

Isamu• 6 years ago

Lots of things at work are sacred, I have to avoid talking about them openly. This makes meetings uncomfortable for me when the very orthodox-privilege leader wants you to open up.

Things like Agile for instance can’t be discussed unless you have a near orthodox view.

loourr• 6 years ago

Beating around the bush Paul...

chrischattin• 6 years ago

Excellent essay. I think the qualifier for an unorthodox view/idea/opinion is that it’s a little bit scary to say in public.

Something like... I think the coronavirus reaction is way overblown. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the media would lead you to believe, and wearing masks is basically ineffective and is just a thing to make people feel like they’re doing something.

;)

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

minor follow-up: How do you distinguish an orthodox privileged person from the herd (besides them telling you to speak your mind)?

sneak2• 6 years ago

I’d venture to guess that a good indicator are people in America who are comfortable using “call the police” as a solution to certain common problems.

duxup8• 6 years ago

Maybe I've internalized what "orthodox privilege" means but ... yes things that go against the grain often receive push back.

Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'?

Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter.

In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them.

I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.

pjc5017• 6 years ago

There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.

I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything

Yes, unfortunately.

duxup8• 6 years ago

It's a weird situation:

So many people are a victim of being silenced now.

As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...

SpicyLemonZest6• 6 years ago

I agree it's hard for people to be truly silenced nowadays. If you have something you really want to say, you can probably find friends and jobs and news outlets that allow it.

But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.

waterhouse2• 6 years ago

There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.

I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:

"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.

Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."

abathur2• 6 years ago

There's an amusing parallel with the justification Foucault gives for his focus in the first volume of "The History of Sexuality".

He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.

You can find a gloss of this "repressive hypothesis" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality#Volum...

jackcosgrove• 6 years ago

Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

Orthodoxy is a numbers game not necessarily an accuracy game. Orthodox opinions may be accurate or inaccurate; what makes them orthodox is that they are held by at least a plurality of people in a given setting.

Orthodox ideas have not necessarily been proven and aren't necessarily parsimonious, so they should not necessarily enjoy the privilege of the null hypothesis. Null hypotheses require a lower burden of proof than alternative hypotheses.

If an orthodox position was never proven but is simply widely held, it should have the same burden of proof as an alternative hypothesis. However the way orthodoxy works its burden of proof is lower owing to its greater popularity.

duxup8• 6 years ago

I don't disagree generally.

I just wonder with these discussions usually the issue is that when people disagree it is SO EASY to believe that someone else is 'biased' or in this case using some kind of 'orthodox privilege' .... that's where the 1:1 disagreement often is. We find it handy to believe that someone else is being unreasonable because ... <insert new term for why they are being that way>.

We live in a world where we're inundated by folks who say they're being silenced or etc for all sorts of reasons. This just seems to be a new term for folks to use.

dleslie2• 6 years ago

Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.

Consider the thread the other day regarding the privilege of beauty: it's not bad to be beautiful, and it's not bad to find beauty aesthetically pleasing, but it becomes a problem when individuals are denied access and opportunities because they lack beauty but where beauty should not be a factor.

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

I think the issuenis two fold for priveledge - one is that connotationally it sounds like an attack and has occassions of being used as a cudgel. The very name has an implicit "undeserved" applied to it and guilt. Even without any selfish evangalists the terms are pretty needlessly confrontational when they need to be winning others over.

Pointing out "we don't experience it that way" is a very good instance of the concept of privledge. It is good communication period given that they would lack your baseline that the "nice polite old lady" down the street screams racial slurs at them whenever they pass by. Lacking evidence they would have little reason to think that.

But dismissing a point of view entirely because the source is privileged? Bad. Heck even if the view was laughably naive and wrong like "children work in sweatshops instead of going to school afford candy ans junk food since that was what I did when farm working as a kid" is good to know where their points of view actually came from.

When it comes to privledge sometimes they may really know more and not simply have social status denied to others. Someone with an upper middle class upbringing may result in being ignorant at what bread, milk, and eggs are supposed to cost but know that credit card debt should be avoided whenever possible and how to diversify investments and maintain properly liquid buffers for emergencies. Someone from a poorer upbringing obviously wouldn't have the investing skill set due to lacking the prerequisites let alone the education and experience.

It isn't fair but it is real and knowing that is the first step to fixing it. Pretending sensible investing is just a bigotted social construct of priveledge doesn't help while promoting financial education does.

blocko• 6 years ago

The access/opportunity/etc are what is being referred to as privilege, not the quality granting it. In a world where being beautiful doesn't come with advantages, there is no "privilege of beauty", just beauty

JadeNB4• 6 years ago

Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.

I think that this is something that people who bear privilege (like me, a currently economically comfortable white man) don't realise. I have this privilege; I'm not a bad person for having it, and someone who tells me that I have it isn't accusing me, only reminding me. I can still be a good and empathetic person, and I try to be. It's just important to realise that what I perceive as empathy, by imagining myself in someone else's shoes and proceeding from that premise, cannot fully succeed, since my privilege means that there are shoes that I will never fully understand what it's like to occupy. I should thus pause before thinking I understand such a situation—that's what "check your privilege" means—and make sure that I listen to someone who knows more, from experience or science, in preference to my genuine, well intentioned, but in this respect uninformed feelings.

sshumaker• 6 years ago

It’s only a “privilege”, by definition, if you have it and others don’t. So the main point about checking your privilege is recognizing the advantages your privileges confer and how to use those advantages to help those without.

jonny_eh4• 6 years ago

If the problem isn't privilege, but the lack of it, then we should be focusing on that lacking and try to raise everyone up.

debacle4• 6 years ago

On the Internet, "the grain" his highly localized. Eroding discourse is only hastening that localization.

jkingsbery3• 6 years ago

Here's an example from my own career:

I once had a colleague (who is a nice guy, and we got along) who said during lunch that there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing. I offered one objection off the top of my head (that prices serve as a mechanism for aggregating data, and any price controls serve to throw out data, and we should use as much data as possible when making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources). Before I spoke up, this colleague couldn't imagine that there would be any counter arguments to his position. Another colleague later thanked me for speaking up and sharing that different take.

Maybe that's not a good reason to not have rent control, or maybe it is a good reason, but on balance it's not good enough. The problem isn't the debate, the push back, it's Graham's point "privilege makes you blind." The problem is when there are limits to your imagination that an issue you see as simple might be more complex or that the person you're sharing a meal with might have a different, but still legitimate, way of seeing the world.

fennecfoxen2• 6 years ago

This is a very good example of blindness. It is possible to advocate that rent control is desirable, and in some quarters it easily forms a supermajority majority political opinion — but anyone advocating rent control should at least be aware of a strong consensus that it is harmful, to the tune of 80-90% of surveyed economists. (I don't have JSTOR at the moment or I'd drag one up — ideally one more recent than Whaples' surveys from the 1990s, though those are an okay starting point too.)

I am reasonably confident that I suffer blindness on some important issue. You should be confident that you suffer it, too.

veridies8• 6 years ago

That's an interesting example, but I think to some extent it contradicts the idea of orthodox privilege. When you offered that alternative, it doesn't seem like you were chastised or marginalized; instead, you were thanked for offering a useful perspective (one I agree with!).

There are definitely going to be examples of people going too far, and making wedge issues out of things that shouldn't be wedge issues. But I think it's worth noting that in general, the opinions that are heavily stigmatized are ones that are insulting or hurtful toward specific people or groups.

dunkelheit• 6 years ago

Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?

It isn't necessarily bad. Novel ideas should face a higher standard of proof than orthodox ideas because a lot more is known about how orthodox ideas really work (including their faults) than about novel ideas.

But there are a couple of ways in which this push back can get really pernicious:

1) By focusing on person rather than the idea. If the orthodoxy views the world as filled with people who are rotten to the core but successfully mimicry as decent, it makes sense to watch everybody for the slightest transgressions and attack the person with full strength when you notice one.

2) By emphasizing ideological unity. Suppose someone has an unorthodox idea and the orthodoxy denounces it. In a pernicious orthodoxy everybody must join in with the denouncing. You are already suspect merely if you don't join. If you try to say something like "hey, actually this has some merit", you are the next target. In extreme cases (e.g. Stalinism) you are the next target if you didn't denounce vigorously enough.

And of course the very idea that orthodoxy can be wrong must itself be orthodox! Otherwise from the POV of orthodoxy there is absolutely no point in engaging in real argument with those who question it.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

I think you misunderstood what is meant by orthodox privilege. It's not just that orthodox ideas are easier to speak, it's that someone who is largely orthodox doesn't realize how hard it is to express unorthodox ideas, because they personally feel free to say whatever they want.

philwelch26• 6 years ago

Pushback and civil disagreement isn’t what Paul is writing about here. The use of the notion of “privilege” as a baseball bat might be something Paul’s trying to turn around onto the typical bat-wielders here, but it’s not a convincing move to me either.

mellosouls• 6 years ago

I don't really understand what this concept is adding that ideas like "blinkeredness" don't already cover, as orthodox in this case (as has been pointed out by others here) is context-dependent.

I've read it a couple of times and am still a bit unsure of what new idea it's getting at.

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

Sneaky use of orthodox. There has always been the problem of finding words so that the targeted group doesn't know they are talked about.

I don't really think the solution of being polite is working for anonymous internet comments for obvious reasons, but for other places it has been the classical solution.

carlisle_• 6 years ago

This is such a strange post. Mr. Graham speaks in vague generalities, then finally hones in on a specific idea seemingly out of the blue:

For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?

Why “cancel culture” when there’s any number of issues this is equally true for? Why is it only “reasonably intelligent people” oppose it in this example.

This post just seems intellectually lazy. Making sweeping generalizations and then throwing in some appeal to popularity is not a well made point.

Tokkemon• 6 years ago

It's just a topical example given the New York Times and resignation of Bari Weiss.

raldi2• 6 years ago

There are true statements that are rightly unacceptable because placed in certain rhetorical contexts, there's an implied argument that they're making which has been rejected by society.

For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.

Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?

voxl2• 6 years ago

I like how brush under the rug menopause, as if making your point where you say "except for this obvious exception that makes this statement unequivocally false!"

The word "women" has always referred to female assigned sex, there is nothing wrong with that inherently but it wasn't entertaining some deeper truth about the world.

gadders6• 6 years ago

Sex at birth is not "assigned" it's "observed". Assigned implies some sort of discretion on the part of medical staff which is not the case.

blueflow• 6 years ago

"most of modern society". No. Only to most people on Twitter. People IRL don't have the need nor the time to care about such subtleties.

veridies8• 6 years ago

Many people would, out of habit or expedience, refer to "women" instead of "people who menstruate." However, in this specific context, Rowling's implication is that trans women are not women. "Most of modern society" would probably be disturbed by that implication.

apexalpha3• 6 years ago

I'm not here to argue the merits of JK Rowlings' statement but I do think you're vastly overestimating your group if you think "most of modern society" is on your side in this subject.

I've read (one of) JK Rowlings' latest blog entries, and while I don't personally agree with her statements they seemed far, far more reasonable and debatable than what the internet made of it.

The internet made it seem like she was going to war against transgenders...

edit: for anyone looking to read it as well, I read this one: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

mtgp1000• 6 years ago

but had a hefty implied message

There used to be a word for this as well; we called it "putting words in other people's mouth".

One can criticize aspects of a movement without being against the whole movement, or the people in the movement.

one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society

What hubris.

tomp2• 6 years ago

legitimacy of transgender women

What does this even mean? Like, how can someone not be "legitimate"? Does it mean "illegal" as in illegal alien? Is anyone claiming that trans citizens should be deported? Or does it mean "imaginary"? Trans people obviously exist.

JKRowling is simply pointing out that the word "woman", which used to have the clear and simple meaning of "female human" (or sometimes "adult female human"), was now not only redefined & politicized to basically mean "opinion" (or "a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition) and is used for Orwellian speech control.

JoeSmithson2• 6 years ago

"a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition

This is a perfectly meaningful recursive definition.

np_tedious2• 6 years ago

I consider the question of how far language should adapt for transgender people to be a reasonable one. Transgender proportion of population is on the same order as blindness. Many would consider it excessive to remove all non-eyesight uses of "vision", analogies like "I see what you mean", etc from our discourse.

It's absolutely fine that you disagree with JK Rowling. It's also fine that she disagrees with you. Talk about it! Don't throw slurs at each other. Don't make personal attacks.

scollet• 6 years ago

This example doesn't line up. Blindness is primarily a disability, no?

marcusverus• 6 years ago

a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.

Based on Pew polling, most Americans agree with Rowling[0].

Overall, roughly half of Americans (54%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, while 44% say someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.

Any ideology that considers truth to be unacceptable is a menace. Feelings cannot matter more than facts. Anyone who tries to tell you different should be immediately and permanently suspect.

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...

raldi2• 6 years ago

That study's from 2017; public opinion on transgender rights has progressed tremendously since then.

I think my statement still stands if we replace "most" with "44% and growing"

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

Often times when I have any kind of nuanced debate, this kind of tribalism comes to the surface. If you disagree on some small point you're obviously the opposition in it's entirety. The other side of the debate comes up with an entire fiction in their mind that has no bearing on reality and nothing to do with any stated phrase or real position. I have had people tell me I'm against marijuana legalization because I support lowering the fees for concealed carry licenses.

You can't accurately construct a message about someone elses mental state without talking to them at length. When you assume people imply things, you're actually sharing YOUR mental state. When you take a message to mean significantly more than what the words themselves mean, you're not filling in the gaps with reality but your perception of reality.

perigrin• 6 years ago

Rowling's statement wasn't even explicitly true before the rise of transgender visibility. It excludes women who don't conform. I've lived with pre-menopausal women who didn't menstruate regularly and felt that they were "wrong" somehow because of it (some had underlying medical issues, some did not). To use Graham's analogy, even ignoring transgender issues, the orthodoxy there was privileged against the multitude of female experience.

Rowling's statement is true if your experience leads you to prioritize the orthodox. It's patently false if your experience deviates from the experiences that created it. The struggle in the conservation of orthodox values (e.g. sisterhood of women) and the visibility of heterodox experience (e.g transgender issues & the lived experience of women who's bodies don't conform to the stereotypes being used) has a lot of truth on both sides.

cpufry• 6 years ago

wait idgi, its not true though since "menopause aside" and women that dont menstruate.

chrisallick• 6 years ago

The concept is not overused. Privilege, and the abuse of it, is _that_ pervasive.

gringoDan• 6 years ago

It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.

It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues:

1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues.

2. A lack of empathy.

What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians).

