Heresy

by prtkgpt • 4 years ago

929 1163 4 years ago

_Microft• 4 years ago

Minor criticism: I wonder why including a statement like "like a vector field whose elements become aligned" was thought necessary. It does not make much sense technically and it does not even add to the content. If anything it makes me doubt the rest of the essay by suddenly making me aware that Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. From my point of view it is absolutely net-negative.

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

He's sort of thinking of a phase transition. I imagine it's included as a symptom of how he's visualizing the situation. The idea of a phase transition here makes sense, and I suspect is a fair description of some social phenomenon.

turbinerneiter• 4 years ago

Is the situation in the US that insane or is he fighting strawmen strapped to windmills?

emerged9• 4 years ago

It’s pretty insane. Notice any comment which is against witch hunt culture is being downvoted. The tech industry is fairly heavily ideologically captured because of where startup culture is largely based (SF).

Edit: and now it’s flagged.

kylemh• 4 years ago

Just read the comments in here. This is a whole lot of words to say: "I wish I could say things without facing consequences."

As somebody else said in this thread, it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion" when he instablocks anybody on Twitter so easily.

ekianjo4• 4 years ago

it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion"

Misquote. He said "implicitly ending the discussion by calling someone a x-ist", which is not the same at blocking someone who is annoying - blocking someone is just shutting your door, not making them lose their livelihood by defaming them.

Aeolun11• 4 years ago

instablocks anybody on Twitter

This is hardly implicit.

guelo• 4 years ago

strawmen

uxp100• 4 years ago

The Us is a little culturally weird right now (and always), and it depends on your industry a little but he’s mostly fighting strawmen strapped to windmills. I mean, what would PG know about this whole topic?

Also, you want to write software without “being canceled?” Well, dust off your oscilloscope skills, in the unglamorous embedded world I hear toned down right wing rants about Putin being canceled and Covid testing as a mass surveillance program and all that happens is sometimes someone’s like, alright, let’s move the meeting along.

3qz5• 4 years ago

Is the situation in the US that insane

Does PG live in the Bay Area? That’s probably why. Most mainstream American opinions would get a person fired there.

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

Name one?

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

No. It isn't insane at all.

mmastrac• 4 years ago

What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics.

It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

Both of those topics are fraught with gaslighting ("nobody is teaching X") and misrepresentation ("don't say gay") along with outright fabrication ("it's a right").

XorNot• 4 years ago

and misrepresentation ("don't say gay")

Exactly like you're doing here when you rode on in to "both sides!" this argument.

nonesuchluck• 4 years ago

Whole thing boils down to "I've always been in the cultural in-group, but man it sucks here in the out-group," as he notices for the first time what life has been like for most people, for most of history. Hilarious.

bufferoverflow• 4 years ago

That's a bad faith argument. He isn't complaining being shunned out of some culture, he is talking about people losing their job, people losing access to platforms that contain lots of people who want to listen to them.

ethbr04• 4 years ago

what life has been like for most people, for most of history

Aren't most people in the majority, in whatever metric is under consideration, by definition? Which tends to be the in-group in democracies?

glogla4• 4 years ago

Yup. If you want trans and gay people, history of racial oppression and female nipples on tv banned, that is just "normal" and "natural". But anything else is horrible attack on mah freeze peach.

pjbeam5• 4 years ago

None of the competing thoughtcrime tribes seem to care about things like free thought, discourse, etc. This is the frightening part to me--people in the "other tribe" aren't worthy of things like due process, and authoritarian approaches are fine as long as they are aimed at the "other".

I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

I have heard a scant few stories of people having their due process taken away.

There is some controversy though about whether the concept of due process as per law should be extended to a general principle that guides the operation of privately-owned websites. That isn't how the internet used to work so the jury's still out.

otterley17• 4 years ago

Nobody’s trying to put you in jail for having differing views. But there’s never going to be a world in which there aren’t social consequences for having them. If you think, for example, that the world is going to greet people who think it’s ok to molest children (whether they do it or not) with open arms, you’re just deluded.

glogla4• 4 years ago

You can't put a jew and a nazi into a room and say "have a free thought discourse". Or a (american) white supermarics and (american) person of color. Or a homophobe and a gay person.

There can be no discourse when one side wants just to be left alone and the other wants to exterminate them.

You might want to rethink that 20th century lesson.

gonehome6• 4 years ago

I agree - I also think this post does a nice job getting into it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-vali...

Main relevant bit copied below.

###

“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.

So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.

This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.

Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.

“Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”
“He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”

There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.

If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.

I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.

The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.”

tomrod8• 4 years ago

Precisely my thoughts.

In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US universities

I don't think this was new. Liberality tends to go hand in hand with seeking reality, as discovering something and then adopting it requires intellectual big-tentism. Perhaps the author bemoans the rise of bureaucracy within the university, which has demonstrably increased?

My concern is that these arguments about moral puritanicalism aren't without merit, but that they are often ignore the cancerous alt-right, which is bereft of morality beyond racial nationalism. Perhaps the cancel culture creedal concern is considered to be salvageable.

newbamboo4• 4 years ago

Is there an alt-right? People use that term, but they might as well be talking about unicorns. All these years, I’ve not met a single alt-right person despite being told this is a large and growing segment of our population, a pernicious and growing “threat to democracy!”Well, if they exist they look a lot like the old-right that voted in exactly the same fashion. If anything the right has gotten much more progressive. My statements here can all be quantified lest you disagree.

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

It's not "don't say gay", it's "don't subject, expect or mandate young kids to learn stuff about things like sexual orientation (or even gender identity) that they cannot possibly relate with prior to the biological changes of adolescence, and that are enough of a minefield for adults already. Leave this stuff to family and broader society for the time being."

edent3• 4 years ago

Do you really think that young kids don't notice their parents affection for each other? Or that their older sibling is dating someone? Or that people get pregnant?

brohoolio• 4 years ago

The teachers can’t address why someone in the class has two dads without risk of being sued. Heck the wording is vague enough you might not discuss marriage.

The ambiguity in the law is there as a feature to hush normal conversations that might otherwise happen.

fennecfoxen• 4 years ago

Florida education law, and this law, and education law in general, all have some real problems.

It's somewhat unfortunate that misinformational memes of this sort travel much faster than reasonable understandings of its problems (this is but one example.) I believe it impairs the resolution of the nation's problems. Yeah, it galvanizes some support, but also hardens the opposition, and impairs the ability to make any sort of incremental progress, leaving achievable reforms stalled for years or even decades.

Moreover, as a matter of principle, I don't really want to be part of a political movement which values spinning a story to its advantage more than it cares about informing the public. Build your movement on something solid.

otterley17• 4 years ago

It’s important to read all the parts of the law. The concerning parts are 1/the vagueness of it, and 2/enforceability though a private right of action (instead of having the state enforce it, parents get to sue the schools). It’s a minefield that educators must now trepidatiously tiptoe through. It makes their jobs significantly harder and more stressful.

And for what real benefit, exactly? How is this improving our society in any real way?

kjksf• 4 years ago

It's not "leave this stuff to family".

It's "you're going to jail if you dare to talk about it".

That's the obvious violation of First Amendment: government cannot use force to dictate what you say.

And this topic is not on the short list of exceptions (threats of violence etc.).

And stepping back: realize you're being played by politicians.

Republicans know well this bill is unconstitutional.

They know there are topics way more important to spend their very limited legislative time on.

But DeSantis is going to run for the president so Republicans are picking fights with stupid bills to whip up their base to vote for them.

Those stupid fights are also distracting you from things that actually matter i.e. how to maintain and increase prosperity of the people.

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

lol no it’s not - it’s literally a vigilante system that prevents teachers from talking about reality

throwaway5752• 4 years ago

Yup. It is conveniently one-side. I don't think it's by design, just accident. When you've concluded that there is a partisan problem, it takes a lot mental discipline (more than even some prominent technology figures have) to see it on both sides of an acrimonious divide. Nothing could be more cancel-culture than ethnic nationalism and efforts to disenfranchise large groups of persons.

Who even came up with the phrase cancel culture to begin with? When? Why does it rhyme and is a just a few syllables? Why doesn't anyone who creates and pushes these slogan/memes and what their motivation is?

sputr• 4 years ago

This comment is not just intellectually dishonest, it's also a basic example of the core problem of our society: demonization of "others".

You can have a problem with cancel culture and not be anti CRT. Who would have thought, right?

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

Who are the major anti-cancel culture pro-CRT figures?

It seemed to me that the firing of Timnit Gebru at Google was superficially the political reverse of the firing of Antonio García Martínez at Apple. And yet the latter case is considered cancel culture, while the former is not.

ZoomerCretin• 4 years ago

I find these "the same people who argue for/against X are the same people who argue for/against Y" comments odd. Do you have a specific example of this outside of politicians*, or are you lumping everyone in camps X and Y together without proof of significant overlap?