While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1]

I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs.

[1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence

makomk• 6 years ago

It's less a lack of empathy and more a redefinition of it, at least on the woke blue tribe side. In those circles, not rejecting ideas outside the orthodoxy and dehumanizing those who hold them is seen as a failure of empathy because the correct ideas are, by definition, required in order to treat the people who matter with decency. I'm not familiar enough with other groupthinks to know if this applies there too, but probably not.

haunter• 6 years ago

That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the rich white people as if they have the same privileges

When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information

M2Ys4U• 6 years ago

It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality.

To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.

awb6• 6 years ago

Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.

ipnon• 6 years ago

On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold.

Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.

Spivak4• 6 years ago

But they're not! At this point I think we should just scrap the word privilege and call it "shit I don't have to deal with because I'm X" since it's apparently too politically charged to have a discussion about it.

Just one example.

As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go.

This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.

neutronicus2• 6 years ago

That particular thing is nothing a couple tats, a scruffy beard, and a move to West Virginia can't change for you

belorn2• 6 years ago

You can fix that by going into stores dressed as a homeless person or any other out-group that contain white people that the store owner/employees in-group has likely an negative emotional response to.

For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.

randallsquared2• 6 years ago

As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at

I agree with your meaning overall, but this is not a great example. I'm a white dude, and I worry about getting receipts any time I am going to one store after buying from another (while walking). I'm hyper-aware in stores of whether it would appear to an observer that I was shoplifting, having been accused of such more than once when young, so I take visible steps like tying off the bags I'm carrying from the previous store, consider whether the store I'm entering is likely to sell items I have in the bag I'm carrying, and so on.

threatofrain• 6 years ago

Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US...

Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts.

When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.

Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

And wiser people would see the benefit of not pitting them against each other.

philwelch26• 6 years ago

Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets

At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work.

When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.

The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either.

To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes.

Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.

Like everything, it’s more complicated than that.

Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed.

It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children.

The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

The problem is when a stupid college kid from an elite institution without significant life experience tells you about privilege and is trying to educate you. Even with mostly leftist views I would fully support the redneck uprising that comes after and you don't need to be a psychologist to understand the reaction. I doubt there is any deeper truth about racism to be learned here...

neutronicus2• 6 years ago

Not "just as fucked," but, yes, very much fucked.

I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance.

Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.

ghusbands• 6 years ago

There are plenty of kinds of privilege. Being white means that when you're pulled over (if you manage to afford a car), you know it's not because you're white. Being white means that when you turn on the TV, you mostly see folks of your race represented. Being white means being told that throughout history, your race is what made the modern world what it is. Being white means being able to always find the company of people of your race [1]. Being white means that when you write good school essays, you're not continually asked who wrote them for you. Being white means that BLM protests can be the first time you understand how Black people are treated.

There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered.

Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse.

[1] https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privile...

djsumdog8• 6 years ago

I believed this for years, and in spite of all the stuff going on now, I think it still holds true.

And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist.

And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience.

But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.

gjulianm4• 6 years ago

There are two issues. First, I don't think it's one or the other: race privilege exists, and class privilege exists too.

Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles.

In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people

beachwood23• 6 years ago

Your comment makes a good point. There really needs to be a renewed openness to consider alternative viewpoints as coming from a spirit of good faith.

A grammar fix: it is "discussed in depth", not "in debt."

zemo4• 6 years ago

"white privilege" does not mean "if you're white you have no problems", it means "you less frequently encounter obstacles that were erected because of the color of your skin".

mc325• 6 years ago

I think a problem with this line of thinking is if treats people like averages (stereotypical) -but people are not the average. People don’t see the nuance. So it’s kind of like the other side of the coin of traditional stereotyping.

So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.

paloaltokid• 6 years ago

Tell me you honestly believe this interaction would play out the same if the driver were white: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hrny1v/watc...

hardwaregeek• 6 years ago

I agree that poor white people should not have their problems dismissed. However, there are some differences between poor white people and poor black people. For one, there's a lot more poor black people per population. The average black family has a tenth of the wealth of the average white family.

Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality.

Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects.

Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years.

The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction.

At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US

No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.)

Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race.

It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.

greenie_beans3• 6 years ago

he's smart and i always like reading his insight but his writing is so cryptic and always dances around his point without fully committing to it

calebm• 6 years ago

He's probably choosing not to say some stuff because it's heresy :)

greenie_beans3• 6 years ago

he's very obviously saying those things if you read between the lines so how is that not committing "heresy"?

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

That's the point - you can't commit to it, or it will be the last thing you ever write.

greenie_beans3• 6 years ago

meh, that's bad writing in my opinion. he's obviously committing to his opinion (in a super round about way), so he can't skirt trying to not commit.

commit to what you want to say. he's had no problem in the past doing that.

wbharding• 6 years ago

The world has been hard up for terminology to describe what’s bad about the forces that have dragged down SSC and driven Weiss away from NYT. “Cancel culture” was a good start, as evidenced by those who have been rankled by the suggestion of its existence. My fave part of this essay is that it offers a shiny new tool, “orthodox privilege,” that allows us to enumerate the case for a countervailing force against this age of outrage.

awb6• 6 years ago

It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.

The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc.

Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change.

It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth.

I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people.

I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe.

Happy to be wrong about this.

philwelch26• 6 years ago

Emmanuel Cafferty wasn’t in a position of power. Sue Schafer wasn’t in a position of power.

josephcsible2• 6 years ago

It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.

Legitimate outrage is "I think an opinion you currently hold or thing you currently do is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society until you walk back the opinion or stop doing the thing."

Cancel culture is "I think an opinion you once held or thing you once did is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society forever, even if it wasn't considered bad at the time, and even if you've since walked it back/stopped/apologized."

In a nutshell, cancel culture is refusing to forgive.

donatj• 6 years ago

Paul Graham as always says the things I want to say, more clearly and concise, and with the privilege wealth brings of being able to more freely speak.

intopieces4• 6 years ago

This article seems to praise people for not being "conventional minded," as if being unorthodox in itself is something to be cherished and rewarded. That is too low of a bar to clear. There are lots of opinions and viewpoints that are unorthodox for good reason -- because they are just bad ideas, or are factually untrue no matter how many times you argue it. It's as if PG is saying to us "Think Different," and just stopping there. What he should be saying is "Think Different, but be prepared to prove it," as well as "Be a little tolerant of people who are doing their best to prove it."

The problem is that, unless you're speaking to someone with whom you have a great deal of trust, that second part -- the earnestness of their unorthodoxy -- is difficult to prove.

carlmr• 6 years ago

reason -- because they are just bad ideas, or are factually untrue no matter how many times you argue it.

I think that's why he specifically said, uttering things that are unorthodox and true.

zrail6• 6 years ago

"good/bad" is a different dimension than "true/untrue".

intopieces4• 6 years ago

To the earnest speaker, many abhorrent things are both unorthodox and true. So, I can’t see that as a uncontroversial qualifier itself.

djaque2• 6 years ago

Absolutely agree with you. Sometimes your unorthodox opinion just sucks.

Also, was anybody else bracing themselves for what "unorthodox" was code for while reading? I think I'm so used to seeing this argument used in an attempt to justify stuff like blatant racism, antisemitism, etc. that I'm sort of conditioned to look for that.

By the way, not saying that's what's going on here, but it was just an interesting reaction I noticed in myself. Ironically, similar to what another commenter posted, the whole article is one of those things which is obviously true, but may completely miss the point depending on context.

wauter• 6 years ago

I think that’s exactly the kind of subtle thing he is trying to capture in this essay: we read ‘unorthodox’ and we get ready, almost as a subconscious reflex, to dismiss whatever comes next as, like you put it, ‘blatant Xism’, or as Paul puts it, false.

Check your privilege ;)

analyst74• 6 years ago

Internet mob rule definitely has its problems, but it's also particularly disliked by people who previously had the "Orthodox" privilege, because losing privilege feels terrible, which can be summed as:

"I used to be able to say anything honestly, now I can't."

asdfasgasdgasdg4• 6 years ago

Not my favorite essay ever. Most unorthodox beliefs aren't on the list of things you "can't say." A small subset of unorthodox statements might make you the subject of anger from various groups. The essay seems to suggest that anyone who doesn't have a problem with this is ignorant of "orthodox privilege." IMO, that's uncharitable. I think most people understand that it's easier to have orthodox beliefs. The folks who have no problem with cancel culture view the things being cancelled as a bigger problem than the challenge of having heterodox beliefs.

I'll also just note that the vast majority of heterodox beliefs and statements are not on the list of things you "can't say." A small subset of them, especially relating to race and gender, are risky. Maybe there's a good reason for that?

david9273• 6 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I would say that most unorthodox beliefs are absolutely on the list of things you "can't say." Most people don't have strong egos (i.e. as "sense of self") and most have frail foundations for what they perceive to be "truth."

Nearly everyone, if they wrote out a list of truths, could have that list divided into "universal truths" (e.g. 1+1=2), "group (e.g. cultural) truths" (you flip up on a light switch to turn a light on), and "individual truths" (things only you believe, often wrongly).

It's not that you "can't say" a unorthodox statement (one that runs counter to one of these truths), but since all of these truths are held roughly at the same level, it will be the equivalent of saying "1 + 1 = 3," and you'll be dismissed and seen as crazy. The reaction will be visceral and abrupt. There will be little interest in hearing your side of the story; you're just talking nonsense.

I'm not a fan of Paul but he's right here. If someone says, "humans didn't go to the moon," it's extremely hard for most Americans to hear that. Their reaction isn't, "Why do you think that?" but "When did you lose your mind?" and all willingness to discuss it is off the table. That's not a normal reaction. The person poked an accepted truth, and in doing so, committed heresy.

asdfasgasdgasdg4• 6 years ago

The person poked an accepted truth, and in doing so, committed heresy.

That's not an accurate characterization, though. In the case of the particular statement you mentioned, what happened is that the person said something that clustered with things said by a lot of silly people. It is rational (in a Bayesian sense) to take that as evidence that the person making the statement is also silly. The main reason people won't engage in argument about it is because nobody cares that much whether you believe some weird unlikely thing about history. It doesn't affect anything, even in the unlikely event that you were right.

There are plenty of heterodox statements that don't have this effect to the same degree. For example, "dark matter doesn't actually exist, and instead serves as a kind of scientific 'god did it' get out of jail free card." This is a heterodox view, but one that doesn't get you cancelled or immediately called crazy. People will be skeptical of the view, and you'll need to bring some pretty heavy arguments, but that's basically tautological. If it were not so, the view would not be heterodox.

jes51992• 6 years ago

ooh a bait and switch! I was going to talk about how people with different kinds of brains (you think anyone in this forum is on the autism spectrum? no?) have to code-switch and perform the normal cognitive style to be taken seriously...

but that’s not actually relevant, because this post is about “cancel culture”. Should a person get twitter mobbed for admitting that they’re a bigot? probably not! should a person who says “damn that sounds kinda bigoted” to someone famous get mobbed for saying that in public?? No I’d say no to that too.

but we’ve got both sides saying “my mob is good people telling the truth, your mob is cruel trolls running an inquisition” but somehow that devolves into saying “cancel cultures does/doesn’t exist” as if that explained why your mob has the right to wield pitchforks and the other one doesn’t

bob332123• 6 years ago

I see it as "My mob should be judged by the most moderate and thoughtful of us, your mob should be judged by the worst of you"

seibelj3• 6 years ago

What has been especially frustrating to me is identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups. It completely removes all agency and individuality and instead classifies you entirely as a set of labels. The smallest minority truly is the individual, and every individual can make their own decisions regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

debacle4• 6 years ago

The way that this is weaponized by hyperinclusionists to further radicalize groups is terrifying.

"If you don't think X, you aren't A." "Well I don't think X, and I am A." "If you don't think X you aren't A." "Well then I guess I'm not A."

"If you don't think Y, you aren't A."

...and so on.

We've seen it with a few specific political groups.

zozbot23412• 6 years ago

People usually call this salami slicing when a group does it to their ideological opponents. But sometimes it is a wholly internal, self-driven dynamic where the least committed members of a group tend to quit first, and the group ends up with more and more radicalized members over time.

tanseydavid4• 6 years ago

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

fedd• 6 years ago

Aren't marketers stratify their audience? No matter how silly they categorize an individual person, it works on bigger numbers.

And that's just employing sales tactics in politics.

There just should be more than one or two parties, than there will be more diversified supply

newacct5839• 6 years ago

identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z

That's not what it means. That sounds like a caricature of it you read in libertarian media. "Politics" in its modern meaning is about getting votes, not telling people what to think.

Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires, coupled with the fact that people tend to "trust" politicians who have supported those needs in the past. And that's all it means.

So white christians vote republican because of a long history of opposition to abortion rights, black votes have gone to democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act passed, etc... Not everyone, but enough that it makes sense as political strategy to court specific groups via these affiliations.

And they're mutable over time. We didn't used to think of the divide between college-educated whites and non-college whites until the Trump campaign was able to exploit that divide. Men/women is getting larger now too, etc...

Udik3• 6 years ago

Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires

I'd call it an assumption more than a recognition, and take it from there.

whatshisface15• 6 years ago

So white christians vote republican because of a long history of opposition to abortion rights, black votes have gone to democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act passed, etc... Not everyone, but enough that it makes sense as political strategy to court specific groups via these affiliations.

You're defining identity politics in a way that's so broad that it encompasses all politics and some non-politics (corporate brand loyalty). That makes it a non-useful phrase. Generally it's useful to define phrases in ways that exclude a lot of interpretations.

skrebbel• 6 years ago

I don't fully agree but I upvoted you to counter existing downvotes, because I think you make a coherent argument that doesn't deserve to be downvoted into oblivion.

klyrs2• 6 years ago

Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires...

You're taking a very short-term view of "identity politics". When the US was founded under the phrase "all men created equal", it was with the clear understanding that "men" meant white landowners, and specifically not women. This was marked progress from previous royalty-based governments where "god" selected some fantastically rich white men to rule. Identity politics are as old as history itself. Only the name is new.

duxup8• 6 years ago

It's such an issue everywhere, I find it increasing on the internet.

Even asking a question, and honest question where I want to hear someone's POV / answer ... and folks assume you're a troll and assume you're the polar opposite of them.... and no amount of explaining otherwise changes people's minds.

Even outside questions I'll say "I agree, I think X too." and folks will still insist on arguing about how I believe Y. Bro I just said I agree...

It's a strange thing and I find myself constantly having to preface my statements in hopes people won't misunderstand.

whatshisface15• 6 years ago

Internet bad-faith interpretation table:

Speaks out against my belief: Mortal enemy.