*Politicians don't start from "I believe X/Y, let's do something about it." They start from "How do I get my voters agitated and eager to vote for me, and what position should I take on controversial issues X/Y during an election year to achieve this goal?" Politics/electioneering is showmanship first. Silly things like real personal political beliefs only get in the way of politicians' end goal of power.

babyshake• 4 years ago

Another thing I have found related to heresy is that the strongest accusations of heresy often involve ideas and statements that are the most difficult to argue against. Recently, I was involved in a workplace conversation about how the org had a certain gender/racial proportional makeup and there was a goal of those diversity numbers being different within a specified timeframe. I suggested that this implied bias, and was warned that what I said might offend people. I think this was because I said something fairly rational and it would have been difficult to argue against in rational terms. Along these lines, the calls to cancel Dave Chappelle for example are largely because he has made some good points.

kardianos• 4 years ago

Yes, I have a problem with teachers talking to my kindergarten kid about sex.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

DSG is the status quo as far as I’m concerned. In the most liberal US state a decade+ ago, we had to have parent-signed slips to attend sex ed at all.

The idea that you could introduce homosexuality or anything else without the same basic check seems backwards.

Granted, the DSG bill has some badly-written foibles but the general idea is on the mark.

eganist3• 4 years ago

It seems like Paul is confusing intolerance of intolerance with heresy in this essay.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.

E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.

(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)

ByteJockey6• 4 years ago

I think you're the one who is confused here. The paradox of tolerance was not conceived to describe people who merely hold opinions.

To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted):

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Which is fair. If someone is going to respond to you by beating and shooting you, you shouldn't have to tolerate them. The justification for the intolerance of the intolerant is that the intolerant use violence to get their way.

But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.

snerbles• 4 years ago

In practice it seems Popper's Paradox is frequently cited as a justification of force against heretics, accompanied by claims that the heresy is in and of itself a form of violence.

eganist3• 4 years ago

But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.

Neither was I. Nor do I think Paul should be "rounded up" either. Just that I believe his mode of thinking is flawed. I expressed an opinion just as he did.

edent3• 4 years ago

I mean, this is the only real response to people posting this sort of nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCBhKs4faI

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

YouTube blocked in the US based on copyright grounds.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

Cancel culture strikes again

dijksterhuis• 4 years ago

Title: Stewart Lee - These days, if you say you're English ...

Is a clip from a BBC show (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, worth a watch if you enjoy British comedy) so copyright block not too surprising depending on where you're located.

He basically takes the piss out of a taxi driver. The stereotype goes that a taxi driver will share their "bloody immigrants" opinions with their fares whether the fares care about hearing it or not.

Cabbie says: "These days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you."

Stewart "wears him down" in the bit by repeating the question back with increasing incredulity and after about 3 minutes the cabbie character eventually just says, "no, you don't actually get arrested."

It's fckin hilarious.

fpiazza• 4 years ago

Excellent read

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

Graham has forgotten his own essays if he thinks that this is a rebirth.

"What you can't say" [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html] is one of the first of his essays I ever read. It eventually directed me to this site.

At the time, I thought it was brilliant. 18 years on, I think it's a good piece of writing but he's only got half the story. Sadly, today's essay suggest to me he hasn't found the other half in the intervening nearly two decades.

Taboo is a powerful tool. Some taboos, to be sure, outlive their usefulness. But some compress lifetimes of experience into easily remembered lessons for people who have not yet had that experience so that we can ever progress... If every generation has to keep relearning the same lessons over and over, there's no time for more.

The counterweight to the philosophy Graham is espousing here is this one (https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...). A taboo is a social analogy to a fence. Someone built it at some point for a reason. That reason might be gone, in which case the fence is unnecessary. But if you're going to tear down a fence, understand why it's there.

18 years on, I don't think Paul is wrong, but the repeated mistake I see people in my field make is assuming that they're the smartest person in the room when they encounter a heresy or taboo and falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.

kijin2• 4 years ago

Graham didn't say it's a "recent" rebirth in the sense that we often use that word in the technology sector. It's "recent" in the sense that historians use it, i.e. sometime in the last generation or two. In TFA he places the cultural shift somewhere in the late 80s, long before his 2004 essay on the matter.

I've read both essays and it seems that Graham's opinion on the topic hasn't changed much over the last 18 years. We can probably all guess which "recent" event prompted him to revisit the topic, whether we agree with him or not.

stareatgoats5• 4 years ago

Sorry, can't guess, not in the US. Care to enlighten us?

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

Graham has forgotten his own

"If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head."

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

I've heard that, but it doesn't apply here... Graham's position doesn't appear to have changed. Indeed, he seems to be retreading old ground like he forgot he wrote the other essay.

nitrogen3• 4 years ago

smartest person in the room ... falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.

I think you've made an interesting argument, but isn't this evidence that the taboo mechanism is failing at its job and needs to be replaced with something better?

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

Every system has weaknesses.

The advantage to the taboo system is that if it's the smart folk who are getting themselves into sticky situations jumping fences, at least they're smart enough to have a fair shot at getting out.

Anything we replace it with needs to maintain the feature of protecting the most vulnerable... Taboos have the advantage of being simple, so you don't have to be smart to adhere to them.

pkulak3• 4 years ago

When you say or do socially unacceptable things, there can be consequences. Is that “heresy”? I always associated that word with religion, myself, but it’s interesting that religion is so out of favor right now that you can use it as a comparison to argue that any action not explicitly illegal should be free of negative consequence.

Aeolun11• 4 years ago

Is that “heresy”?

Depends on whether you get put to the stake for this socially unacceptable thing.

At some point it was socially unacceptable/heresy for a woman to float when thrown in a pond.

krainboltgreene10• 4 years ago

That actually never happened, much like cancel culture it's a myth made up by people trying to sell books.

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

Yes, heresy by definition is an opinion that is deemed socially unacceptable.

pkulak3• 4 years ago

Not any definitions I can find:

belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.

skippyboxedhero• 4 years ago

Religion isn't out of favour. We are currently in one of the most religious periods of human history but the gods and authorities have just changed.

frazbin• 4 years ago

This is a crappy hot take. Monetary and labor contributions to religious endeavors are way down and have been for a while. I understand the desire to call any strongly held organized belief 'religion' but you're misrepresenting most of human history when you do so.

evocatus2• 4 years ago

Let me dust off my copy of the Malleus Maleficarum.

tedivm3• 4 years ago

This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird. I have the right to judge your statements just as much as you have a right to say them. I have the right to leave jobs when it turns out the people working there hate people like me, and companies have the right to hire people who aren't going to alienate future potential employees.

When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes. People aren't getting fired for picking nomad over kubernetes. People are getting called out for denying the existence of people who aren't like them. When someone gets fired for, as an example, purposefully misgendering their colleagues- that isn't getting fired for having a bad opinion, that's being fired for making a hostile work environment.

What's always interesting to me is that these "free speech absolutists" are explicitly calling out the left here, when the right is the one passing "don't say gay" legislation and refusing to allow trans children the healthcare needed to save their lives. The right is also kicking everyone out of their party who doesn't bow before Trump. To say that the left is creating heresies while ignoring that the right is literally creating new dogma is just delusional to me.

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept. Does that make for a hostile work environment or "deny the existence" of anyone? I submit to you that the answer is no, except for die-hard adherents of the new ideology. Well, that simply isn't my religion, and I resent attempts to force it on me.

eganist3• 4 years ago

Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept. Does that make for a hostile work environment or "deny the existence" of anyone? I submit to you that the answer is no, except for die-hard adherents of the new ideology. Well, that simply isn't my religion, and I resent attempts to force it on me.

Here's the question:

Are you tolerant of people who do? Or do you make the lives of those people (who viscerally feel their gender identity to be true) more difficult than those who share your belief?

The line is crossed with the latter.

mcronce5• 4 years ago

Yes, it does. You don't get to decide for other people who or what they are.

edent3• 4 years ago

That's fine. You are welcome to believe that.

What you can't do is harass people, deny them service, or make their lives a misery.

No one is forcing you to believe in something. They're asking you not to be an arsehole about something which doesn't affect your life.

fosefx• 4 years ago

It does not really matter what your stance on that topic is. If your co-workers don't what to be called a certain way, just respect that. E.g. I don't want to be called by my full first name but rather a short version of it. If you deliberately disrespect my request that is simply hostile.

ryanobjc4• 4 years ago

So, your new colleague says their name is Richard. You decide it’s hilarious to call him “dick” and refuse to stop even after he’s asked you multiple times.

Pronouns aren’t any different - if you had a masculine looking female coworker at work - say she was into bodybuilding - and you keeping calling her “he” as a “joke”… persisting when you were asked not to, by your boss, by hr perhaps even. What kind of person are you being here?

You can not believe in gender identity, I don’t care. But be respectful to your colleagues at work. Is that so much to ask for? To literally not be as asshole? Is that what you’re defending - your right to be a flaming asshole to your coworkers without any consequence??

halfmatthalfcat• 4 years ago

Your supposition that it does not make for a hostile work environment is a privilege you should examine.

em-bee• 4 years ago

the question is how you go about it.

what do you do when you are asked to respect someone else's choice of gender identity? do you go along with it, while quietly keeping your own opinion? or do you complain and purposefully ignore their request? or maybe do something else entirely? how do you keep a friendly work environment when the mere questioning of someones gender identity can be considered hostile?

you ask that your rejection of the idea is considered not hostile, yet you consider the enforcement of rules of interaction as something hostile.

jleyank3• 4 years ago

s/gender/religious/g and see how well things go down.

ratww9• 4 years ago

It depends.