Questions my belief: Mortal enemy who my powerful comrades have cowed into not directly speaking out against my belief.

Fails to show appropriate support for my belief at the appropriate times: Mortal enemy sleeper agent.

Speaks in favor of my belief, but not in the way I would have: Exploitative opportunist who believes nothing but seeks to benefit from the glorious revolution.

Speaks in favor of a belief that's almost identical to mine, but still, subtly distinguishable: The worse kind of heretic; a heretic within the faith.

foofoo4u• 6 years ago

I am seeing this prefacing of arguments happening everywhere. For example, Sam Harris finds himself having to preface nearly argument he wants to make as a means to ward off misunderstanding and online retaliation. Unfortunately, no matter how much time he takes to preface, mobs online inevitably misunderstand his positions and call for his head. It's exhausting how no one can make any arguments anymore without going through the ritual of having to convince others they are not a bigot before proceeding with what they have to say.

derefr3• 6 years ago

I would be highly interested in watching (or maybe participating) in a forum where the rule is to employ a certain kind of charity, where you must assume that everyone you're speaking to is an AI who was just booted up, who was trained to know basically all the "is" facts about things (including politics), but who literally has no "ought" beliefs about anything (including politics.) Except maybe that there "ought" to be more paperclips :P

Anyone who breaks the kayfabe by expressing a human-like "ought" belief, would have their post flagged until dead (but isn't kicked out or punished otherwise; it's too easy to do accidentally, especially if you're new, and the point is to take such people and gradually get them used to having conversations that aren't fundamentally conflicts between opposing "ought" beliefs.)

pea• 6 years ago

There is a good book on this called "Uncivil Agreement" which I enjoyed. It covers how, on both sides of the US political spectrum, identity trumps political issues in what people care about.

I think identity has been more of a focus of right-wing movements right throughout history, although people frequently refer to it in the context of the current US progressive zeitgeist; identity and nationalism are very intertwined. Identity and what it means to be an American plays a large role in Trump's support, for instance.

intopieces4• 6 years ago

where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups.

This was never more obvious to me than when I was in college. As an out gay guy who studied Arabic, this seemed to short-circuit the expectations of my peers; being in awe of Islamic art, and wanting deeply to travel to Iran and see the mosques of the world was something that, for some reason, didn't compute to them. "But don't they hate your kind over there?" was not an uncommon reaction. I get it, I really do, but sometimes it felt like I wasn't allowed, in their eyes, to have access to those beautiful things in the world, or else I was considered "brave" for trying to access them. But to me they have been wholly distinct interests from the start, and only incidental that they happen to coexist in me as a individual person.

mam22• 6 years ago

Interesting, but I'm not sure this qualifies to the point, in this case they are worried for your safety for valid reasons.. not trying to force you an opinion on something.

AaronFriel5• 6 years ago

I think their concern was well-founded and the reason identity and politics have become so intertwined is because "the personal is political".

In Iran, homosexuality has been punished by imprisonment, torture, and execution. People who are gay in Iran do not have the luxury of being able to go and visit, they live under that threat every day. And many countries in the Middle East have similar policies and their gay population - rarely out - live under similar threat.

Wanting to go study the beautiful works of art in Iran is brave. As an atheist, it would be dangerous for me to do so as well, and yet the Islamic scientific and cultural golden age is still quite interesting to me.

But yet, it's still true that many, perhaps most of them "hate my kind" over there. Atheism is also punishable by execution in several countries in the Arabic speaking world. If I told friends I wanted to go study and live in Iran and they were concerned and asked me that question, I don't think it'd be disproportionate. If they said it was brave, I don't think I'd dispute it.

(Though in all fairness and perhaps you find this cringeworthy, I am fortunate and privileged in that being a straight atheist in these countries is a lot easier than being gay, and being gay and Muslim might actually exacerbate the threat.)

mattalbie• 6 years ago

I think the reason it short-circuits their expectations is that what they're actually trying to do is "cancel" Islam on your behalf. Like: "wait a minute, I'm trying to defend/protect you here, isn't that what you want from a majority, to stand up for you?" And what you're doing, ignoring their protective effort, becomes a kind of betrayal. Which has got to be so frustrating -- the idea that you're not qualified to have your own opinion, that you have to conform to what the majority says simply because they're "helping" you.

int_19h10• 6 years ago

And then there's the converse - when e.g. Iranian and Arab immigrants are shamed for legitimately criticizing religious-based oppression in their societies, because their criticism - with extra weight lent to it by their background - supposedly fuels Islamophobia in the West; and is thus a form of cultural imperialism that they're expected to not partake in, regardless of the reality of oppression that they talk about, or their own personal experience in that regard.

The most famous example is probably Maajid Nawaz - a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who renounced his extremist views, and since then has been actively criticizing political Islamism (of both violent and non-violent variety), while remaining a practicing Muslim. Despite that last fact, he was identified as an "anti-Muslim extremist" by SPLC - and they only retracted this after a massive outcry.

malandrew12• 6 years ago

People who believe people in group X must hold belief Y don't realize that they have a good falsifiable statement that they can test, but sadly they either never bother seeking out counter-examples or they actively dismiss or even fight against counter examples they encounter due to cognitive dissonance.

brightball2• 6 years ago

I have never in my life understood how being a member of a racial/gender/religious group implied association with some specific political party. When you actually do fit in that box, it creates a perception that you lack the free thought to do otherwise and not that you hold these views for well thought out reasons (no matter what they are).

It's one of many forms of labeling that are easily attached to people and it's one of many reasons why I'll be firmly independent until the day I die. Although I'm sure that has a perception associated with it too.

michaelt• 6 years ago

I have never in my life understood how being a member of a racial/gender/religious group implied association with some specific political party.

Surely it wouldn't surprise you to learn gay voters are more likely to support pro-gay-rights parties?

watwut10• 6 years ago

Statistically, there are measurable and not really small differences in attractiveness of parties to different genders, races and religions.

The implied association likely have a lot to do with those visible differences.

Free throught does not mean that everyone finds same appeal of same policies and groups regardless of their differing interests and experiences. Quite the opposite.

knolax• 6 years ago

Member of group X chooses to vote for party A instead of the "Kill all X" party.

brlewis2• 6 years ago

This is analogous to the principle of composition over inheritance. Using is-a relationships (inheritance) is concise and convenient, but sometimes leads to wrong models of the world. It's safer to use has-a relationships (composition).

specialist• 6 years ago

I highly recommend Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized.

My personal takeaway TLDR:

faceted identity is normal.

increasing sorting and polarization somehow coincides with all of our identities becoming much more aligned, aka superidentities.

the novelty is social media activating and amplifying identity.

Presumably these social pendulums will swing back. Methinks Millennials and younger will go in the direction of the phyles from Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Where people chose their cohorts, which all kind of mutually coexist.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

zozbot23412• 6 years ago

Paul Graham has written about this dynamic in Keep your identity small: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

brlewis2• 6 years ago

"As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?"

I want to be on the JavaScript and baking forums that he's on.

hintymad6• 6 years ago

Or worse, if you hold idea X, Y, or Z, then you're a racist. See this: https://twitter.com/byronyork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2...

"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods.

So, for the sake of identity, let's attack modern civilization. This. Is. Fucking. Insane.

banads2• 6 years ago

"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods.

What does that say about the life works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

steverb• 6 years ago

The article and the infographic in question did not call those signs of whiteness, they are referred to as some aspects and assumptions of Whiteness and WHite Culture.

Most of which cause me to wonder what kind of person wouldn't agree with those things... which just goes to show how fully a part of my culture I am. :-)

I didn't see the article refer to those things as right or wrong, merely default positions.

escape_goat2• 6 years ago

There is a lot — a LOT — to criticize about the infographic tweeted by Byron York here (based on a table produced by Judith Katz in 1990) and frankly this entire page [1] of relentlessly abstracted and ahistorical discussion of 'Whiteness' and cultural identity is a dumpster fire even from the perspective it is attempting to communicate, and I am shocked to see scholarship of this quality featured at the Smithsonian.

However, absolutely nothing about it suggests that "internalizing aspects of white culture" makes you a racist. It's fine if you don't respect or understand the idea that the web page is trying to communicate here because frankly they did a shamefully bad job. They are preaching to the choir. But absolutely nothing about it suggests the thing that angers you. You are bringing that idea to the infographic with you.

[1] https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten...

formerly_proven• 6 years ago

Utterings from both the left- and right-wing discourse in the US (and increasingly in Europe) have been reaching almost 100 % applicability of Poe's law, where it is virtually impossible for me to tell whether someone is serious.

vidarh3• 6 years ago

The graphics did not attack anything. It described a set of assumptions that are cultural. It did say they were good or bad, or racist.

Your perception of it as an attack is your own.

andrepd3• 6 years ago

Quote the actual infographic rather than the uncharitable interpretation provided by the (biased) guy posting it.

As I read it, it's a list of traditional WASP traits. Some mostly good (hard work, objectivity, delayed gratification) others much less so (respect for authority, religious intolerance, commoditization of time, normalisation of the "rat race" as the only acceptable path to the only acceptable idea of success, etc)

scruple2• 6 years ago

Wow. This is put out by the Smithsonian Institute. So, this is tax dollars at work. Great.

soulofmischief2• 6 years ago

My problem with this infographic and general point of view is that it completely ignores the fact that there is a huge counterculture which not only rejects most of these concepts but also is generally accepting of people of all kinds, and many white people within this demographic are not afforded the same privileges and luxuries commonly associated with "whiteness".

Instead of recognizing these people as not part of the problem, it throws us in with the rest of the "whiteness" and creates major group division, reducing our ability to change things collectively. I've gotten in arguments with a couple of black people here and there about how because I'm "white", I shouldn't involve myself in black politics and have no right to fight for black civil rights in America. Nevermind that I'm 4th-generational Italian and come from a long line of poor indentured servants, and that my ancestor was met with racism and segregation when entering the US. My ancestor was an illegal immigrant stowaway because of racist immigration laws targeting Italy at the time. I fight for them as well as any other person whose family has a history of oppression.

Reminds me of the Niemöller poem...

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."

vertbhrtn3• 6 years ago

I see the "inclusiveness" rhetoric is getting very aggressive and is approaching the state "if you are not with us, you are against us." In other words, they want to divide the society along the skin color, so people would forget that it's really about poor vs rich.

MisterBastahrd2• 6 years ago

That isn't what the sign says. It's what York is trying to imply from it, because York's made his entire career out of race-baiting.

The purpose of the sign is to show how people who DON'T have those things have been discriminated against because of circumstances beyond their control.

If you're poor, rugged individualism is less important than getting through the day. Collectivism is the more intelligent approach in that situation.

Hard work for a lot of white folks is seen in the context of having "a job that matters."

Objectivity in this situation is a farce. Yes, it's stupid to take out a payday loan. But when your wife just lost her job or you lost your child care benefits and you have to pay rent, you do what you have to do.

Nuclear families are great if you're born into them. What happens when you aren't?

And so on, and so forth.

And the funniest thing about this whole thing? White society is trending away from AAAAAALLLLL of these as the cost of living outpaces inflation and wages stay stagnant.

Turns out that it's pretty easy to check the items off of that list if you have the means to do it.

throwaway_kufu• 6 years ago

Since I initially registered to vote at 18 in 2001 I was an independent for precisely this reason...I have never wanted to identify with a party much less party politics.

In my experience on any given issue if you were to ask for a simple comparative analysis with 5 points for both sides almost no one can get beyond the talking points of the day from their favorite cable news channel.

hintymad6• 6 years ago

Interestingly, Paul Graham follows and interacts with @TitaniaMcGrath. This thread is very revealing for the current identity politics: https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/128102398724248780...

honkycat2• 6 years ago

What a weak argument. "Some idiot said something somewhere, that means everyone believes it."

If anything that thread illustrates how weak and stupid the "anti-identity politics" arguments are.

carapace7• 6 years ago

Maybe stop referencing twitter like it's important or relevant?

I rejoined twitter a few months ago, and quit again: it was inciting negative emotions and it felt addictive. The UI made me feel like I was having a mild stroke. It was disorienting.

Having bailed on it again, my take is: generally the loudest and most attention-seeking people are the ones on there making the most noise and seeking attention most thirstily.

Twitter is part of the problem, IMO.

akavi• 6 years ago

@TitaniaMcGrath is a parody, and not a particularly subtle one.

korethr3• 6 years ago

This thread strikes me as a material lesson in Poe's Law

paganel• 6 years ago

Highways are kind of anti-poor, and as the black population in the States is poorer than the white population you could say (by stretching it a little) that highways are racist. Robert Moses was maybe not a racist (I haven’t read that big book about him, I must admit) but the highways that he helped built did a lot of harm to the black population of NYC.

I mention all this because I saw that lady you linked to being frustrated at highways having been called racist.

vangelis2• 6 years ago

Boring, garden variety outage culture strawman.

IAmEveryone3• 6 years ago

It's telling that the top post on an article about "unpopular ideas" is a attack on a concept that is almost universally hated on HN.

"Identity politics" even has the benefit of being so generic, it allows everyone to replace it with the worst example they can come up with: you hate "identity politics" for the one time that <person> invoked <their identity> to get <something ridiculous> (see examples in this threat). But you use it to tarnish complaints about black people dying twice as often from COVID and five times as often from police bullets.

So, please, continue to be outraged by how unwilling others are to, for once, see it from the perspective of a white heterosexual man with a suburban middle-class background. And how unwilling people are to be "free thinkers" like you, boldly telling people on HN that you kinda think women and black people should shut up.

But please stop glorifying reactionary opinions as some sort of revolutionary insight! When people tell you you are wrong, you are extremely more likely to be wrong, and not Galileo Galilei. If in doubt, maybe try to think of something revolutionary in particle physics or plate tectonics, before going all-in on the biological origins of intelligence or whatever it is you're being criticised for.

Tainnor10• 6 years ago

Do you really believe that it's not possible to be left-wing and progressive, even part of a minority, generally accepting the things you mentioned as genuine problems that need to be addressed, while still simultaneously thinking that identity politics is flawed and counterproductive?

If I criticise the left it's not because I'm right, it's because I want the left to be better.

andrepd3• 6 years ago

I agree that this is a problem. That being said, it irks me a little while the opinions you couldn't express were stuff like being a communist, promoting gay rights, or other stuff, there was never an uproar against this soft censorship. Suddenly it's stuff like not being a racist that's no longer mainstream to express and it's suddenly a problem (which it is).

potta_coffee4• 6 years ago

We've had a cultural revolution that was directly an uproar against the things you say there never was an uproar against. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to express unpopular, wrong and even vile ideas. I support the freedom of people that I disagree with to express their thoughts and ideas.

john-shaffer• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s

_bxg15• 6 years ago

The key is to decouple your inner self from how you present to the world. Your inner mental model of the world can acknowledge all apparent truths, even if some of them might upset various factions (the legitimacy of which varies; the offensiveness of sensitive topics to particular people is a real thing, but it also sometimes gets invoked inauthentically), without necessarily saying all of them. At the same time, if you're chronically contradicting everyone else you should still see that as a prompt for deeper examination of your beliefs.

It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely.

This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic.

I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness:

Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.

mrinterweb• 6 years ago

People can easily subscribe to whatever paradigm they wish. Being able to completely tune into a specific paradigm shapes people's reality. There are specific news outlets that cater specifically to identity politics. For those tuned in, opposing views seem ridiculous. Availability of information and diversity of information is a good thing, but the media outlets that exploit their power they have of shaping people's reality, can be dangerous.

dkarl2• 6 years ago

A friend of mine from high school left a PhD program in Latin American studies for basically this reason. His mother was Mexican, he spoke Spanish and English natively, and a lot of people in the department wanted him to identify as an oppressed Chicano, but both of his parents were white and wealthy, people never questioned his whiteness, and when he visited his mother's family every summer in Mexico, he lived in their walled compound with tennis courts and armed guards. He didn't have great disagreements with those other people in the department over ideology or politics (no greater than they had with each other) but they treated him personally very poorly because he couldn't feel emotionally invested in identifying as oppressed. The non-Chicanos in the department resented and distrusted him because they thought he had a special ethnic "in" with the Chicanos, so he left and went to a different program.

dilandau2• 6 years ago

Academia seems to be the source of so much of this anger and resentment.

Maybe it's because teachers, rightly and wrongly, feel themselves to be the moral betters compared to the wealthy. And this is all an elaborate cope and power grab.

the_other• 6 years ago

What has been especially frustrating to me is identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups. It completely removes all agency and individuality and instead classifies you entirely as a set of labels.

This is how marketing works.

Getting really esoteric (and admittedly not thinking to hard about it), I wonder if the prevalence of individually targeted advertising is responsible for amplifying this trend in modern social discourse. How would we study that?

dkural3• 6 years ago

I understand what you're trying to say - but that is not what identity politics is, per se (I'm not advocating for identity politics either). The usual criticism of identity politics comes from proponents of class-based politics: American identity politics tends to split the working-class vote and obscure the fundamental inequities of society.

In fact what you seem to be arguing against is stereotyping based on your identity. This is in fact a big part of what identity politics argues against, and would consider it to be a form of racism or sexism etc.

However a certain type of (usually well meaning, white) college liberal will want to "respect your background" by which they mean what they think you are like, based on various prejudices they have accumulated until then.

jjk1662• 6 years ago

Identity politics is a term that describes a political approach wherein people of a particular religion, race, social background, class or other identifying factor form exclusive socio-political alliances, moving away from broad-based, coalitional politics to support and follow political movements that share a particular identifying quality with them. Its aim is to support and centre the concerns, agendas, and projects of particular groups, in accord with specific social and political changes. [0]

Identity politics is when your politics stem from your identity. Holding opinions that are atypical of people with your background is the cardinal sin of identity politics, as disunity saps your group of its strength.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics

apexalpha3• 6 years ago

The spectral signature of orthodox privilege is "Why don't you just say it?" If you think there's something true that people can't say, why don't you be brave, and own it? The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist.

Well. This kind of hit a snare with me... I'm the kind of person that would say this to people. I'm not entirely sure what to think of it as a whole, the letter. I might have to read it again later.

newacct5839• 6 years ago

I'm the kind of person that would say this to people.

Recognize that this is probably a combination of: (1) your opinions aren't as unorthodox as you think, they're just a little controversial, and (2) you're the kind of person who can just "say this to people" without significant repercussions.

Both of those traits constitute the state described by the linked article: you're "privileged", to use the vernacular. It's not something true of everyone.

In fact, were something you said to produce a real, big reaction from offended people, you'd probably be really upset. You just don't know it. Probably 90% of the "cancel culture" paranoia we're seeing on the right is exactly this: people used to being able to exercise their "Freedom to Offend" suddenly finding it's not so fun when the other side hits back.

apexalpha3• 6 years ago

I've read the letter again and if its goal was to make me think it succeeded. Although I'm generally weary of labeling everything "privileged", I get the authors' point.

Having thought about it I do live in a culture that is considered extremely blunt, honest or even just rude depending on who you ask. That might change my perspective as well.

nayuki• 6 years ago

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

newacct5839• 6 years ago

I was about to post a rant about bothsidesism here, bemoaning the fact that pg is talking about a problem without example, as if it's something that "everyone" does in various contexts.

Then I caught the reference in the second to last paragraph. Clever.

1xdeveloper• 6 years ago

I would love to know Paul's definition of a "true thing".

KboPAacDA3• 6 years ago

Related: Overton window - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

"The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time."

chasingthewind• 6 years ago

At the moment it seems that we have a "double-hung" overton window. The right sash and the left sash overlap less and less all the time.

bob332123• 6 years ago

"Joining as employee number 15 or later at a startup pretty much guarantees that you will get screwed over on equity if the company needs to raise money again"

Can you say that and also still be accepted to ycombinator?

jbob2000• 6 years ago

This is the problem with this post; Paul isn’t getting into specifics, so it’s easy for anyone to read this and say “ah yes, it is them who have the problem and not me”.

I gather he wants to tell all of these people casting platitudes down on everyone to fuck off, but he could also be talking about the people that want to tell those people to fuck off.

rurp• 6 years ago

This was my impression as well. The main point made sense but was so general I didn't really get much out of it. Maybe it's because I don't follow Twitter or movements like "cancel culture" much, but I couldn't readily think of any specific real world situations that this article gave me any new insight on.

jarmitage• 6 years ago

For a list of 46 other privileges (some that overlap with this proposal), see this classic article:

White privilege and male privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies (1988) by Peggy McIntosh https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/white-privilege-and...

vertbhrtn3• 6 years ago

Sounds like a very fundamental work!

scarmig2• 6 years ago

One interesting part of living in China has been the different sets of orthodoxies and heresies people have. Things that are unspeakable in the US are conventional wisdom here, and things that are unspeakable in China are conventional wisdom in the US.

Of course, the conventional wisdom in the US as it exists among upper-middle class, college-educated white folk in 2020 is exactly right about everything, but it's interesting to see just how wrong people in a different society can be without even realizing it.

Invictus0• 6 years ago

I'm curious, can you give some examples of Chinese conventional wisdom that are unspeakable in the US?

celeritascelery• 6 years ago

can you give some examples ... that are unspeakable?

There is a reason they are called unspeakable.

peacefulhat• 6 years ago

Talking with Chinese expats in America, one that really sticks out for me is:

Despite massive economic backslide under Mao, China would not have industrialized without him. I've heard people who are otherwise very critical of Mao say this, seems ubiquitous. The American perspective of course is that Mao was only a negative and stunted Chinese growth. I think the idea is that land owners were overly conservative with capital investment and Taiwanese/Hong Kong growth is explained by foreign investment that Republican China would not have received.

And not as ubiquitous but several have said that the Japanese military is a major threat to China, which seems absurd. Haven't gotten a real justification for this other than "they make good technology", like they're secretly developing a Gundam.

carapace7• 6 years ago

"Round up the Uighurs".

philwelch26• 6 years ago

Is there any American conventional wisdom that’s unspeakable in China that isn’t directly related to the Chinese system of government?

0823498723498725• 6 years ago

Conventional wisdom: total fertility rate must be {above,below} replacement to ensure well-being of future generations.

rexreed2• 6 years ago

Sounds like just another way of saying "groupthink".

It's a rebranding of the concept of groupthink which has been around as long as hominids have been in groups and have been thinking. It's not a form of privilege. Rather, it's the nature of our brains. We are social animals. We prefer not being ostracized. We self-censor as a result. This is not a privilege. People who groupthink are not more privileged than those who don't. The only privilege is the ability to say "yes" to the group more frequently.

0823498723498725• 6 years ago

For an example of a US southerner speaking from orthodox privilege in 1860: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739361

For an example of a Nazi speaking from orthodox privilege in 1943: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36...

"The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not. ... We also know our historic responsibility. Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. One cannot overestimate the danger. ... The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe."

For an example of Athenians speaking from the Most Orthodox Of All Privileges in 431 BC: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm

"right ... is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

__alexs• 6 years ago

Great piece. I frequently find myself withholding opinions about inequality because they'd get me in trouble. The orthodoxy really has the debate on lock down, glad the Trump situation has really got the debate moving again though.

ot• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what the point of this post is. It says

And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.

and then goes on to argue that saying certain things could get you in trouble. I'm sure that the orthodoxy-aligned people at any point in time believed that they couldn't say anything that would get them in trouble as well.

So it may be an unfortunate dynamic, but the post contradicts itself in presenting it as a product of our time. If anything, things got better: in the past you'd be imprisoned or killed, today people yell at you on Twitter and in the worst case you may have to switch jobs.

jeffmcmahan• 6 years ago

but the post contradicts itself in presenting it as a product of our time.

No. It doesn't. Nope. It presents the phenomenon as something that's always true - recall the discussion of time traveling and meeting the same dynamic with different particulars in each time and place.

Moreover, "the point of this post" is abundantly clear: the more closely your views adhere to the mainstream, the more blind you'll be to the costs of holding opinions outside the mainstream because you don't encounter those costs. It's a good point and not hard to understand.

dexen• 6 years ago

If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't

I guess this is an accidentally in-apt example...? It certainly detracts from the essay (mildly and in oh so many words) pushing against accusations of wrongthink - which includes accusations of dogwhistling.

getpost• 6 years ago

Is there a high-pitched sound, or not? If the people in power say there's no high-pitched sound, and the people out of power are suffering from the high-pitched sound, what is "true"? There is "a truth," or "two truths," but not "the truth."

The ideal of polite conversion is that people who disagree can come to a conclusion, a "truth," that was previously inaccessible to either of them. Asserting "the truth," is a dominator paradigm privilege.

0823498723498725• 6 years ago

Famous visual examples of two truths: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23843723

throwaway744678• 6 years ago

Also, The Dress![https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress]

malandrew12• 6 years ago

This is a great one: https://gfycat.com/softklutzyblackbird

nailer• 6 years ago

If the people in power say there's no high-pitched sound, and the people out of power are suffering from the high-pitched sound, what is "true"?

How is the power of the speaker relevant to the truth of what they are saying?

Would the presence of a high pitched sound change if the people in power say there /is/ a high-pitched sound, and the people out of power say it doesn't exist?

The way we find truth is to measure the sound, rather than to pay undue attention to anecdotal evidence to one party based on identity.

malandrew12• 6 years ago

This is also captured in the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant.

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

azangru• 6 years ago

but not "the truth."

And yet, in your opening paragraph, you described "the truth". "The truth" would be that a percentage of population complains about a certain sound while the remainder of the population doesn't. You might even be able to describe physical properties of that sound, such as the range of frequencies and the amplitude that produces discomfort in a given proportion of population. You might even be able to describe the characteristics of populations that respond to the sound differently (such as, I don't know, socioeconomic status for whatever reason). That would probably bring you as close to "the truth" as possible. Whether the sound in question is called "high-pitched" or not is irrelevant.

It irks me that subjective claims about the physical world are regarded as truth statements about the physical world, and thus my report that I hear a displeasing sound and your report that you don't hear that sound or don't find it displeasing somehow produces two "truths".

AnimalMuppet5• 6 years ago

Get an audio sensor that covers the frequency range in question. It isn't rocket science, people. There is in fact "the truth", that is, what corresponds to actual reality, and it's completely independent of how many people say they hear the sound and how many do not. (Those are also "truths", but they are not "the truth".) Once you know whether the sound really exists as audio energy in the air, then you can tell the difference between "X% of people can't hear high frequencies" and "100-X% of people suffer from tinnitus or audio hallucinations".

dgellow3• 6 years ago

I understand that the essay isn’t about deciding what is true (I.e: is there a pitch or not?), instead it’s about the fact that a group blinds itself from asking or even considering that there could be a high pitch. Because they don’t experience it, and in their reality nobody seem to experience it (orthodoxie) they can dismiss any allegation of a pitch, or will ask for evidence that cannot be produced (though that’s were the analogy fails here).

JadeNB4• 6 years ago

Is there a high-pitched sound, or not?

I found this such a bizarre analogy (responding to pg's point, not directly to you). There can be meaningful difference of opinion and perception on whether or not a sound exists; people literally might not have the physiological equipment to hear it. However, the assertion that "there are things I can't say" (meaning, presumably, "there are things I will experience significant hardship for saying" rather than literally "… things I am physically incapable of saying") is surely proveable by mentioning such a thing. He dismisses this idea, but seems never to explain why he's dismissing it, other than by this analogy, which to me seems false.

If the answer to why you can't say what things can't be said is that merely specifically mentioning their existence brings on the unspeakable consequences, then I would say further: I find it perfectly possible to refer to and defend the right of freedom of speech by defending the expression of ideas with which I vehemently disagree. Hopefully Nazism is a safe enough bugbear to assume that every reasonable person disagrees with it. And yet I think Nazis should be able to speak, and at the same time that they should experience the consequences of that speech; and I feel safe in saying that no-one here will confuse my saying that with support or defence of Nazism. So why can't one of these things that can't be said similarly be named without supporting it?

To carry it even one step further, I agree that, if someone says that there's a high-pitched noise and I don't hear it, then it is rude to deny that they hear anything. But is it rude to ask them what it sounds like (for example, does it sound like something I can hear?), or if they can identify where it comes from, or if they hear it all the time? Maybe that falls under the category of 'demanding' evidence that pg says is rude, but it seems to me to be rather a gathering of evidence that I think is the sort of activity highly valued in this community.

rexreed2• 6 years ago

Here's something for you: HN has groupthink (er, I mean PG-branded Orthodox Privilege) in spades. If you agree with the Group (orthodoxy) you get upvotes and lots of kudos. If you don't, you get downvotes and criticism.

non-entity• 6 years ago

If you don't, you get downvotes and criticism.