I know people who thinks like you, but they don't shut the fuck about these things, and take every possible the opportunity to proselytise about it.

I've seen it happening in workplaces, for example. But also parties, random people on the street.

Not shutting the fuck about it is fucking annoying and if it's in the workplace I'll be complaining the fuck about it until you stop and/or looking for another job.

Now, I'm a 100% neutral part on this, and even me don't wanna hear about your bullshit. Imagine now if you were to use this to actively hurt people.

tomrod8• 4 years ago

Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept

One funny thing I learned from studying high demand religions: you don't have to believe something for it to be true. It's existence is entirely orthogonal to a person's opinion.

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

I think Graham's essay conflates two phenomenon when he describes heresy as thought that people equate to a crime. In fairness to him, societies have conflated them also. But if we're talking about modern American society, they are fundamentally different but can smell the same to somebody who doesn't see the distinction.

A heresy is a position that damages trust. When someone publicly espouses a heretical position, they damage other people's trust in them to make good decisions and have good judgment. Now, you can also breach trust via committing a crime, so the overlap is clear. But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked. Somebody who says women don't belong in space is going to end up as unqualified to be director of NASA as somebody who fundamentally and with great conviction mis-states the tyranny of the rocket equation. Both mark the person as a poor fit for a high-trust job were there opinion on those topics matters.

And people who believe themselves against "canceling" seem to often be in agreement even if they don't realize it of themselves. A talk was famously pulled from a security conference several years back because after the talk, people concluded that the speaker didn't know what they were talking about. The difference in opinion is on what constitutes a breach of trust, not on whether people can respond to such breaches by routing around other people.

thesuperbigfrog4• 4 years ago

> nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked.

That's because no trials are held in modern mob justice for heretics. The mob justice punishments are more like lynchings.

Medieval heretics could at least expect a "witch hunt"-style trial. The monarchy or church was the authority and there was a semblance of rule of law.

Modern heretics face mob justice by self-appointed vigilantes and mob justice punishments. The lack of due process is concerning.

skibob1027• 4 years ago

“But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions.”

This is not true. You don’t have to look hard for examples of people being jailed in the US for holding unorthodox positions.

Defining heresy as “a position they damages trust,” implies that an accused heretic is at fault for believing something that “damages trust.” That is entirely subjective relative to the one whose trust was damaged.

Society has claimed heresy to suppress political and religious opponents since the beginning of human history. We have also shown a track record of being very wrong with regard to how we define heresy in the past.

Why should we believe that we are any better than our ancestors on this front?

pikma2• 4 years ago

Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone? I see this expression often, but I'm genuinely puzzled by what it means in practice.

I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, how criminal transgenders should be incarcerated, or whether affirmative action is a good way to help disadvantaged people.

tedivm3• 4 years ago

I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that.

I do think the article is about that. I think it was purposefully left vague so he could take advantage of people giving the benefit of the doubt. I don't think people's pronouns should be up for debate, and I believe PG does.

ModernMech5• 4 years ago

Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone?

Here's an example:

"There's no such thing as a trans person. Trans is not a real thing, it's a mental illness and a delusion that needs to be cured. "

If you hear that and you are trans, then you are bound to feel like someone is denying you actually exist. Its a strange feeling that someone whose existence has always been validated by society cannot really relate to. I imagine that's why you are puzzled by its meaning.

rendang4• 4 years ago

Interesting - I would never knowingly refer to someone by pronouns other than those which correspond with their birth sex, it would violate my conscience to do so. Obviously not a majority position in SV but also not an extremely rare position to hold in the world more largely. I suppose that means you would fire me and others of the same opinion if you had the chance.

I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

Does the right have hold of corporate culture however?

I think the issue is the consequences of speech which are permissible themselves -- I think being shunned by a friendship group seems always permissible. Being marginalized in one's workplace, shunned by one's colleges, and so on -- this seems far less permissible.

I dont think this is a strictly left/right issue; and what today is called "left" is rather a kinda of corporate politics --- "corporate correctness" rather than "political correctness". This is about embracing "diversity and equality" of your workplace identities (vs., diversity of skills; and equality of treatment, for example).

I'd imagine if work/life were better seperated, and the workplace better managed, these issues would be felt less seriously.

The question of "free speech" is a massive red-hearing. Everyone accepts some concequences to some speech in some situtations. The only useful conversation to have is: what concequences are permissible, and when.

Presumably, likewise, no one believes abitary ones, whenever -- yet this seems to be the implied position of many who think you can just stop the argument at the point where some "anarchism of speech" is shown to fail. Nope.

tedivm3• 4 years ago

I think it's ridiculous to think the left has hold of corporate culture. I think a lot of different companies have a lot of different cultures, and I think for the majority of companies the right holds power. I think that tech companies are a major exception to this, in part because it seems that a much larger percentage of queer people are in tech (both directly and indirectly, via companies that support tech)- but if you pick any random company in the US you're going to find a fairly conservative culture.

The only reason I brought up left versus right was because that's the reductionism PG resorted to here. I also think it's a bit more nuanced. I also think focusing on this being a free speech issue, as PG does, is a red herring for other cultural issues.

roflc0ptic8• 4 years ago

When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes.

There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.

See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.

I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.

jakelazaroff3• 4 years ago

See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.

Is this really a topic you needed to weigh in on? I’m assuming you weren’t concern trolling or playing devil’s advocate, but it’s very easy to imagine how a “gentle challenge” might get interpreted as such if your relationship with the other person doesn’t generally include similar discussion topics.

throwaway826527• 4 years ago

I'm very confused as to why you're suggesting that people being disagreeable or unreasonable is a thing that is specific to "the current moment" or is specific to any one political identity. But please correct me if I misunderstood.

Edit: Another response brought up a good point. Your pushing back on body image issues seems pretty tone deaf. Those are pretty personal and the point there is that it doesn't help to shame people for being overweight. Nobody responds well to that, it usually just causes hurt feelings. You can still promote healthy lifestyles without making it about "anti-fatness".

ajross• 4 years ago

There are plenty of examples [...] e.g. David Schor

I think it's rather the opposite. There are, to be sure, tragedies and abuses of woke rhetoric that gets directed at the wrong people and/or implemented in outrageous ways. But they're pretty rare, and generally get a ton of media coverage for exactly that reason. Those are what PG is writing about.

But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people entering this kind of argument are actually just wanting more cover to say things they used to say that are... well, kinda off. Not "lose your job" off, but casually "x-ist" in a way that most of us would prefer not to engage with.

And really, that's the rub here, and the biggest problem with PG's essay here. Where are the examples? If there's something you want to say but feel you can't, then say it. This is a reasonably anonymous forum. PG is reasonably immune to that kind of criticism. But the problem is that when you say it the debate becomes a debate about your opinions and not your oppression, and that's ground these folks won't win on, like this one:

I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric

You literally had a friend walk out of your life because you couldn't respect her boundaries about something as senselessly unobjective as body image, and the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one?

Aeolun11• 4 years ago

I don’t think people want to say bad things without consequence. They want to be able to discuss a topic without the rabid tone police descending on it.

Like, I say I cannot understand trans people at all, and people will jump on me because I’m rejecting them and making them feel bad, when I’m just stating a fact.

There’s a lot of this stuff.

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

“I don’t understand it but I’ll trust their feelings and the recommendations of their doctor” is very different from “I don’t understand it so I’ll call them mentally ill, misgender them, or insist that legislation prevent access to medical care”.

jleyank3• 4 years ago

I can’t understand bigots at all, particularly things like language. Yet Quebec is full of them.

i000• 4 years ago

Perhaps replacing "trans" with "black", "Jew", "Muslim" or any other marginalized minority group, would help you understand why such blanket "I cannot understand X at all" causes people to object?

lexicality• 4 years ago

I say I cannot understand trans people at all

Seems like a weird thing to say. I don't understand FORTRAN at all and as such I stay away from people discussing it.

Why do you want to tell trans people that you don't understand them? Wouldn't it be easier to read some literature so you can gain a basic understanding?

lowkey_• 4 years ago

People are getting called out for denying the existence of people who aren't like them.

I see this a lot and it makes no sense to me. What does it mean to deny the existence of someone? To pretend they do not exist?

People who make that comment usually seem to be falling into a trap of viewing a disagreement or difference in opinion as something much more extreme.

malnourish3• 4 years ago

Take this statement: "all trans people are misgendering themselves and _should_ conform to the gender assigned to them based on the sexual organs they had at birth".

This effectively denies the existence of people who believe or desire to be their non-assigned gender. The statement tells trans people that in the eyes of the speaker, their personal identity is a fabrication.

daveoc64• 4 years ago

I've read comments on articles about LGBT issues (often trans topics these days), and there are a lot of people that say things like "Being gay is a choice".

If that's not denying the existence of a different kind of person to you, I don't know what is.

ekianjo4• 4 years ago

This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird.

Define horrible.

chmod6003• 4 years ago

If it were only about a hostile work environment, it would only be about behavior/speech in the workplace that is not easily avoidable.

But a lot of these heresies are about behavior/speech outside the workplace, or behavior/speech that you need to actively look for.