Heh, if you're lucky. Often you get just the downvotes.

skissane3• 6 years ago

The incentives encourage people to downvote rather than criticise. If they post a critical response, they run the risk of being downvoted by those who disagree with that criticism. You can't get downvoted for a silent downvote.

martinlaz• 6 years ago

Awesome. So we can just scroll to the bottom and fish out some of the truths visitors from the future better be careful not to say.

t0astbread• 6 years ago

A lot of this seems to focus on ideas and worldviews but I think there's a more general truth in Orthodox Privilege: If you're in the majority it's easy to overestimate the quality of life in the minority (and this applies to many kinds of majorities and minorities).

I think a lot of politics (at least in my country) also work this way. Simply by not addressing real problems, a politician can look like a winner because hey, there are no problems when they're in charge! Addressing problems not only becomes a political liability, it's in fact hardly possible at all because the majority of people wouldn't believe you if you told them about it and would accuse you of making up problems.

bravo22• 6 years ago

This also reveals a fundamental bug in naive democracy (i.e. we should do everything that the majority wants). It creates an implicit tyranny against the minority by the majority. Of course the same person can be in a majority group in one category but minority in the other.

U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other similar fundamental laws were conceived as essentially a way to fix this problem; to keep the minority safe from the majority. You wouldn't be able to solve slavery with democracy. The majority would vote to maintain it.

bhntr3• 6 years ago

Orthodox privilege probably exists but, at least in the US, we also see a lot of people who fetishize independent-mindedness to a degree that's irrational as well.

I have advocated before for epistemic learned helplessness (https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_...).

thinking for ourselves is over-rated in most cases. In most cases, for most of us, good science and pseudoscience, good history and pseudohistory are going to be equally convincing. Bayesian logic suggests that sticking with mainstream experts and consensus thinking is a safer bet than rolling the dice on the Galileo Gambit.

So PG seems to be arguing that orthodox privilege is bad and independent-mindedness is important while Scott Alexander seems to be arguing that conventional mindedness should be the default. They're both very convincing essayists. Who is saying something true that can't be said and who is saying something popular but false?

woodruffw5• 6 years ago

A glaring omission: the views and positions that paulg is (obliquely) referring to just aren't orthodox. He's upset that a small, vocal minority[1] is challenging a set of orthodox social norms that continue to enrich and empower him.

The average American is doesn't read Twitter daily, and is somewhere between a moderate liberal and a moderate conservative[2]. These people represent orthodox privilege.

[1]: Case in point: they continue to lose primary elections within their own (ostensible) party.

[2]: On the American political scale, which is uniformly further "right" than European left-right divides.

whatshisface15• 6 years ago

In Applesauce Town, you are required to eat only applesauce. To a person who wants to eat ham with his applesauce, the fact that the larger American society that envelops Applesauce Town permits all kinds of food matters little to him, because his boss, his wife, and all of his friends vigorously enforce Applesauce Culture.

woodruffw5• 6 years ago

To be clear: are you claiming that paulg, whose net worth is (probably) somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars[1] and who runs the company that manages this extremely popular forum, is somehow required to live in "Applesauce Town"?

paulg is the boss in this analogy. He wields more material power than almost anybody who can possibility be mean to him on the Internet.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Grahams-net-worth

dropit_sphere• 6 years ago

The average American doesn't read Twitter daily, and is somewhere between a moderate liberal and a moderate conservative[2]. These people represent orthodox privilege.

Orthodoxy is not just a numbers game---you also have to factor in reach and institutional support (but I repeat myself).

woodruffw5• 6 years ago

Orthodoxy is not just a numbers game---you also have to factor in reach and institutional support (but I repeat myself).

Reach, sure. That's the nature of social media. Can you name an institution that includes "cancel culture" among its principles? I don't think any (American) institution, public or private, practices what paulg is complaining about.

I can think of plenty of institutions that encourage boycotting and isolation as political tactics; labeling these as "cancel culture" is, well, telling.

49531• 6 years ago

Yes. Orthodox privilege is a thing, and it changes in different spheres, but having people on twitter "cancel" you for a hot take doesn't really add up against the real material orthodox privilege paulg receives from the system we live in.

wwright3• 6 years ago

It's frustrating because he is so close to really getting it.

"Cancel culture" is not a thing, in my opinion, because the things that people cry are "cancelled" are almost universally orthodox!

- Gender critical feminism: the orthodox view that trans men are not men and trans women are not women

- Rape, sexual assault, harassment: the orthodox view that women are the property of men (if you don't think this is orthodox, you should really study the history of laws around women)

- Racism: the orthodox view that those of European decent deserve more and better (orthodox since Europe spent most of the last 500 years conquering and exploiting the rest of the planet)

Because all of these things are orthodox and hurt others, it is a privilege you have to defend them. If you write a national NTY editorial that is explicitly and disgustingly racist, you will be fine! Racism is orthodox! Racists are in power everywhere! The president is racist! His friends are racists! Being "cancelled" is not a thing in this context!

Meanwhile, if you speak out against violence against black bodies (which we know still happens because it never stopped happening!), the government will actively spy on and harass you, and in some cases there is evidence they will even kill you (https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...).

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

He doesn't refer to that when he writes orthodoxy. He is referring the spiral of purity some topics are subjected to. And to related rules for behavior and expression that actually leads to people getting canceled. Not everyone of those is innocent, but some certainly are.

Just to be clear, canceling people because of social transgressions is not a new phenomenon and people most prominently executing it today are not the first to do so.

ballenf• 6 years ago

Why do you think he meant "orthodox" to be the majority or historical view? Never occurred to me that it could be interpreted that way.

AnimalMuppet5• 6 years ago

"Orthodox" isn't global. Orthodox is only orthodox within a set of people.

Gender critical feminism: the view that trans men are not men and trans women are not women is orthodox, if you look at all of history. It's orthodox in many parts of the US today. It's heresy in progressive circles.

Women as property: that may have been orthodox historically. In almost all circles in the US, it's heresy today.

Racism: it was orthodox historically. I would guess that in the majority of the US, it's heresy today - but it's orthodox in more circles than it should be.

You seem to be mostly using historical examples. That's not particularly relevant - we don't live there now. What's relevant to our lives now is that, within a given circle of people we interact with now, there is an orthodoxy for that circle.

Tainnor10• 6 years ago

It's perfectly possible for people to have privilege and hold power in one setting but not in others. I am relatively left-wing myself, but I do find it jarring how little much of the media, academia and certain people I meet question that "of course, being left-wing must be the one true conviction, and we actually have science on our side". Even when I agree with them generally, I find the complete lack of appreciation for the other side of the argument baffling.

In elections, of course, you end up asking a lot of people for their opinion, and not just the intellectual, wealthy elite, and I think this is why we are so often surprised by electoral results after having been in this academic bubble where "of course everyone supports migrants and trans people" (which I do, for the record).

But since in most countries, people don't vote on issues directly but through their representatives, which generally align with political parties, I think what is happening is that very vocal, very extremist minorities lead to an increasing radicalisation of certain parties (in different directions; of course the extreme right wing is totally out of control in many countries nowadays), and "moderate" voters, while being moderate, don't really find an outlet for their opinions anymore and just have to settle for the side they find the least bad.

obelos• 6 years ago

It’s useful to contrast “orthodox privilege” with what I like to call “privilege privilege,” which is a condition where one is so fully ensconced in a variety of privileges that they think an opposing minority opinion actually reaching their ears is a sign of a someone else having privilege.

Kapura4• 6 years ago

pg has been opining about so-called "cancel culture" on twitter, and the last paragraph makes it clear that this entire post is his attempt to formulate a response:

Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.

"Orthodox privilege" is, he sees, why some people are not worried about being "cancelled." In his mind, these people are saying what is considered correct, so they don't fear cancellation. Perhaps this is true for some people, but I think that it is inventing (or at least overscoping) a phenomenon to answer a question that has another, simpler answer.

Some people are able to honestly assess their past positions and statements, understand why things could be construed as problematic, and make efforts to better themselves. That, and a sense of what conversations are appropriate for public forums versus informal conversation over drinks, act as pretty great cancellation buffers.

Tainnor10• 6 years ago

I think it's more that most people realise "I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore" or "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore". Those people might be leading healthier lives (why die on a hill you don't have to die on), but it doesn't mean they're closer to the truth necessarily.

The fact about some debates not being acceptable on public forums as opposed to private discussions would be fine, if it weren't for that fact that it's being applied extremely inconsistently.

JadeNB4• 6 years ago

"everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore"

I would like to quote pg's own rhetoric of "is my situation unique?":

And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.

I suspect that many people, myself among them, think "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I am likely to be wrong." Otherwise I am forced to believe that I am the only person who can see things correctly, a mindset that is at least statistically false, even if it might very occasionally apply to a particular person. This response I think naturally worries a lot of people, since it sounds awfully close to silencing dissent, but there are two things that I think make it meaningfully different.

1. If everyone disagrees with you about your scientific, or otherwise verifiable, ideas, then you definitely should not say "oh well, I must be wrong." You should test those ideas. The risk (failed investment in a test whose outcome was widely predicted) and reward (being the scientific or other leader in a discovery that upends expectations) here are both high, and many parts of science, at least, are set up to reward individuals who decide to make that trade.

2. There is a difference between my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am likely to be wrong", which I think is a good thing, and my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am wrong", which I think is a bad thing. Experiencing widespread disagreement should make me carefully examine my assumptions and biases, not just import opposite assumptions and biases.

gus_massa4• 6 years ago

What about historical scenarios like:

* I think that slavery is immoral, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.

* I'm {gay, lesbian, ...} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.

* I think that the Holy Trinity should have {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...} members, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.

* I think that {capitalism, communism} is {good, bad} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.

tinalumfoil• 6 years ago

Some parts of the US have culture such that a working class utility worker can get fired for unintentionally making the OK symbol, because a Twitter mob decided it's racist and harassed his employer [0].

It's McCarthy 2.0 (although not the entire US), driven by employers worried about their brand. Talk of "understand[ing] why things could be construed as problematic, and mak[ing] efforts to better themselves" is detached from this realty.

[0] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...

Kapura4• 6 years ago

the twitter mob didn't "decide it was racist," racists started co-opting that symbol to identify themselves to one another in a way that flies under the radar[1]. The term is "dog-whistle."

I can't speak to the case in question, but my guess is that there were other dynamics in play if the "ok symbol" was enough to get him fired.

[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...

NoodleIncident5• 6 years ago

Shouldn't you be mad at his employer / capitalism? Twitter mobs aren't paying him, they weren't the ones who fired him either

oh_sigh2• 6 years ago

Not just a working class utility worker, but a working class Latino utility worker from a multi-racial family, who would be exactly the kind of person a white supremacist might hate. I'm sure there are Latino white supremacists, but they are much rarer than even white white supremacists.

jonny_eh4• 6 years ago

And it was such a bizarre and rare occurrence it made national news.

kspacewalk2• 6 years ago

Some people are able to honestly assess their past positions and statements, understand why things could be construed as problematic, and make efforts to better themselves. That, and a sense of what conversations are appropriate for public forums versus informal conversation over drinks, act as pretty great cancellation buffers.

This is wonderfully sensible when the problematic things in question are unequivocally problematic (e.g. justification of genocide, or explicit racism). For those things that are borderline, as well as those whose problematic nature is in dispute, it's not so clear cut. Herein lies a strategy for silencing a viewpoint - descend on those who express it with vigorous Twitter fury, deprive a few of them of their livelihoods, et voila! Something that has been discussed in public (and perhaps ought to be discussed) is now confined to "informal conversation over drinks". The offensive-to-some viewpoint is silenced, all is well!

Well, not to me. I am a liberal, and thus I believe that discussion and disagreement over ideas helps improve the good ones and helps sink the bad ones. Disagreement is not a chore, it's the fundamental feature that every free society should cherish. But we should probably restrict justification of genocide, and explicit racism.

btilly5• 6 years ago

The example of Niel Golightly demonstrates that opinions we held decades ago and have not held for many years can still get us fired. Thus, being willing to better yourself is no protection.

See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation/boeing... for the story.

Just to give a sense, at the time more than 50% of Americans agreed with each of these statements: Women should not serve in the military. Homosexual relationships between consenting adults should not be legal. Interracial relationships are wrong.

Today, those opinions are a firing offense. And if you said them publicly, they are a firing offense no matter how many years it has been since you thought them.

Kapura4• 6 years ago

I mean, they're a C-level executive, i could see why employees, especially women working under him, might be less than thrilled if they were still in power.

I think that his response in that article was appropriate, but I'm also not losing sleep for any millionaire airplane executives that now need to find something else to do with their time.

NoodleIncident5• 6 years ago

The quotes in the article are more extreme than what you imply in this comment. You're drawing a false equivalence between every possible reason someone could be against women in the military, and writing an article about how even though women could serve, they shouldn't, because it would destroy "exclusively male intangibles" about men fighting to protect "feminine images".

kps• 6 years ago

I don't know whether I'm more susprised that “Niel” is an actual forename or that “Golightly” is an actual surname.

NoodleIncident5• 6 years ago

After scrolling past hundreds of comments, this is the highest top-level comment that's actually about the post, and not an unrelated monologue triggered by the words used in the post. So thank you.

After 20 minutes on the internet, I have grown so, so tired of reading long, principled, idealistic essays that just so happen to defend racists, sexists, nazis, etc at the end. It's obviously a huge coincidence that he happened to be thinking about privilege, and just happened to come up with this concept of Orthodox Privilege, and by only applying sound logic to this premise, it proves that actually cancel culture is bad mmk. There isn't a chance in the world that he started with the conclusion that he doesn't like cancel culture, and then searched around for some word used by those people that can be twisted into denouncing them. No sir.

And for the record, I felt the same way before getting to the end, not knowing any of this context, because the actual essay is entirely unconvincing. Sampling his other essays to refresh my memory, they're stuffed full of examples to convince you in between each logical leap. Where this essay should have done that, it just vaguely subtweets people disagreeing with stuff he says that you "can't" say. You're expected to fill in the blanks yourself with some noble suppressed truths (ideas... are bulletproof!), when the whole time he's really talking about people getting cancelled (yelling at black people on the internet).

emiliobumachar6• 6 years ago

Assuming that he started out not liking cancel culture and then searched around for how to denounce them, what's wrong with it?

I'm generally opposed to cancel culture but generally can't be bothered to clearly articulate my objections, i.e. search around for the best words to denounce them.