So I don't buy the "hostile work environment" justification.

ekianjo4• 4 years ago

What's always interesting to me is that these "free speech absolutists" are explicitly calling out the left here

Looks like someone didnt understand the article, because PG directly addressed that point.

javajosh4• 4 years ago

This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence

People say horrible things all the time! In fact, I reckon that if you said anything, a non-negligible fraction of the world's 7.5 billion people would think you horrible for saying it. It is not possible to avoid saying horrible things, especially out of context.

Even if you limit yourself to racist and sexist speech, how do you deal the fact that roughly 100% of the people on this planet, of ALL races and sexes, are themselves racist and sexist, and say racist/sexist things all the time? What are the consequences for a homophobic black person? What are the consequences for the Japanese woman who hates the Chinese? What are the consequences for the Libyan mother who circumcised her 4 daughters, with the support of her government and community?

The culture war that the left has started is an intellectually bankrupt grab for cultural power, who's primary effect has been to piss off the good people of the left, and to inspire a once-in-a-century outbreak of insanity on the right. I get that you want to make the world a better place, and it makes sense that punishing people for wrong views could make it so, but you've done the experiment now. Tell me, how is it going?

seaourfreed3• 4 years ago

* Heresy supporters give themselves a license thinking it is about issues of real racism, sexism, and other real bad problems, but...

* The tools of censorship are then used for normal speech. Proof: Ron Paul had a YouTube channel. He left politics before the covid and no videos had been posted since the pandemic started. But they censored his YouTube channel full of videos by censoring all of the videos and the channel.

* Proof here: https://twitter.com/ronpaul/status/1308849979730071554

* This censorship of the political right happens in a long list of cases that have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or false propaganda. Ron Paul's YouTube channel being censored is one example in a list of thousands just like it.

chmod6003• 4 years ago

"This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird."

It's really easy to think/say horrible things. The main defense humans have against it is following orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.

If you think you are naturally good (whatever that means), you are wrong. If you think you are good because of your intellect, you're also wrong. It takes many generations to build up the kind of orthodoxy that keeps humans good. And the lessons behind it are too many to learn in a lifetime.

So, we need to mostly follow orthodoxy, at least in our actions. But that poses an intellectual problem: orthodoxy is imperfect, and to discuss and advance it, or even understand it well, you have to challenge it. If merely by challenging it you transgress, then it will never be understood very well and certainly not advanced.

Granted, there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.

Remember: gay marriage was illegal almost everywhere 20 years ago. Imagine the surprise to, say, a 60 year old, that "misgendering" (by using pronouns associated with one's biological sex) might be a firable offense today.

thesuperbigfrog4• 4 years ago

> orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.

One issue is that there are multiple orthodoxies. Each human culture has its own orthodoxy which is reflected in the culture's norms and practices.

> there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.

When and why is it right or just to judge one culture against another?

We can try to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, but it is very difficult to understand without having lived their lives and experienced it ourselves. Perhaps the best we can do is to be compassionate and tolerant of others who think or live differently than us. We can educate, persuade, and help, but condemning them and punishing them strikes me as unfair and perhaps unjust depending on the circumstances.

subjectsigma3• 4 years ago

1) Whenever people call it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, I ask them if they've read the text of the bill. So far it's like 0-8.

2) I think you're conflating two different groups of people to make your argument sound better. I don't like cancel culture and I don't like the Florida bill either. People aren't just "ignoring" it.

3) > denying the existence of people who aren't like them

This is such a weird, vague statement and I have no idea what it means - which is great because it perfectly captures the mob mentality of the far-left cancel culture. The reason everyone is so afraid of it is because you never know exactly what you can say, and it changes by person by day.

In my professional experience, even "acknowledging the existence" of trans people is a minefield. The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive. Certain people think changes of pronouns should be handled differently and if you disagree with them you eventually get a meeting invite from your supervisor called "Discussion".

Speaking of hostile work environments...

ModernMech5• 4 years ago

The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive.

I understand the euphemism treadmill can be difficult, but understand why it exists: when people in a group use certain words to self identify, those words are then coopted by outsiders of the group to vilify insiders. Therefore the old self-identifying words are abandoned by insiders and left as markers of those outsiders who are attempting vilify them. Meanwhile new words of self identification are adopted by insiders that have no negative connotation.

Take for instance people with mental disabilities. The words lunatic, insane, retarded, disabled, mentally disabled, special etc. have all been used to describe the same mental state, and have all been at times the "correct" way to refer to such people, and also the "insensitive" way to refer to such people. Calling someone "retarded" used to be clinical. Now you say "retarded" and it's a grave insult.

This is just the price of diversity, and existing in a world where people want to use powerful words to shame and demean. Words have amazing power, and when they are wielded in evil ways you have no other choice but to abandon the word and move to a next one.

This is why the N-word is so forbidden to say; Black Americans took a stand and said: "No more. We are reclaiming the power of this word, and you just can't use it anymore, period." It took a huge movement to make that social change, and it'll take the same similar movement to stop the euphemism treadmill for trans people.

In the meantime, try to keep up. If you make a real effort people notice and they have tolerance for that. However if you make clear that you have no idea why you have to keep up with all these words in the first place, and it's really all just a bother to you that you'd rather not deal with, you're implicitly signaling you're more aligned with someone who may use those words in a harmful way, and that may be why you are met with hostilities.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

Cpoll• 4 years ago

I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.

Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.

The problem is that there are heresies and heresies, and conflating everything together isn't helpful.

To give one extreme of a "heresy": It's reasonable to not want to associate with someone if they're (in your perspective) ideologically reprehensible. In that sense, it was a bit aberrant that in the past most people would look the other way at stuff like racism and antisemitism in academia or the workplace ("none of my business," "not related to their professional skills," etc.)

But when other people think of "heresies" they might be talking about approving of a right-wing policy in a left-wing environment, or (moreso in the past) being labelled "communist," or taking contrary stances on things like wage equality.

So to reiterate my point, the article is flawed and can only lead to noisy nuance-less arguments until it spends more time defining "heresy."

blockwriter• 4 years ago

It is the infinite regress of orthodoxy that puts the essay’s rhetoric in jeopardy. I think the essay is internally consistent. American culture has built up an unsolvable Zeno’s paradox that no one seems interested in thinking through because barbarians prefer to live in a state of supernatural ignorance. “All conversation about this topic is flawed, therefore the original idea and the response is unable to influence my priors.”

CPLX3• 4 years ago

If it’s a dog whistle it’s the loudest one I’ve ever heard.

Beginning of the actual framing of the issue:

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.
For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist,"

Is there any genuine confusion what he’s talking about here? How many commonly used words fit the “x-ist” framing?

I mean he’s a white pontificating boomer billionaire active on Twitter worried he’ll eventually say something dumb and get cancelled.

Which, indeed, is a concept that’s having a cultural moment right now. The problem is he’s adding literally nothing to the discussion.

I think most sane people can realize that the fringe “woke” elements of the discourse can veer into ridiculousness. Maybe that matters a lot maybe it matters a little I dunno.

To the extent there’s an actual problem here it’s really focused on those who are potentially at actual risk.

Examples of actual problems that could be created by excessive wokeness include the increasing degree to which HR is able to divide and control the most vulnerable elements of the labor force, or the highly cynical ways in which jargon laden intersectional language is used to obscure a hegemony of corporate and wealthy donor interests over leftist or activist organizations.

Would be interesting if he had opinions on that.

But instead we’re again talking about how the most powerful economic forces in our culture are being trolled on Twitter. That isn’t an actual fucking problem. Like really it isn’t.

PG is clearly a very smart guy. I’ve read his books I want to like him. Sure is a terrible pity he’s not spending his twilight years being introspective about the horrifying legacy of inequality and misery that’s been inflicted on society by the tech sector, where he has an actual ability to have a positive influence.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

The article isn’t flawed; it perfectly shows PGs evolving right leaning viewpoints. I used to understand where he came from when he originally started to argue about women in tech, but the new things he says, can’t stay with them anymore.

You’re trying to divide two types of heresies because you don’t want to acknowledge the truth, there’s no two types just a sliding scale of offensiveness. You want there to be repercussions for some heresies (overt racism and homophobia?) while others should be let to slide by. But there’s no inherent difference between the two types. PG is smart and acknowledges that, but decides there should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be. As long as it’s not the government that’s doing the banning in public forums people need to shut up about their rights. What’s special about the government? As PGs friend Thiel eloquently put, government is a monopoly on violence, it stands to reason the only entity that shouldn’t have the authority to shut your opinions and voice is the entity with the monopoly on violence.

But I guess once you’ve stayed rich and influential for long enough you’re annoyed at this one remaining domain where you can’t just have everything you wanted yet so you want to change the rules to let you do the same. That’s what people like Thiel and now sadly PG are trying to do. They don’t care about any real issues, they just want to spend time blasting wokeness and actively sabotage all of humanity (in Thiels case) because I don’t know what their endgame is.

thematrixturtle• 4 years ago

There should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be.

So you're saying that there are factually correct statements that nobody should be able to utter without facing repercussions? Can you offer an example?

Beltalowda6• 4 years ago

Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.

I think this is actually the big problem in the debate, not "cancel culture" or "heresies". A lot of people seem gleefully enthusiastic about seeing the worst in other people. This is not isolated to just one ideological side: people on the right engage in it just as much as people on the left.

I've started to seriously dislike "dog-whistling". Often it's "yes, what they're saying is looks fine on the surface, but I know their actual secret motivations!" Yes, things like "14/88" and whatnot really are "dog-whistling" and it's fine to call it out as such, but 9 times out of 10 I see it used today it's weird assertion about someone's motivations. It's essentially a straw-man argument with extra steps (allude to a far more extreme position than what was stated, and then attack that).

Sometimes this goes so far I wonder if I somehow don't understand the English language correctly, or ... something. Many times I see people commit a "heresy" it's something fairly mild – or even completely benign – taken to far more extreme levels than what it seems to mean on the surface.

In this specific article it seems clear to me that Graham isn't defending tosspot Nazis or other overt "x-ists", yet here in the comments we have people who seemingly take this to mean that Graham is defending folks who say that "people with different skin colors are dumber" and similar things. You can read that in his essay, I suppose, but only if you come at it with a certain attitude.

Once you eliminate the "this person is x-ist, let's find arguments to support it"-attitude the whole "heresy" problem goes away, too. I haven't the foggiest how to actually do that though.

skellington8• 4 years ago

This part of his essay addresses your thought:

...one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves.

Remember, these are religious fanatics not scientific objectivists.

jroblak2• 4 years ago

Genuinely funny coming from the dude who insta-blocks anyone who even mildly disagrees with him about _anything_ on Twitter.

ratww9• 4 years ago

I'm really wondering why this is a problem.

Sure, that might insulate him and put him in an echo chamber, but blocking is entirely his right, and he's the one who'll get the consequences from that.

I also tend to do a similar thing in spaces I curate, and it's honestly better for mental health. Someone comes out from nowhere with something completely 180 degrees from what I say? That's not reality TV, that's my private [social network page]. I'm not gonna be baited.

Saying someone "can't block" is an asshole move. Nobody should be forced to talk and see messages by anyone.

mwcampbell6• 4 years ago

I'm really wondering why this is a problem.

To take an example from my own experience, if I automatically tuned out anyone who said something bad about the requirement to make things accessible for blind people, I would deny myself the opportunity to learn how they think and become more effective in my advocacy or, possibly, revise my position.

Osmose4• 4 years ago

The problem is that he has way more influence in the world than you or I due to his status, money, connections, etc. The amount of harm resulting from him being in an echo chamber is much larger, especially since he actively posts in order to influence large amounts of people.

People judging you for your blocking is one of the prices you're socially expected to pay in return for those privileges.

ekianjo4• 4 years ago

who insta-blocks anyone who even mildly disagrees with him about _anything_ on Twitter.

Does his block makes you lose your job? If not, you are missing the point.

jroblak2• 4 years ago

I took this essay's main thrust to be around a lack of nuance in the discourse. His own behavior indicates he's pretty unwilling to have any nuance himself; pot calling the kettle black, etc.

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

“Does losing your job kill you? If not, you are missing the point.”

ttiurani• 4 years ago

I'm not a fan of his by any means, but want to still give my N=1 counter example:

I have disagreed with PG on Twitter, and also pointed out errors in his logic and facts a bunch of times, and haven't been blocked.

afc• 4 years ago

The clearest evidence of this [that some x-ist statements may be true] is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).

skellington8• 4 years ago

You mis-paraphrased the argument. Your paraphrase insertion [] is incorrect. It should be:

[that such x-ist labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity]

Your conclusion is roughly his point, but his point holds independently of the "truth" of the underlying statement.

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

It's a "truth vs. order" debate. PG is in highly stable environments where order isnt an issue, so he is more concerned about truth. Generally, when "x-isms" are accused, the issue is the break down of social order in the environment in which the accusations are made.

It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.

Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.

You can not make progress in a land of fiction. Propaganda is a stop sign, not a tool for productivity.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

It's a "truth vs. order" debate.
It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.

I think this is pretty insightful.

There are two things at play here that I think are being conflated - one is challenging certain concepts, and the other is challenge the social order that is predicated upon them.

Let’s take racism as an example.

Arguing that racism doesn’t exist, in whole or in part, is challenging the concept. Rightly or wrongly, that is one of the “heresies” from the article. It’s also a very difficult thing to discuss respectfully and productively in the workplace, and in most every case I can think of off the top of my head, unproductive.

Arguing that the actions taken in response to that conclusion, in my opinion, is and should be a different thing entirely. We have a work environment today that seeks to offset historical/systemic racism through positive steps such as affirmative action. I believe that challenging the implementation, scope, or even the continued existence of affirmative action should be acceptable - because it is a specific action that is in the scope of the course of business and has a demonstrable impact on the work environment itself.

From my reading of the article, I think what PG is saying is that it should be much more acceptable than it is to openly and honestly discuss the system that we have built that creates our work environments. I don’t believe that someone who argues against affirmative action - or any similar workplace policy, explicit or implicit - should be anathema.

This example of racism/AA is only one example. There are others with similar stigma associated.

Personally, I feel a great deal of social pressure not to discuss anything related to COVID in the workplace. I work for a company based in SF, but live in a small town in the South - very different social environments. I have had COVID, have verified that I have demonstrable antibodies on par with what is expected from vaccination + boosters. I also have a history of systemic inflammation that I’ve struggled with my whole life, and both my GP and the specialist I see agree that vaccination poses at least a slightly higher risk for me than for the general population. As a result I’ve decided not to get the vaccine. I have absolutely zero desire to try to sway anyone to see things my way, and honestly don’t want to talk about it at work lest it turn into a political argument. With few exceptions, I avoid discussing politics with colleagues.

A while ago we were planning a team outing in California. I wasn’t going to be able to attend, but I absolutely didn’t want to discuss that the reason was that I wasn’t vaccinated and don’t want to be.

This is the kind of heresy that concerns me. I feel like it should be reasonable for me to say that I am not vaccinated and don’t intend to be. I shouldn’t have to justify that. I may be excluded from some activities, and that’s acceptable to me - but it’s a discussion that I don’t even feel like I can have. Instead I have to hide this decision, avoid discussion of it, and hope I’m not put into a position where I’m forced to. If I do have to reveal it to my employer I expect that at the very least I’ll be viewed negatively in their eyes and it will harm my social environment.

It shouldn’t be seen as heresy to hold a different opinion.

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

thank you, that seems to be a very useful framework to keep in mind

jameshart2• 4 years ago

A statement, on its own, isn't "x-ist".

Choosing to make a particular statement at a particular time, in a particular context, in order to promote an "x-ist" agenda is "x-ist".

That's the same whether or not the statement is true.

kemayo18• 4 years ago

The particularly uncharitable reading of that quote that jumped to my mind when I read it is "but why can't I, a white guy, say the n-word?" But this probably isn't what Graham actually had in mind.

I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.

There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

This was also the example that came to my mind. It is perhaps one of the most iconic examples, and as such, absent a concrete example or further clarification, I don't see why you shouldn't assume that this is representative of what the author had in mind.

ratww9• 4 years ago

I feel like a pariah sometimes in those discussions.

I agree with PG in that I'm also not too happy with the "only X can be x-ist", but on the other hand I'm also not a conspiracy nut that talks non-stop about "critical race theory". I'm also not free speech absolutist, as I'm ok with things like European law criminalizing Nazism or glorification of genocide.

I feel like I'm constantly against three very radical groups, and there's nobody representing me.

I'm tired of radicalism coming from three different directions.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

When liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism have all failed you, perhaps the only path left is communitarianism.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

Anarchism also remains.

mordae3• 4 years ago

Hahaha, same here.

Have you noticed how the discussion here is fairly civil? It's very similar to most Reddit places, lobste.rs and other *moderated* fora as well.

Most of these extremes only arise in unmoderated spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. Or the original /b/.

Similar things are happening in the news comment sections wherever they don't care to moderate.

It radicalizes people long-term. I am no fan of censorship, but EU will probably step in eventually.

teddyh• 4 years ago

I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s The Chromium Fence (1955):

’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’

Nobody heard him.

— https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...

muglug2• 4 years ago

Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth

I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).

By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.

pikma2• 4 years ago

Is the reason it's sexist because it can be interpreted as "women are less capable than men"? You would say this other statement is false and sexist, correct?

happytoexplain5• 4 years ago

I know you didn't ask me, but I just wanted to say that language is nothing without context. "Less capable" is very subjective and context-dependent, so without more specifics it can't really be "true" or "false" except very colloquially. As for "sexist" - in a void with no context, it's apparently sexist, but that doesn't mean the sentence can't exist in a non-sexist context.

CrimsonCape• 4 years ago

"Women are less capable than men" is sexist; "The majority of women are physically and mentally incapable of running a Fortune 500 company" is a neutral hypothesis that can be asserted with anecdotal evidence, sociological studies, and if modern corporate leadership wasn't silent on the issue, there would also likely be firsthand testimony. <--- heresy But on the other hand, you could likely present evidence to the contrary. The comparison of the opposing evidence, and the careful scrutiny of the facts that provide that evidence, is the most truthful approach to the question.

For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist

jameshart2• 4 years ago

Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans.

When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says.

So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something.

And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different.

In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable.

But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success.

Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500.

So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.

Beltalowda6• 4 years ago

These kind of "x-ist" statements are fine for things that are overtly x-ist. The problems happen when things are more murky; for example when you start exploring the reasons why there are few women running Fortune-500 companies. If you start shutting down things with "it's x-ist!" then you may never find out the reasons (and by extension, how to do something about them!)