I think it's generally positive that some people, such as pg, are willing to articulate their objections to cancel culture.

jdauriemma• 6 years ago

Yeah, I felt like a dupe when I read the ending. I'd rather read some alt-right drivel that makes no pretense about who they're attacking; at least it's honest on some level. Orthodoxy is the domain of conservative and reactionary forces, it's not a true synonym of ideology or conformity. Graham blithely repurposes the term as a pejorative against so-called "cancel culture" participants, which is clever until you think about it for more than five seconds.

closeparen• 6 years ago

things could be construed as problematic, and make efforts to better themselves

The substantive disagreement here is whether backing off things that "could be construed as problematic" makes you or the discourse "better."

leafboi2• 6 years ago

I was actually warned by the HN administrator for saying something "True" and slightly negative about a race/culture. I threw a bit of "privilege" around because that race was basically my race. Perhaps it was also an example of "orthodox privilege."

I'm Chinese, the topic was about educational fraud in China and I made a negative comment associating corruption and Chinese culture in general:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781696

I felt the reaction by dang was out of hand and overblown especially given the fact that he likely has no actual first hand knowledge about the topic. It's also a reaction that I feel is unique to the culture in the United States. Definitely, there are racial issues in the United States with issues like Floyd, but I'm not commenting about that issue, I'm talking about freedom of speech and when it's appropriate to say things that are the result of "orthodox privilege."

The united states is one of the least racist countries in the world. This is a very commendable trait that every citizen should be proud of but every citizen should also be aware that in being the least racist country in the world, the United States, as a result, also has one of the most irrational opinions on race and equality.

A black person is generally bigger, taller and stronger than an asian person. Black people are so much further to the right with the bell curve on these traits that the olympic gold medals in strength based sports are typically taken by people of African descent while even rich countries like China with targeted programs to win gold medals rarely bring home gold for strength based sports. These are just biological generalities that are true and that are accepted that not all people/races are equal from a physical standpoint.

However if I say an one race generally has higher biological IQ then another race... I crossed a line. What black magic allows people to be biologically different physically but doesn't allow them to be biologically different behaviorally or mentally?

Sure, maybe none of the IQ differences are real and there might be research somewhere that normalizes racial IQ scores when you account for things like socioeconomic background... However, the backlash for even bringing up a topic on biological and racial IQ is outright vicious and as I said before: unique to the United States in terms of the level of intensity.

There's definitely government oppression in China in terms of what you can and cannot talk about, but there's none of this irrational touchy touchy equality stuff you get in the United States. Speech in the united states is regulated by culture and society rather than centrally like in China.. It Changes the overall nature of what is censored and what you can and cannot talk about...

For example if you're born with a big nose in China, that basically becomes your nickname in China. I literally have a friend with a big nose and everyone just calls him "Big Nose." I also have a friend in China who's fat and his Chinese nickname is Fatass. People just call him "Fatass" by name and it's considered slightly derogatory, inline with "Big Nose" but otherwise not a big deal because it's also the physical reality. This is in stark contrast to the states where there's a whole Body positivity movement is trying to change reality as we know it.

I'm not going to comment on whether being obese is healthy or not, it could or it could not be... but I will say that the Body positivity movement exists not because of there's scientific proof that being obese can be healthy... it exists because people are so scared of being insensitive and having their precious feelings hurt that they want to rewrite reality into viewing fat obese people as culturally normal. Again this phenomenon is uniquely prevalent in the United States and not only unique to race and weight. Another example of this occurs in gender pronouns but let's not get into that, I'm sure you already get the point.

I have a different conclusion than Paul. I would say that you're conventional minded if you're afraid to talk about or think about very real yet hard to stomach taboo topics that are True. Cultural biases caused by guilt from past injustices in the United States has taken hysteria and fear to unreasonable levels. I would tell Paul and anyone in a similar situation to take a good look at themselves. If you can't comfortably have a scientific conversation about biological IQ, weight, gender and race without fear of losing your job or offending someone how is that different from the christian religion making you feel uncomfortable talking about evolution and natural selection?

The cultural biases and conventional thinking exists in the people who are incapable of talking about truth, not the other way around.

tomhoward2• 6 years ago

What black magic allows people to be biologically different physically but doesn't allow them to be biologically different behaviorally or mentally?

I hear this line of argument repeated all the time, delivered as if it's a bona fide mic-drop discussion-closer.

Apparently those making the argument don't even consider that it's not-at-all established that behavioural/psychological/mental aptitude qualities are exclusively or even majority biologically predetermined.

It's well known that human qualities very significantly in their degree of heritability. There's nothing remarkable about the suggestion that qualities of the mind will have a different level of heritability to physical traits like height and facial shape. We've all observed that siblings can be far more different behaviourally and cognitively than they are in appearance. And we should expect this to be the case, if we assume that the very purpose of consciousness is to enable us to adapt to the conditions we experience.

Here's a different hypothesis to consider: for the majority of people, physical brain function is pretty consistent, the way eye, nose, kidney, liver, heart and spleen function is pretty consistent, particularly at birth, before the wear and tear of life has had an impact.

But behaviour becomes more variable as a person develops, due to different conditions and experiences, causing certain kinds of emotion and cognitive function to be enhanced, and others to be diminished. E.g., somebody who grows up living with fear and anxiety due to lacking a sense of security will develop enhanced amygdala activity and chronic sensitivity to threat, and thus a reduced development of other brain parts and forms of cognition.

Extrapolate all the kinds of differences in conditions a developing person will experience, and you end up with great variability in people's cognitive "tuning", and resultant personality and aptitudes, that has little to do with their genetics.

leafboi2• 6 years ago

The mic dropper here is that environment influences behavior but so do genetics. BOTH are factors. The problem with society and you is that you choose to ignore the genetic factor and only choose to examine the environmental factor because it fits with your social construct of how the world should be.

Science and reality exist separate to your ethical constructs, and there is scientific evidence that proves it.

You view the world as a two sided hypothesis. Either nature or nurture with nature being racist so nurture is better. But you are aware that this isn't true on some level. You know that genetics influences differences in behavior between men and women so much so that men and women across the globe can be fit into certain behavioral stereotypes that are sexist to talk about but at the same time exist as a permanent part of the fabric of reality. Anecdotally it is literally impossible to ignore the masculine behavioral traits of a trans woman because the genetics influencing behavior are so prevalent.

That's not evidence however. Let's not get into that because anecdotal arguments can become circular: When I present an example and you rewrite reality so that it fits your ethical world view or vice versa. Let us consider scientific studies. Is behavior caused nature or nurture or both? Obviously both, but let us see what happens when we control the nature part by only looking at twins or triplets separated at birth. What are the behavioral differences?:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/5-true-storie...

I have long discovered that there's no such thing as a "mic dropper" the extent that humans will go to bend the evidence and examine improbable possibilities to maintain their ethical and moral world view is extensive. A logical argument will not convert a christian to an atheist and it will not change you. What follows from you, if you read this, is a long and involved break down to discredit my evidence a reexamination of the context from biased angles until you use the logic to construct a universe that fits the world how you see it rather than the world as it truly is.

The bottom line is: genetics made your brain therefore it influences your brain and in turn, your behavior. If such genetic differences exist between twins and between sexes then it must exist between race.

And keep in mind... never ever did I say environment is not a major influence for behavior. I never said otherwise i am only saying that to ignore genetics and say that genetics do not influence race is scientific folly and irrationality.

tomlockwood2• 6 years ago

It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be particularly sure of it.

Exactly! Like for instance, the vast majority of people, who believe they can objectively identify mindless orthodoxies, while somehow remaining immune to them.

hawkice2• 6 years ago

I think the trick is to distinguish "that's an unorthodox idea" from "you are violating the orthodoxy". For instance, here are (relatively anodyne?) statements, the first being rare to hear but unpoliced (unorthodox), and the other being one where I've had people, in person, prompt me to explain it so that they and their friend can laugh at me (violating the orthodoxy).

a) The exception in the 13th amendment for criminals is bad, currently used to legally shield slavery in American prisons, and should be repealed.

b) All Americans, including minors of all ages, should be allowed to vote.

Seeing the difference in reactions to them has sharpened my conception of precisely what orthodoxy is, and what social purpose it serves.

[As a historical note, Nazis displayed art they hated at prominent museums, specifically to encourage people to mock it for how terrible it was (of course, almost universally art created by Jews). Ben Shapiro would be out of a job if the people he mocks were _actually_ silenced -- not because he'd have nothing else to talk about, but because the format would be boring. Same for Chapo Trap House, etc etc etc.]

tomlockwood2• 6 years ago

I don't know if the distinction is necessarily clear here - I think the idea b is so jarring to people is they can immediately visualize the edge case - where a baby is voting. I know you've probably got more nuance to that belief, but a naive person probably immediately thinks about it.

I'm not sure you've successfully identified an orthodoxy there because, also, I've never heard anyone defend the current voting age with any vigor.

peisistratos• 6 years ago

The a priori to all of this current hubbub is a large number of people who are not of an upper class or upper middle class white American background, who are not even heard at all.

One example would be Tulsi Gabbard. We do not hear what she says. We hear from a New York Times columnist who went to exclusive prep schools and then to an Ivy League college (where she tried to "cancel" Arab professors by testifying against them that they were antisemitic) before landing her plum role, that Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". After years of throwing mud from her aerie, she herself finally feels some criticism come in, and quits her job in a huff, with ramblings about the end of freedom.

Hillary Clinton not so indirectly implied Gabbard was some sort of stalking horse of Putin's as well. Saturday Night Live joins in. This is all not considering canceling though. It's not, in a sense, the notion that the US should not have military bases all over the world was never out there on the corporate controlled media channels . There's nothing to cancel - that show was never allowed on to start with.

Pushback against this mudslinging is considered canceling though. This is the threat to freedom we hear Sturm and Drang about.

The channels of media out there all blast forth establishment views, benefiting a minority of privileged people. They are born upper and upper middle class, white, and are American if not by birth then by coming to the US. Other voices are excluded. All that is left and that can finally be faintly heard is some criticism of these establishment narratives. That this pushback is causing demonstrations around the country and criticism of the establishment narrative is very distressing for these people.

(A tangential example - in the days after 9/11, the New York Times published excerpts of an Osama bin Laden statement. As the whole world seemed to be pivoting on this dialectic, I tried to find the full statement somewhere. I was unable to. I could not even find it on the net. Perhaps it has surfaced in the past 20 years. It reminds me of the old Irish republican cartoon of an Irishman with a British gag over his mouth representing BBC voice bans etc. When the gag is removed a dove of peace comes out. NATO bombing Serbian press is not considered censorship. Satellite installers jailed for installing al-Manar is not censorship. Privileged people who tried to cancel Arab professors getting criticism is considered censorship.)

In the current dialectic, we have to-the-manor born, white, more or less American establishment types suddenly having to contend with voices who are not necessarily white or American, who went to public schools and grew up middle class or working class or poor, who are finally having their voices heard and who are challenging the establishment hegemony. I know which side I am on.

pyb2• 6 years ago

It's not the first time that pg alludes to "what you can't say". It would be nice if he could at least outline what it is that he believes he's not allowed to say. Otherwise the discussion remains exceedingly abstract. Furthermore, some may assume the worst of whatever he had in mind that "can't be said"

ksdale3• 6 years ago

He explicitly mentions that whenever you talk about speech in the abstract, people will assume you believe whatever thing they don't like.

Agree with him or not, I think it completely misses his point to need to hear his opinions before you decide whether he's correct in the abstract about speech.

pyb2• 6 years ago

It's true that the 2nd half of the post (which I should have read before commenting) is a retort to my objection. If I understand well, the response is that I am blessed (?) with "orthodox privilege".

wry_discontent4• 6 years ago

Nobody who complains about cancel culture can actually do that cause they'll out what they really mean, which is something like "I want to say racist/sexist shit but can't cause I'll get in trouble now."

gridlockd• 6 years ago

It's more like: "I can't say anything that someone somewhere might uncharitably interpret as sexist/racist/transphobic/homophobic or else I get in trouble now."

For instance, pointing out scientifically well-established differences between genders and daring to draw the conclusion that maybe gender inequity is not entirely the fault of a sexist white cismale conspiracy - that will probably get you cancelled.

ksdale3• 6 years ago

From the essay: "The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist."

blablabla123• 6 years ago

And that's a really recent phenomenon, and least if you somehow come from the conservative "orthodox" part of society, also considering popular culture, plots of Hollywood movies in particular.

Also there is a difference in having a proper discourse and just spilling out controversial opinions. I think in a philosophical context it's possible to discuss all sorts of things, in fact that's very much where the updated - and more critical - ethics comes from.

temac2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure about if I read you correctly.

Do you mean that it is impossible to complain about "cancel culture", because it is inherently good and you are an horrible person if you complain?

If yes, can you define cancel culture?

topspin• 6 years ago

It would be nice if he could at least outline what it is that he believes he's not allowed to say.

Ironic: "Why don't you just say it?"

He avoids doing that because as both he and you know perfectly well the Orthodoxy would crush him for his heresy.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

It would be nice if he could at least outline what it is that he believes he's not allowed to say.

If he did that, the near-certain fact that whatever he is complaining about is regularly said by people who are prominent and active figures would kind of negate his point.

I mean, at least, every time anyone else makes the mistake of making this argument with specific examples of things that are supposedly not allowed, that's the case.

But as long as there are no specific examples, the claim is not meaningfully debatable, which is preferable to the one making it, when it is false, than if it is easily falsified.

brm2• 6 years ago

I can't think of a TRUE statement that you'll be cancelled for. I can think of a lot of opinions presented as truths that will get you cancelled. For my edification, can you all please present some hypothetical examples of current TRUE statements that cannot/should not be said?

Something like "Fat people are a burden on a healthcare system" is true and won't get you cancelled.

Something like "Trans people are currently the gender they were born" is a philosophical opinion and might get you cancelled but whether its true or not is a sort of Ship of Theseus problem.

Something like "Donald Trump has a low IQ" may impede your work progress but that has its own implications about cancel culture that aren't what we're talking about.

So please for the sake of argument, show me an actual truth that will get you cancelled. Seriously looking for examples...

apsec112• 6 years ago

Here's a list:

https://mobile.twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/12824046471609...

brm2• 6 years ago

That is not a list that provides examples of truths being cancelled.

temac2• 6 years ago

I'm wary of social hypotheses that place an irrefutable / indefensible burden on "me" (well, actually, on anybody), especially if the only reason is by association because of correlations with arbitrary traits.

I can very well admit that some cultures (in a very broad sense of the term) have agressive characteristics perceived by people used to others and, to the extend the advantages are greater than potential drawbacks (which are often not even present or can be short term, granted), try to be careful about that in hopefully a benevolent way. Also, people classified as privileged might also perceive tons of things as aggressive against them, and mere injunctions to stop or act as if not in all regard, are not productive -- it does not really matter who is "wrong" or "right" if an action is de-facto antagonizing and polarizing over and over (well, from an individual ethic pov it does matter very much, but from an outcome that's debatable...), unless you are ready to escalate, and that seems a terrible idea.