"It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.

muglug2• 4 years ago

Lots of people have studied the question of why women aren’t running Fortune 500 companies, and unsurprisingly the answers have a lot to do with sexism.

The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender.

My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.

happytoexplain5• 4 years ago

Yeah, the quote is a very fundamental breakdown of logic. It's common among Facebook arguments, but very strange to see written by somebody at least ostensibly interested in rationality. I suppose he's playing a dishonest semantic game (I think he's smart enough to know that the world is more complex than that).

"13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational.

Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".

subjectsigma3• 4 years ago

THIS is exactly what some are afraid of. People taking statements, interpreting them with their own mental models, and coming to the conclusion the person who made that statement is x-ist.

Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?

happytoexplain5• 4 years ago

"Implicitly sexist" does not mean "sexist by default". "Implicitly" is a reasonable qualifier here. You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. In English, "very few" implies "very much fewer than the alternative", but in strict logical construction, it does not, hence the parent's point and my remark about being a robot.

koonsolo• 4 years ago

I guess the original article didn't take misleading statements into account. Because your statement might indeed be factually true, but very misleading.

What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?

happytoexplain5• 4 years ago

An excellent point - see my reply to the parent about "13/52" for my personal opinion.

Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

“Heresy” is not when you purposefully say things which make some other group a less human. We as a society kinda decided that is wrong. But there some people who do not think that is wrong and they call it “heresy”.

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

An opinion that is "wrong" from the society's standpoint is indeed what is called "heresy."

anonu• 4 years ago

The missing component not mentioned in PGs essay is the acceleration and amplification of cancel culture via the Internet.

Even a decade ago, tribes were geographically local. Today, your tribe is literally global. It knows no borders. Thus social media amplifies the effect of cancel culture and "same think".

oasisbob• 4 years ago

The internet accelerated and amplifies many other things as well, including the free exchange of ideas and information.

I would argue this may dominate over the effect you assume and drive the same simply because if one wants to become outraged over an act, they need to know it occurred in the first place.

I'm not sure I'd agree that the overall effect of the internet is to drive cultural consensus.

throwoutway• 4 years ago

Today, your tribe is literally global.

What's worse is tribes also have strongarms inside corporations. If the Internet mob wants to get someone fired for saying something, they just reach out to the local chapter of strongarms and make demands/walkouts against the company until they get their way.

vinceguidry• 4 years ago

This essay would have been more useful had it included a treatment of actual Catholic heresy accusations and trials. I could give my own account of how I understand it, but I would have liked to have heard PGs characterization.

Instead we're stuck with an modernist take ungrounded in history.

falcolas6• 4 years ago

Yeah, while I’m not a huge fan of modern radicalization (or perhaps just it’s resurgence) I still find “cancel culture” more tolerable than torture and murder.

MrSlonzak• 4 years ago

We live in New Middleages. Just substitute religion for ideology and suddenly it all makes sense.

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

maybe read a book or a wikipedia article about what the middle ages were like

emerged9• 4 years ago

what they ended up like, or how they got there? because I’d rather note and correct the trend /before/ we start torturing and killing people in public display.

otterley17• 4 years ago

No it isn’t. Nobody is literally losing their life over this.

alexashka• 4 years ago

You think it is due to some virtue these braindead activists possess that they don't kill people?

Sorry, I mean 'intolerant people'.

h2odragon3• 4 years ago

they only burned a few witches, back when. It wasn't that big a deal...

ruined2• 4 years ago

wow, pg banned from his own webbed side

metmac2• 4 years ago

Why was this post flagged?

SmileyJames• 4 years ago

It's heretical

metmac2• 4 years ago

But like. Seriously @dang, can you provide context here.

Is this a matter of heated discussion or what…

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

Is it heretical to call a heresy "heresy"?

falcolas6• 4 years ago

Because many users flagged it.

That’s usually all there is to it.

Personally I flagged it because it’s conversational flame bait where two radicalized groups will argue past each other endlessly, which will serve only to reinforce their radicalization. (Yes, me too)

yojo4• 4 years ago

Woo boy. Generally liked the concept for the essay, but this piece jumps out as problematic (or just poorly written):

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?

Many (most?) statements embed some of the speakers attributes, either explicitly or implicitly. At a trivial level, saying “I am hungry” can be true when one person says it and false when another does.

Obviously “I” statements are not what Graham is talking about, but the idea that your lived experience cannot qualify or disqualify you for passing certain judgements seems suspect.

prtkgpt5• 4 years ago

Ghost writing?

falcolas6• 4 years ago

Might be simpler. PG no longer has to censor his own speech in fear it will rebound on his business.

jimmar• 4 years ago

Maybe you chose your "hunger" example in haste, but it's not a great counterexample to the points in the article. Only the person making the statement about being hungry can know the truth. The focus of the article, as I read it, is on shared truths that must be evaluated in public sphere.

newbamboo4• 4 years ago

You are expressing a literally racist opinion. “Only race y can express idea x.”

Unlike others, I don’t want to cancel you for being racist, though you clearly are, by your own admission.

This tolerance I show towards others allows dialog and thus enables human progress. Cancelling racists does the opposite. I support your right to think out load and bless the sacredness of your inner spirit even though you think racistically about free speech which imo is not really “free” speech.

yojo4• 4 years ago

I think you’re injecting a lot into my comment that wasn’t there. I never talked about cancelling anyone. I talked about whether speakers are always equally qualified to make the same statement.

Here’s an example: There are words that have historically been used as slurs that have been reclaimed by the people they were used against.

If you are not a member of that group, your use of the word invokes the history of its use, and is likely x-ist. As a member, you are likely able to use it.

ByteJockey6• 4 years ago

Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?

He can't think of a statement that is false when a white person says it and true when a black person says it (or vice versa).

yojo4• 4 years ago

The literal quote is about the “x-ism” of the statement, not its veracity. He goes on to extrapolate about truth later.

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

"I am black?"

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

I suppose you have to unpack pronouns when you are evaluating truth or falsity of a statement and maybe add some additional context. If you say "I am hungry" when we evaluate that sentence we have to unpack it to something like "Yojo is hungry at time X" so that way your statement would be equally true or false if I said "it" (the unpacked version) or an hour after you said it and had eaten a full meal.

h2odragon3• 4 years ago

I read that as "Truths can be stated by anyone, and are still true". If you are saying some truths can only be said or are only true for some groups... We'll have to agree to disagree.

yojo4• 4 years ago

I take issue with the speaker not influencing whether a statement is or is not “x-ist”

There are truths that are empirical (math, physics, etc), but most controversy that includes “x-ism” is about things that are subjective and don’t bucket neatly into a true/false dichotomy.

glogla4• 4 years ago

What is true is not relevant in many cases.

Consider looking at piece of art and saying "I think this part is badly done". This is a very different statement depending whether it is the author saying it, the author's mentor saying it, unrelated person saying it to their friends, or the same unrelated person writing it on twitter. And it doesn't matter whether it is true - it might not even be possible to say, objectively, whether that part is actually badly done.

Same goes for talking about groups of people. Criticising a movement as a member internally, as a member on twitter and as a member of opposing movement is very different, no matter whether it is true or not. And movements are (usually) voluntary - it matters even more when talking about groups of people by categories they can't chose, like cultures, sexual orientations, skin color, etc.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

Has anyone considered this whole phenomenon from a materialist analysis? Global society is more interconnected than before. The public discourse on social media platforms is huge. It’s also hugely polarized for multitudes of reasons. People (on the Internet) are getting into arguments with more people than ever before, usually with strangers.

From that perspective, canceling/labeling heresy could potentially be thought of simply an act of automation. People identify reoccurring patterns of arguments, classify their adversary, and use a cached response. Thus, instead of spending the costly time and energy to respond to every argument in detail, you tag, use the appropriate function, and move on. And because modern society is so polarized, those functions tend to be fairly absolute- who wants to get dragged into another argument they’ve had before?

The problem is that modern discourse just can’t scale.

themanmaran• 4 years ago

Agreed on the individual side. It's a response to decision fatigue. You cannot effectively understand every individual, their opinions and intentions, while scaling your personal "social network" up to thousands of people. So instead you apply a label and move on.

But "modern discourse just can't scale" is a bit of a defeatist mindset. Surly there is a solution out there for reducing polarization.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

I think polarization can be decreased, I just think one of the prices to pay might be we need to collectively agree to refrain from the luxury of arguing with random strangers.

idleproc• 4 years ago

Surly there is a solution out there for reducing polarization.

Well, there's compassion. But that's always been rather difficult, and seems to have fallen out of fashion...

Maybe you meant a technical solution though.

jimkleiber6• 4 years ago

I appreciate how you bring up the point of efficiency. One of the things that challenges me in communication and resolving conflict, especially on the internet, is that it often works better if I use more precise language, which often requires more words.

So, for example, adding qualifications can show uncertainty and humility, yet adding "often works" is longer than "works" both from a character limit and a typing it on a phone keyboard.

Another example, saying "that's annoying" can be quicker than "that annoyed me" or more so "that annoyed me and may annoy others like me."

As much as I try to catch myself taking these linguistic shortcuts, I still may give in to the quickness of them, especially when I'm in a rush, and sometimes, especially online, conversations can move so quickly they put me into a heightened rush state.