So I don't believe people with characteristic X or Y shall be approached all the time as if they are a mean representative of their "group" and shall as a result apply a parody of Bayesianism blind to all other traits, and blind to individual variance, and blind to the knowledge of themselves.

I don't see why, from time to time, there would not be people who are "true" about things they won't even say, but that does not seem a very powerful thing to act upon. I just don't know what to do with that, and especially I'm not sure I understand where to go from that to the conclusion.

Some intelligent people think X and other intelligent people not X?

Yes, that happens. Very often. Extremely often.

But is there even an absolute truth when "cancel culture" is concerned, and what even is the precise definition? The wording is typically used to talk about things believed excessive. For example it's one thing being associated with Epstein and people not wanting to work with you anymore; it's another thing to be fired because you told a silly joke to a friend during a conference, and a third party ears it.

Absolute truth in social subjects is rarely to be seen, especially when we talk about blurry concepts.

(edit: typos)

known• 6 years ago

Always post your opinions anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.

emiliobumachar6• 6 years ago

Great essay, useful concept I never noticed before. But I cannot agree with the last sentence.

"If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it."

Even if one is 100% convinced that true statements are 100% safe, there remains the possible beliefs that being wrong is okay to some degree, and that becoming right is a hard process that may involve believing false statements and saying them.

honkycat2• 6 years ago

What a bad take. I would expect Paul Graham to be more educated on a topic before he says something so tired and uninsightful.

It comes from BOTH SIDES. The right wing also cancels people with social media. A few well-placed articles by right-wing publications and their targets will have a months long harassment campaign of people trying to break into their social media and bank accounts, constant death threats and hate messages and photographs of their house, insults, harassment at their place of work. Convenient that always gets left out of the "cancel culture" discussions.

We need to stop acting like conservatives have no power in this country. They do, they literally run the country and arguments like this are just people getting in additional body-blows against liberal opponents. You want to see what "performatice victimhood" looks like, look at the extremely rich Paul Graham whining that people get mad at him when he says things we don't like. We do not like the way we are treated, and we are going to continue to speak out. If that gets you fired: GOOD.

I understand it is frustrating, and I have said before: I don't like the cry bullies and woke-scolds on the internet. I do not think they actually care about the cultural movement, and I think they should go outside and get a life. But I honestly believe the progress we have made in the cultural consciousness for gay, trans, and people of color has been phenomenal, and it arises from the new "woke culture."

I think the cry-bullying and woke-scolding days are numbered, they are starting to eat their own and even allies are getting sick of it.

muxl• 6 years ago

The core message of this article is that it's possible for even large groups of people to be wrong about things and that those people won't think they're wrong (they're wrong about being wrong). The author summarizes this mechanism as: these people are so accustomed to being "right" by appealing to consensus that they can't imagine being wrong.

This argument seems to generalize not just to large groups but also to small ones. The problem I see is that in the case of large groups the author calls this "privilege" and in the case of small groups he doesn't. Since the size of the group doesn't really effect the nature of group orthodoxy and adherence the argument seems to collapse to "large groups are privileged."

I agree that large groups are privileged but to claim that part of privilege is not being able to conceive of your group as being wrong seems tangential and potentially just incorrect.

Perhaps the author is assuming that people in small groups more frequently encounter other groups which (1) they disagree with (2) they eventually determine are right

but it isn't obvious to me that (2) would be more likely to occur in a small group than in a large group. There have been fanatical large groups and small ones which do not tolerate deviation on certain points.

jlawson• 6 years ago

It has nothing to do with the size of the group.

It's about whether a member of the group will ever have to encounter or understand views that are unorthodox in that group.

If not, they assume they can't be wrong. It's the "way things are" which nobody disputes.

This creates a mental blindness where they can't possibly imagine someone wanting to say something in good faith that was against this "way things are", to them it would be like saying the Earth has no moon or that cats can fly. Why would you claim that? What's wrong with you?

munificent5• 6 years ago

In all of the many arguments swirling around cancel culture, I have yet to see anyone raise what I think is the most important distinction: good faith.

Open debate and public disagreement is a healthy vital tool of progress when the claims and argument are made in good faith. When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them.

But if you assume all arguments are in good faith, then you leave the public sphere ripe for exploitation. This is what white surpremacists and others have clicked to recently. A bad actor can exploit a presumption of good faith to add legitimacy to their position. "Look, famous person X rebutted me. My claim must be at least significant enough to be worth rebutting." Or they can use it to make the other party look bad by sea-lioning. "I am merely politely asking questions. Why are you so angry? Aren't you able to control your feelings?"

"Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication.

The challenge is that as we get increasingly polarized and tribal and as the bad faith actors get more savvy, everything starts to look like a bad faith argument. And at some point, people start concluding that the only foolproof algorithm for determining if an argument is in bad faith is "does it disagree with me?" And then you start seeing the banhammer swung freely.

That in turn increases polarization and tribalism because good faith dissenters, people with middle ground positions, and people who aren't sure where they stand self-censor to avoid taking friendly fire.

It is a very nasty feedback loop we're in, exacerbated by the already bad feedback loops of social media AIs being trained to show us content we already agree with.

_bxg15• 6 years ago

"Cancel culture" [is an important tool] to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication

I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease.

But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.

santoshalper3• 6 years ago

That's a very interesting analogy.

ajhurliman• 6 years ago

If we're using an autoimmune disease as the metaphor, may I suggest steroids as the analog to deplatforming instead of antibiotics?

picometer• 6 years ago

Thank you for this metaphor - it brings clarity and refocuses the discussion on the dynamics of the whole system.

Of course there are a few key differences between cells and modern humans: (a) we have empathy, and (b) we are are much more interconnected. This means that if a non-destructive entity is harmed, e.g. an unjustly deplatformed person, this produces a signal that propagates to others who were not deplatformed, through the story being shared and empathized with. So the antibiotic-like harm is much less containable.

If we want to use “deplatforming” as a tool, don’t think it’s even possible to effectively do. The high connectivity of human social relations means that there will always be another “platform” for their message to propagate. This is especially true with social technology (printing press, digital social media) although I suspect it was also true beforehand. Not even, say, executing someone is guaranteed to suppress their message. (Extreme example: Jesus/Christianity.)

someone7x• 6 years ago

I had a lot to say, but you're right, Its optimal to avoid friendly fire.

The final revision of my reply was "Cmd+A Delete"

Good luck being reasonable out there.

CPLX• 6 years ago

This is a crucial point. Here is an absolutely excellent essay expanding thoughtfully on this line of discussion:

https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/

Animats• 6 years ago

That has some good points. Remember the classic forum comment, "please don't feed the trolls". That worked until the trolls became too numerous.

The latest idea comes from The Lincoln Project, which is funded by a group of anti-Trump Republicans. They read the Sun Tzu quote, "If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him." So they make very strong anti-Trump ads and pay to run them on Fox News during shows Trump is known to watch.[1] They're deliberately trolling Trump. The goal is to make Trump lose it (which he has, on Twitter) and make it safe for Republican politicians to move away from Trump (which is happening).

This is boss level trolling.

[1] https://youtu.be/bk6d4TgO2NY

NoodleIncident5• 6 years ago

There’s a term for this sort of bad-faith argument: it’s called the justification-suppression model. The theory is that bigots refrain from directly defending their own bigotry but get hugely riled up justifying the abstract right to express bigotry.

I doubt I'll remember it, but I was searching for some term to describe why this essay immediately set off alarm bells. I probably don't know enough about PG to know if he's really writing this essay in such explicit bad faith, but it certainly activated some neurons in my internet-trained mental spam filter. Now I have a name for that pattern

koheripbal3• 6 years ago

When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them.

This doesn't seem to be the case. Those who disagree are simply lumping everyone they disagree with into the big "racist" bag, claiming they are arguing in bad faith, dismissing the conversation, and then calling on others to censor it outright.

I see no evidence that contra-theocracy dialogue is being tolerated at all.

"Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication.

I find this argument to be odd. Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? Are we not adults? What gives you the right to decide for others what they should and should not see/read?

This is the fundamental illogic of censorship. No one should have the right to tell others what to see or read.

munificent5• 6 years ago

Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone?

Those harmed by the actions that follow from the beliefs of the deplatformed person.

For example, if you de-platform who says that all green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean to drown, you do so to protect green-eyed people.

Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments?

The argument that green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean is neither false nor true. It is an ought claim, not an is claim. The intent is not to protect people from the argument, it's to protect people that would be harmed if others believed the argument.

baddox6• 6 years ago

Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments?

In some cases I do think we can and should protect ourselves from arguments for intolerance.

luckylion6• 6 years ago

The obvious problem with this approach is that it's essentially "I'm on the good side, and I need to protect the platform/society/world from the bad people who are not arguing in good faith. I can judge this, and so when I censor this, I'm not doing this because I don't like hearing opposing view points ... I just don't like hearing wrong, evil people who make arguments to trick me and the audience".... which pretty much looks exactly the same from any angle, in any group and you just need to replace a word or two in the justification for the cleansing.

It's really a long winded version "there is no orthodoxy, it's just that there are the right things and the wrong things, and the things I say are right and should we really spend time listening to things that are obviously wrong?", which is a good way to make the point of the essay, ironically.

Sniffnoy2• 6 years ago

The way to handle argumentation that you suspect of bad faith is to handle both cases.

You say "If you mean ... then ... but if you mean ... then ...".

This doesn't apply to everything. But it certainly applies to just-asking-questions. You give both the actual correct answer; and you also say something maybe rude, but behind a conditional.

munificent5• 6 years ago

I think you're underestimating the savvy of bad faith participants. Even doing that now lets them take control of the narrative and forces you to do twice the work to respond to their poorly worded message. That's time and effort you're not spending moving the conversation in a more productive direction.

dilandau2• 6 years ago

Twitter is perfectly designed for coordinating attacks on individuals. The problem is that so many organizations tend to yield to the slightest hint of twitter outrage, which reinforces these kinds of cancellations.

everdrive5• 6 years ago

I sometimes wonder if this is not just the novelty of social media, but rather the new normal. ie, perhaps social media will always be this divisive? This is a very limited metaphor, but it reminds me of how a moth circles around a flame. Usually, a moth would use the Moon (or Sun) to navigate, which is focused to infinity. The flame is close by, and the way the moth's natural circuitry works causes it to malfunction. A straight line becomes an inward spiral, towards the flame.

The basic problems of social media are nothing new to human behavior: tribalism, moral judgement / righteousness, extremist viewpoints.

But I wonder if it's a bit like the moth and the flame. With so many extreme opinions from so many strangers, we begin spiraling to more extreme positions, and taking sides in a more extreme fashion. Under normal conditions extreme opinions can still exist, but they are usually tempered by contact with other people. Even when extremity existed in the past, it at least appeared to be stable over time. ie, you'd have single group with unified (albeit extreme) ideas. People are normally meant to be socially and morally judgemental. (to what degree, and about what is up for some debate, but as an animal we like to make moral judgements.) But, they're also meant to find consensus within a community. Well, the internet breaks down some of that consensus building, while also introducing and amplifying more and more extreme positions. I really wonder that like the moth, social media breaks our normal intuition for social judgement and coalition building.

And lastly, I wonder if it's any surprise that things seem to have gotten crazier since most have been on quarantine -- away from normal people, but glued to our screens. Maybe that's just anecdotal on my part, though.

not2b2• 6 years ago

I'm not impressed with this argument, which we are seeing more of these days. Expressing one's opinion on controversial issues risks that people will be pissed off, but it isn't just the originally expressed opinion that is "free speech"; the furious criticisms of the original opinion are also "free speech". Refusing to associate with people because of their expressed opinions is also a right.

And there isn't one orthodoxy, there are many. The range of opinions that can be expressed in the vicinity of Paul Graham without risking that he won't fund your startup is very different from the range of opinions that an assistant professor going for tenure in a humanities department may express, but it's not clear whether Graham is conscious of the orthodoxy he himself imposes, by his economic power.

seibelj3• 6 years ago

It's not enough to merely criticize someone. The fear is that you are fired and your career is destroyed, which is very bad for you and your family. When expressing even a minor deviation from the party line can result in life-destroying consequences, all dissent and discussion is stifled out of fear. This is the chilling effect.

not2b2• 6 years ago

Yes, if it were true that "expressing even a minor deviation from the party line can result in life-destroying consequences", that would be bad. But it really isn't. You can get fired from a company by disagreeing with its party line on some issue, but that doesn't destroy your life.

Miner49er2• 6 years ago

There has never been a time in history when this wasn't the case for certain views. PG touches on this for much of this article. The difference now is that fairly orthodox views are the ones people are facing consequences for.

platz• 6 years ago

If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.

I'm having a hard time parsing the logic in this sentance. Is there something like affirming the consequent going on here?

staycoolboy4• 6 years ago

The last paragraph is nefarious:

"Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it."

Wow, talk about a word-salad to defend privelege.

Who would suspect more wisdom on privilege from proud sexist Paul Graham.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-...

He's STILL complaining about "things you can't say" in this article:

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

And completely missing the boat on "right to free speech" != "right to no consequences".

He's learned nothing. Not a self-reflective bone in this man's body.

diffrinse• 6 years ago

Wow, talk about a word-salad to defend privelege.

"I'm on the right side of history, and for other people like me, here is how to navigate this trying persecution".

It's also clear that you can replace the term "orthodox privledge" with "perspective" and the good parts of the article would make complete sense while excluding the rather uncritical parts, since their substance largely hinges on the rhetorical value of this weaponized spin on the term privilege.

What's funny is he has no idea this entire elaboration can be perfectly applied to himself since, again, the whole thing lives-or-dies on the implicit perspective that he, or whatever persecuted idea(s), is on the "right side of history. Like, which perspective is defining orthodox?

staycoolboy4• 6 years ago

I agree that using the word "perspective" is useful as a 101-level concept because perspectives can change radically based on a number of socioeconomic and cultural conditions out of their control. I think privilege is a 201-level concept that should only be deployed after someone internalizes the former statement, you gotta walk before you can run.

gosukiwi2• 6 years ago

I understand and share your POV, but it's also really easy to abuse.

If you think consequences for saying what you think are okay, it's no different than defending dictatorial goverments, where you just "dissapear" if you say something agains it. Or Galileo being forced to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun.