Anyway, I'm grateful you pointed out this element of efficiency and scalability. I think these conversations can scale better by taking a little extra time to communicate than by always taking the shortcut. Maybe akin to how code can become more legible, and thus easier to maintain and scale, if the developer takes the time to more precisely name things. The name may be longer but may be more precise and prevent future problems.

BlueTemplar3• 4 years ago

It's the US society that is so polarized. Global society is just in a situation where it has to deal with the fallout of that.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

Sort of. Social phenomena like the rise of Bolsonaro or Zemmour, or the gender wars currently going on in South Korea, might be influenced by culture wars in the U.S. but are also propelled by their own local experiences.

noduerme2• 4 years ago

I think this is a useful take because it points to a positive solution: Taking the time to weigh evidence and context on an individual, case by case basis, as opposed to walking around as if you have a "mute" button for everything.

I was accused of saying something I didn't say at a bar, by a black woman I was talking with. She complained to the bartender who, without having heard any of the conversation, called me a racist and threw me out.

I was very distressed by this. On hearing the story, a friend brought up the fact that bartenders don't have the time or training to resolve every dispute between customers, so they just make snap decisions that are often wrong. He also said that in days gone by, the black person would have been the one who got thrown out in a dispute, and so this is a form of restorative justice. I found this a helpful idea, because it implies that people still aren't treating each other any more equally or listening to both sides, or weighing things wisely or on the merits; and that's what needs to be fixed if we want to have any kind of discourse at all.

magicroot75• 4 years ago

This would be fine if we were moving towards canceling thoughts, and not people. In a hyperconnected society where everyone is watching everything all the time, we're all bound to be cancelled for something eventually.

prtkgpt5• 4 years ago

Why is it flagged?

stareatgoats5• 4 years ago

People thought it would be like a joke perhaps. Anyway, it's unflagged now.

stareatgoats5• 4 years ago

And now it is flagged again. This really seems to rub some people (dare we say the "the aggressively conventional-minded"?) the wrong way ...

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

Because heresy.

cultpfog• 4 years ago

Probably people irritated at HN being a cult of personality for Paul Graham. He's not that interesting a writer, but people here swallow his literary turds like they're pure gold.

ISL• 4 years ago

There is a certain joy in seeing that this submission is presently titled:

  [flagged] Heresy

prtkgpt5• 4 years ago

define “joy” lol

xqcgrek23• 4 years ago

amusing irony

kache_• 4 years ago

flagged.... lmao

edmcnulty101• 4 years ago

Heresies are inherent to tribalism. Violating the tribes bigger rules gets one rejected or killed. This ties into the identity of the society.

prtkgpt5• 4 years ago

It’s no longer [flagged]. Thank you.

eliseumds• 4 years ago

It's been flagged again. What a mess.

prtkgpt5• 4 years ago

Unflagged again. This is super weird.

newbamboo4• 4 years ago

Remarkable to see the lack of self awareness in this thread. “It’s not censorship when I do it!!!!” It scares me to have so many educated people that aren’t in touch, aren’t even in control, if their own minds. My faith in free will ever diminishes.

Aeolun11• 4 years ago

The best moment is when you become aware that you aren’t yourself immune to everything you critize others for.

Beltalowda6• 4 years ago

I think this is an important part:

"Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased."

Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit. You don't even need to go back a few hundred years; look at the number of people persecuted by the government (both through the courts and outside of it) for things like blasphemy, subversion, civil rights, sexual deviancy (homosexuality, among other things), etc. just a few decades ago. In the US burning the flag was illegal in many states until the late 80s when the SCOTUS declared it was legal under the 1st (and only by a 5-4 majority).

Yes, there are some developments I am not especially pleased with either, but it's also important to remember the historical context.

Anyway, I liked this piece of nuance.

throwmeariver12• 4 years ago

The problem with the whole free speech is dead argument is that it gets tangled into plain stupid lies. Flatearth, holocaust denial...

randrews• 4 years ago

Conflating a valid point with a bunch of total-nonsense points in order to discredit it is an effective strategy.

ricardo812• 4 years ago

True enough, recently my Scottish Parliament pardoned those condemned of witchcraft (and fwiw a lot of Scottish ex pats formed the US constitution)

I think a lot of the issue revolves around us celebrating our differences rather than trying to polarise them.

But clearly scientific evidence (ie lack of witchcraft) also play a part.

The vibe I get from the post is just that, being OK with people having a different point of view without having an adverse reaction. Maybe another component to it is the black box algorithms of major platforms that may magnify differences of opinion or 'filter bubbles' as it were.

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

The 90s was a strange ideological moment -- the eastern religion failed, so the western religion admitted pluralism within its own denominations. It was an interregnum in which the liberal democratic order was unchallenged.

It is, today, challenged from all sides. What PG et al. call "free speech" was just the peace of a political moment. In every other era "free speech" is a demand with costs; we should expect that to be the default.

UnpossibleJim2• 4 years ago

I think the problem with this argument is the free speech "is at an all time high if you zoom out a bit". This is much like the argument, "gun violence is at an all time low if you zoom out a bit" argument.

Both of these statements are true in the macro, but if you look at the trends, they point to a very disturbing line.

The call for the restriction of free speech on the right(1) and the left (2) have increased in very different ways and seem to be increasing, both legislatively and socially. The same can be said of gun violence. We reached an all time low in 2018 (I believe - it might have been 2017) but have been trending upwards ever since.

Most (reasonable) people agree that an effort should be made to curb gun violence, even if they can't agree on the best route to get there. The attack on free speech, however seems to have cheering sections from all sides. As far as the government is concerned, sanctions on the first amendment would be a boon, but the groundswell from the populace in the form of right and left "cancelation" (or whatever BS term you wish to call it) hasn't been seen since McCarthy. Given the rise in the public square with social media, and you have national feeding frenzies with public "witch trials" to take our minds off of inflation, oil prices, pollution and multiple global conflicts of questionable national interest.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-free-speech-is-under-attack...

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/566119-for-the-left-a-...

Beltalowda6• 4 years ago

It just puts things in perspective; I'm not saying it's not something to be worried about, but you can both worry about something while also keeping the historical perspective in mind.

There is also a lot of hysteria going on; that Maus "controversy" which your CVS article cites (among others) is a good example. The concerns were over some nudity and profanity. You may think that's prudish or a bit childish, but fine, it's not really something especially unusual to be concerned about, or a very new "taboo" to be concerned about. It certainly wasn't an attempt at removing any education about the Holocaust from the curriculum, yet that it often how it was framed. With the author of Maus going so far to openly question whether these people might have neo-Nazi sympathies in an interview.

That there are some instances of unfounded hysteria doesn't mean there are also things that are not; but again, it's good to keep some perspective.

twofornone4• 4 years ago

These claims that the "don't say gay" legislation stifles free speech are dishonest. These are teachers, agents of the state, in a professional setting, not private citizens expressing opinions off the clock. If I'm paying taxes for public education then I should have a say in what gets taught, and that includes culture.

switchbak• 4 years ago

I think that's something that often gets overlooked in the frenzy to tribal defence: this is a sideshow to take the spotlight off of the real important issues of the day.

If you really look at it, the left/right dichotomy in US politics seems designed (evolved?) to serve much the same purpose.

When we all calm down on the partisanship, often it's amazing how much shared ground there really is.

jacquesm• 4 years ago

A bigger problem is that all of this is extremely local, typically affecting a small fraction of the world population, when for the majority the truth is very much different.

bendbro4• 4 years ago

If I said:

1. "Fuck Jesus, fuck America, kill all men."

2. "Fuck BLM, fuck diversity."

Which one do you think would get me cancelled?

Conservatives have comically little social power. Further, you can basically say anything you want around them, while conversations with the average liberal are a careful affair.

Perhaps though I am blind. Are there contemporary instances of conservative driven cancellations? The definition I like of cancellation is: removing privileges from a person when their qualities do not predict harmful use of those privileges.

For example, in the CBS article you linked, with regard to the parents, schools, CRT issue: I acknowledge the parents are restricting speech, but I don't think it violates the spirit of free speech. Teachers can say whatever they like, and parents are free choose what their kids listen to. On the same note, I think it is fine for schools to be forced to omit creationism when discussing evolution.

On defining cancellation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30770206

My personal axe to grind on left driven cancel culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977399

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

The speed with which society is moving is also a factor.

Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.

I think Graham is slightly missing the point about our period. It's not that heresy is on the up, so much as it's on the move. Outrage is a homeless beast. We're in an Orwellian age where it changes with the seasons, so what is heresy in one place and time is a tepid platitude only next door the following week.

Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik. It would have once been "dangerous" (at least in a fairly pedestrian job) to say that Google is a crappy old search engine, Facebook is a threat to democracy and Microsoft are corrupt criminals. Today it's practically de rigueur to cock a snook at jaded icons. It's practically a credential.

Angostura• 4 years ago

Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.

That’s an interesting, because I suppose at the moment that group would include all through have been historically or currently disadvantaged or discriminated against.