So where do you draw the line?

sakian2• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why his comments are deemed sexist. Isn't he saying that 13 year old girls aren't as interested in computers as much as 13 year old boys? What am I missing?

bargl• 6 years ago

This was my take too. I disagree with the opinion piece linked by the op.

My take was that he wanted more girls to be involved at a younger age in tech.

If you look upstream at hiring, If I have 20 candidates and they all graduated from either a bootcamp or a cs degree, then my pool will probably reflect that ratio.

If we want to fix the representation of people in any workforce that has a barrier to entry such as previous training. Like with Engineering and college. You have to get more representation in the engineering programs.

If you want that you have to have more applications to the engineering programs. If you want that you have to de-stigmatize engineering at a young age.

That was my take away from what he said, but maybe I'm projecting.

staycoolboy4• 6 years ago

Because it isn't true. It is him inventing a cause of a problem by simply ignoring many, many womens' experiences with discrimination in STEM that starts at a young age, which is extensively documented. This is what privilege looks like: "I never experienced it so it doesn't exist."

dpoochieni3• 6 years ago

When did privilege become bad? I mean it is a reality we face daily but is it actually "bad" so should be eliminated? Plus there is no one privilege right?

At what point do I owe someone something for being less privileged than me?

koheripbal3• 6 years ago

Who would suspect more wisdom on privilege from proud sexist Paul Graham.

This is a great example of Cancel Culture. You attack someone's character, rather than their argument.

This is the definition of arguing in bad faith.

lliamander5• 6 years ago

He's learned nothing. Not a self-reflective bone in this man's body.

There's a lot of rhetoric without any actual argument. Unless you are a mind reader, I would suggest refraining from speculating on other people's mental states. Self-reflection is not a trait unique to people who agree with you.

jariel2• 6 years ago

"And completely missing the boat on "right to free speech" != "right to no consequences""

This is the straw-man of all straw-mans.

---> Nobody is disagreeing with this statement.

There's 'no point to miss' because it's not even a point of discussion.

Everyone agrees that 'speech has consequences' and everyone agrees that someone 'calling a Black man the N-word in a derogatory manner' is terrible.

But we are arguing of people can dress up and play characters of another race or identity, or if we can mock people who do bad things by having characters do bad things or if we can literally use bad words while intellectually discussing bad words.

Or how much 'racism' is in the 'out group' using bigotry to attack the 'in group'.

Etc. etc..

The cancel culture arguments are at the margins of hate, not knee-deep.

If someone was doing Vaudevillian Blackface acts to mock black people, there would be 99.99% common agreement that this should be 'cancelled'.

But whether or not my corporation should be putting BLM on their website, that's complicated.

d_burfoot• 6 years ago

One important thing that the essay doesn't mention is that our current orthodoxy isn't democratic. The orthodoxy is dictated by newspapers and universities, with some help from Hollywood and tech companies. None of those institutions are remotely democratic (if they were, they wouldn't be so strongly aligned with the left). Perhaps we need to establish some limitations on what people are allowed to say, but if so, those limits must be decided by formal democratic processes.

carapace7• 6 years ago

What? Is this a cry for help? Is it ax-grinding? Are there "unorthodox and true" statements that pg would like to make but is afraid of "terrible trouble"? I find the idea of "orthodox privilege" an oxymoron. I don't understand what the phrase captures that isn't just "privilege". Maybe the whole essay is just going over my head. Or perhaps I don't hear the same "high-pitched noise"?

Look, I do something called "Reiki". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. I also do something called "computer programming". For some people it's commonplace, for others it's crazy-town. (Being a computer nerd used to be cause for abuse and shunning, now we're celebrated. So it goes.)

My point is, there are lots of ways to rile up the mob and get them to pick up their pitchforks and torches. In some places all you have to do is exist and be black or gay or a woman or white or straight or a man or neither a man nor a woman, or both-at-the-same-time (hermaphrodite), or be both black and white (Trevor Noah's autobiography of his childhood in S. Africa, "Born a Crime", is worth reading, IMO), or be a computer nerd in the locker room at the wrong time, or wear the wrong kind of hat.

Mob-ism, with the pitchforks and torches, is a problem (this is hardly news though, eh?)

francoisp• 6 years ago

kudos to Paul for this one. Writing about a very very charged and divisive social phenomenon and putting out a meta-conception that casts a better light in a very adroit, objective angle. True free thinker stuff. This is prolly how enlightened individuals had to softly tread their way also in other times, although one on one and small groups allows more forgiveness and time to practice wording your conception than big bad internet.

neilk2• 6 years ago

pg has (for a long time) asserted that he has opinions that would get him pilloried in the public square. He's advocated that one shouldn't share those opinions. And he's continued to frequently allude to their existence.

Having already dismissed the common people's ability to process unorthodox beliefs, he then goes on to complain that people shouldn't speculate or make assumptions about those beliefs that he keeps alluding to?

He further asserts that people who advocate open discussion must be dullards, whose minds are only filled with the opinions of others?

I don't agree. What should a rational, Bayesian person conclude about someone who keeps alluding to beliefs they can't say? What's the most frequent such belief?

    Conservative: I have been censored for my 
    conservative views
    
    Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting
    lower taxes?

    Con: LOL no...no not those views
    
    Me: So....deregulation?
   
    Con: Haha no not those views either

    Me: Which views, exactly?

    Con: Oh, you know the ones

-- https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Caveats: I'm not saying that pg holds any particular views, racist or otherwise. I don't know what it's like to be someone in his position. I expect there are a lot of people who are eager to take his statements out of context and that can be wearying. And although the above tweet is a pithy illustration, I don't think pg qualifies as a conservative either.

But I'm pretty sure that pg is not hiding a belief like "Amazon should be broken up", or "recycling is mostly a sham" or "actually nuclear power is green" or even "I oppose reparations for slavery". The beliefs at issue these days on social media tend to be about _personhood_ - acceptance of trans people, the acceptance of certain identities as oppressed, and so on. Someone popping up in the discussion and saying that he holds beliefs he can't say - well, what am I supposed to think?

And if I was being generous and assuming they were constructive views that were inexpressible right now, what am I supposed to do? What action does pg want us to take to fix that? I don't even know what direction pg wants the discussion to go in.

luckylion6• 6 years ago

This comment sounds a bit like you feel attacked by the idea he lays out and are going for an offense. "I'm not saying that pg holds any particular views, racist or otherwise" while quoting a tweet implying just that does smell a little bit.

I don't know whether he holds any problematic opinions. Those essays sounded more like PSAs to me, essentially "hey, Robespierre, before you start going after those people, remember that you might not be right on everything, so having an opinion that differs from your own doesn't really mean that somebody is an evil agent of the reactionary forces".

neilk2• 6 years ago

Contexts matter, and this is I guess what we're all concerned with.

In my own experience, since the mid-2010s or so there's a steady undercurrent of elitism and fascism in techland that I had not been expecting at all. There are some nerds who want us to be "rational" about it, that we should be willing to debate everything, up to and including the basic humanity or worth of people who are... just not white techies. I've been shocked to discover some of my colleagues and friends have fallen into these tendencies of thought. Fascism is less of a viewpoint and more of a viral strategy for smothering tolerance under the guise of allowing debate.

Like, from my perspective, there's a hint of that elitism even in what pg was saying, as he dismisses his critics as simply less-nimble thinkers who don't have original ideas.

So yes, I'm skeptical when I see people saying, "I have all these wonderful ideas, that you're unworthy of because you just won't be tolerant of them." I've been down that road a few times with a few colleagues and it always ended in something like a grand theory of why the West is at war with Islam.

But I also acknowledge there are other contexts, where one might feel under attack by the impersonal forces of social media outrage, for totally different reasons. And (as I've revised this comment many times) I've also expressed, in public, that cancel culture is a real thing, and it does stifle some viewpoints and can be exploited by nefarious people. I wish I had a tidy bow to wrap this up with, but I don't.

xtat• 6 years ago

The irony here is that PG loves the valley and one of my biggest frustrations with the valley is how cargo culty everything is - how hard you have to fight to do anything different from the SV way.

(Edit: I should add that I also enthusiastically agree with what he's saying here.)

voidhorse• 6 years ago

Essays like this are always enticing to people who consider themselves “reasonable”, “logical”, or “intellectual” because they seem to defend the virtues of reason on the surface—flout convention—ally yourself with reason, science!

Then you start to realize that while the slef-aggrandizing, implicit, unstated analogy is to someone like Galileo—the mytho-legendary figure of “unconventional wisdom”—the sage that rose us out of the muck—the actual analogy falls apart very quickly because the stances being defended, generally when people rage against “cancel culture” are not progressive, scientifically backed, or methodologically carefully won informed positions, but rather regressive values, such as arguments for the subordination or mistreatment of certain classes of people, the objectification of people, etc.

Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.

If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.

pg seems to want to ascribe some inherent moral value in being heterodox without actually questioning the contents of that heterodoxy—which is really foolish. It’s a view that abuses history by viewing it in the abstract in order to, at worst, build up extremely flimsy defenses of bad behavior, and at best, state nothing more than the extremely obvious “some people in history were right when the majority of people were wrong”

I also think right and wrong are the completely incorrect categories to use in this context—going back to Galileo—it makes sense to say he was “right” in matters of science while the church was “wrong” because science is rigidly defined, verifiable, etc.—politics and moral questions are not rigidly defined and there is no completely agreed upon system for working out binary categories of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to political and ethical matters—people subscribe to tons of different moral systems many of which yield incompatible views over the same issue—pg seems to assume everyone operates using the same moral/political calculus—it would be different if we were discussing matters of science but its very clear that the intended topic zone here is political—pg just never states these things explicitly since being concrete about it would demolish his position and reveal how ridiculous it is.

amadeuspagel3• 6 years ago

Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.
If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.

Replace "whiners about cancel culture" with "counter revolutionaries" or "reactionary forces" and this could have been written during the stalinist purges or the cultural revolution.

myth_buster• 6 years ago

AKA, nothing to hide argument.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

mlang232• 6 years ago

Using "blind" as a negative figure of speech is about as intelligent and empathic as is "crippled". Talk about priviledge and not being able to see the POV of outsiders.

-- a blind admin/coder

mlang232• 6 years ago

Using "blind" as a negative figure of speech is about as intelligent and empathic as is using "crippled". Talk about priviledged people that can not see the POV of outsiders.

-- a blind admin/coder

luckylion6• 6 years ago

I believe that there's one big flaw in this essay, and it's these two sentences: But they can't overcome orthodox privilege just by learning more. They'd have to become more independent-minded.

I don't necessarily disagree, but from reading a few comments here, I believe that they are counter-productive in so far that nobody likes to think of themselves as somebody who isn't independent-minded.

When somebody now reads about something they haven't experienced (having opinions they know they can't share without undue pushback) and then goes on to read that this is because they're not "independent-minded", it'll automatically trigger their ego-defenses, making it hard for them to even accept that the author isn't just arguing in bad faith because their horrific beliefs are rejected, and at the same time makes them double down in the belief that there is no such thing as an Orthodox Privilege.

greenail2• 6 years ago

Learning about the underlying theories of Postmodernism and Critical Theory helped me get a better understanding of some of the "cancel culture" behavior and illiberal-ism which seems to be trending. It has also helped me avoid falling into traps I would otherwise have blindly stumbled into.

ponker• 6 years ago

Have any links to overview resources?

greenail2• 6 years ago

this may help. Keys are the rejection of objective truth and other "enlightenment" ideas. https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

baddox6• 6 years ago

It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe.

The premise is not sound. Not everyone who has a conventionally accepted idea has that idea because the idea is conventionally accepted. It could be, for example, that there is some other cause that leads to me having an idea and that idea being conventionally accepted.

As an obvious example, I don’t think that one plus one equals two because I observe that to be conventionally accepted. I have good reasons to think that’s true even if most people disagreed. And I certainly wouldn’t think anyone who disagrees was being discriminated against for having unconventional ideas.

bhelkey• 6 years ago

It sounds like you are interpreting Paul Graham to mean, 'if one of a person's ideas is conventionally accepted, then the source of that opinion is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe'.

I interpreted this to mean, 'if all of a person's ideas are conventionally accepted, then the source of their opinions are whatever it's currently acceptable to believe'.

Part of why I interpreted this passage the way I did was because this builds on Graham earlier post titled 'What You Can't Say':

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. [1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html

baddox6• 6 years ago

I think what both of his sentiments are missing is that we should try to shape society such that the good beliefs are also the conventional ones, instead of praising people for having unconventional beliefs for its own sake.

Liron• 6 years ago

‪I’m seeing more complaints about the abstract concept of “things you can’t say” than actual object-level things-you-can’t-say said anonymously.‬

‪How come, if the internet makes anonymous publishing so easy and safe?‬

smitty1e2• 6 years ago

The spectral signature of orthodox privilege is "Why don't you just say it?" If you think there's something true that people can't say, why don't you be brave, and own it? The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist.

That's not "orthodox privilege". That's fear.

How do you respond to orthodox privilege?

Wait for the storm of folly to blow over. The nihilistic idiocies that I cannot name shall have destroyed themselves in their madness before much longer, like the French Revolution before them.

If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.

The best generals are quite choosy where/when they engage. But stand by for the silent majority to weigh in some months hence.

hashkb• 6 years ago

Does pg reach many people who don't want his money or favor?

grugagag3• 6 years ago

To keep my sanity I tuned out of this conversation. I get easily confused by diverging opinions and I came to become afraid to say anything at all publicly because someone may feel hurt. I don't want to cause that to anyone but I get a general sense of going crazy when I think of what to say: huge cognitive dissonance. And that is not because I have some views that are not in sync with other peoples views, their views are simply confusing to follow.

Wake me up when this is over. I will do a last effort when things stabilize so I get on the same page with everyone or basically the general consensus.

josephhurtado• 6 years ago

Good argument, but the naming is wrong.

It is NOT orthodox privilege, but the complete opposite we are dealing with today.

Let's remind ourselves what orthodox means: "Following or conforming to the traditional or generally accepted rules or beliefs of a religion, philosophy, or practice."

Well nowadays the non-traditional views are trending, and shutting down the traditional views. So the "orthodox privilege" actually belongs to the NON-ORTHODOX folks who like to push their opinions to everyone else, and have the backing of major media, and academia behind them.

That is the reason why freedom of speech is dying in society today, and is being replaced with conformance, and silence. This is dangerous, and bad for democracy. Democracies require an open, respectful sharing of people's views. When those views are persecuted, the people are cancelled, the companies are boycotted, we have a problem. That problem is UN-ORTHODOX PRIVILEGE.

Orthodox Privilege

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