Today’s axiom, at least in liberal countries is ‘you can punch up, but not down’ somewhat different in totalitarian regimes.

dibujante2• 4 years ago

They're credited with it but that quotation is actually from neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom and has been repeatedly laundered through social media to seem like respectable intellectual rigor, instead of an attempt to legitimize the kinds of completely insane conspiracy ideology that is present on social media today.

eternalban• 4 years ago

Outrage is a homeless beast.

Well said and true.

it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik.

Pretty sure this modality of power has been with us since ancient days. (The beast may be homeless but there is always a beast master.)

kbenson• 4 years ago

Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment

There are different types of power, and what I think we're seeing is that whip traditionally those different types of power have rested in the same individuals, that's not so true anymore.

Financial and political power is still mostly where it's always been. Social power has been democratized far more and far more quickly in recent years, to the point that those same groups that have the financial and political power no longer mostly control it.

I think the mercurial appearance of how that power is wielded is also easily explained. Like any revolutionaries that take power, they are often unrestrained in it's use as they are not used to the problems of wielding it.

Whether the status quo can ever develop into a more restrained arbiter if social justice remains to be seen. As long as the young are the majority of the social scenes used in the decision process (the social networks of the moment) I doubt it, but the demographics of these networks are shifting year by year and those that have been using them longer are learning the trade and solidifying their bases, and those ones making enough money to also join the other power structures. Perhaps in another decade or two this will just be viewed as another period of large change, like civil rights and woman entering the workplace, and the social narrative will again be controlled like it traditionally has.

For most I imagine that thought has parts of both comfort and dread.

randomtwiddler2• 4 years ago

Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.

That doesn't work if/when a value claimed by those in power is to turn the other cheek. At least if it is followed, then this wouldn't be accurate.

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.

The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi who was using this quote to claim that Jewish people run the world.

It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work, but autistic people clearly aren't running the world through some secret cabal.

orwin2• 4 years ago

Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.

Yeah, so the people in power currently are Ukrainians.

Look, i agree with the rest of your analysis, but this Tacitus sounds stupid (I am pretty sure Voltaire didn't write this). It's ignoring that most pamphlets and songs actually targeted people in power, historically (yeah, thinking about it, no way it's Voltaire). And people mostly take the dominated/wronged side.

analog31• 4 years ago

Indeed, and the very concept of "heresy" has changed over the centuries, to the point where the analogy to Newton is probably meaningless. "Heresy" was considered to be an immediate mortal threat to the eternal life of the soul. It was not just a disagreement with social customs. It was the spiritual equivalent to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, or driving a truck into a crowd.

ambrozk5• 4 years ago

Are you telling us that it was literally violence?

amalcon3• 4 years ago

I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today?

What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's -- but because they're on the receiving end for once. This could be a good thing in the end, by leading us to a more complete model of civil discourse, but it's going to be painful for a while before that even has a chance to happen.

infiniteL0Op• 4 years ago

Ask Thai citizens if they can imagine that. Or Russians.

In democracies, society has moved a bit into a direction where many harmless things said will trigger an upset in some very uptight people.

It's enforced socially rather than by the government. Back when you could not say things openly against governments, at least you could speak your mind on anything else.

Today, you can say whatever you want against the government, they are so far detached they don't care.

Free speech is a stupid political term, it has never truly existed an never will.

adolph4• 4 years ago

Can you even imagine that today?

No need to imagine, the law never left.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/seditious-conspiracy-real-domest...

https://www.google.com/search?q=sedition+usa&tbm=nws

ratww9• 4 years ago

Can you even imagine that today?

Not in the countries I guess we both live, but in some authoritarian places, definitely, unfortunately. Your point still fully stands though!

sitkack2• 4 years ago

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...

otterley17• 4 years ago

I think most jurists would agree that the Sedition Act is dead for all practical purposes. Most modern First Amendment jurisprudence only started being written after the Vietnam War, commencing with Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 44 (1969), and the Sedition Act would be unlikely to survive scrutiny today.

temp89642• 4 years ago

lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's

I am not aware of this history. Is there any data or document? What kind of jobs, private? governmental? academic?

tomcam6• 4 years ago

I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today?

Only in banana republics like the USA. The patriot act went quite far in that direction

deanCommie4• 4 years ago

I think the comparison you drew is interesting.

Restrictions to free speech used to be in place to protect the Most Powerful - the Kings (still do - in places where there are kings), The Party, even The Government (in places where democracy is but a sham)

In Western democratic nations, new restrictions to free speech are being considered to protect the Most Marginalized - the most weakest, most discriminated against, lowest represented members of society.

It is ludicrous to look at this movement and compare them like-for-like. There is no backsliding here, there is no slippery slope here. There is a very distinct difference between who is protected and who is exploited.

rawTruthHurts• 4 years ago

Can you even imagine that today?

Try to give in UK an opinion regarding the State of Israel not matching the Pro-Israel lobyy diktat and you will find yourself in trouble. Ask Jackie Walker.

Ma8ee3• 4 years ago

In 1985 you could say “homosexuality is a disease and all gay should be locked up” and you wouldn’t have to be too worried about your employment. Today you can say “I’m gay” and don’t have to worry about being fired for it. I like today’s freedom of expression better.

gedy2• 4 years ago

People like to bully on the outgroups, now as then. Same as ever.

goto11• 4 years ago

Censorship is much more visible in modern social media because it happens after the publishing. Somebody publishes something, and then the platform reviews the material and decides to block it. In print media the filtering happened before material was published. Newspapers only print a tiny fraction of the "letters to the editor" they receive, but it doesn't feel like censorship.

chmod6003• 4 years ago

Interestingly, there were 3 justices that were around for both the flag burning case and Citizen's United (money-is-speech case): Scalia, Kennedy, and Stevens.

Scalia and Kennedy were in the majority (broad speech rights) in both cases and Stevens was in the minority (narrower speech rights) in both cases.

So, I guess (loosely speaking) if fire is speech, then money is speech too.

fsckboy• 4 years ago

you quote him: Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

and you state: Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit.

It can't decrease and remain at an all time high. You are disagreeing with him, not finding a nuance.

Doxin• 4 years ago

It can be decreasing currently, and yet increasing recently. Those aren't contradictory.

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

It's important to remember that this particular kind of "heresy" is not about hurting an imaginary God, but actual real people.

Questioning the legitimacy of geocentrism is a victimless crime. Questioning the legitimacy of gay marriage or gay adoption or sexual transitioning has very defined, specific victims that face real actual harms from these attitudes.

Right now parents of trans children are being accused of being abusers, with legal threats to that effect. Gay parents and their supporters are being called groomers.

Clamping down hard on that is defensible. You may believe that this is an unjustifiable restriction of speech, but it is materially different from old concepts of "heresy".

ratww9• 4 years ago

There is an OCEAN of difference between saying what this article is saying and being okay with the recent wave of anti-trans/anti-LGBT conservatism in the US.

Someone saying that "teaching about sexuality is akin to grooming" is clearly telling a lie. If someone gets shit for it, then the hubbub/cancellation is definitely not taking priority over the question of truth or falsity.

Heck, if anything, the anti-trans/anti-LGBT conservatism you're referring to also falls into the same issue: it's also bullshit "Heresy" that people use to punish others over truth.

hunterb1233• 4 years ago

"teaching about sexuality is akin to grooming" is clearly a lie.

Out of curiosity is there an age limit on this statement for you?

Because while we're talking about heresies I'd like to say teaching sexuality to young children without parental consent is grooming.

What happened to asking for a permit slip signed by the parents if you want to give a sex talk.

It's a parent's rights issue, not a LGBTQ issue.

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

I have literally never heard any person complain as PG is complaining with this article about being "cancelled" about anything other than an opinion on LGBT rights.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/10503916635...

"""

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

"""

ricardo812• 4 years ago

I'll preface my comment by saying maybe (certainly) some people are more nuanced on the matter.

I think the baseline is equality. Anything after that, we celebrate our differences and the debate is about a future direction for us all. Extremely generic I know, but better than trying to homogenise us into a singular point of view.

version_five3• 4 years ago

I think what's missed is that most of the extreme, even if common, cases of people demanding heretics be punished, are really just trolling. Trolls are continually pushing the boundaries, and institutions are afraid to stand up to them for fear or being labeled heretical (ironically) so we have this feedback of more and more ridiculous stuff that nobody actually believes becoming mainstream. By fighting it the way PG is, it (trolling) gets legitimized. Feeding the trolls doesn't work, we need to to better to collectively tune them out, picking a fight with them puts you in their territory and you've already lost.

javajosh4• 4 years ago

The evidence doesn't support your view that SJWs are "just trolls". A lot of SJWs genuinely believe that cancelling people for espousing wrong view is a real force for good. And they have some superficially good reasons for that belief. Trolls will use any weapon they can, so it's less interesting to debate them (except, maybe, about the nature of sadism).

aaron695• 4 years ago

Interesting how he chose to name nothing except anti-vaxxing.

Body autonomy is incredibly important.

But when people start ranting about anti-vaxxers that concept doesn't even enter their little heads. It's never I understand their rights and how important that is, but...

Because any complex thoughts on the issue are heresy.

dasil003• 4 years ago

I think this is largely a social media phenomenon. Twitter flash mobs can destroy people’s lives in a vary offhanded, drive-by fashion simply because people with actual power are scared of them and capitulate to unreasonable demands. But if you talk with people in real life, you’ll find much more nuanced thinking and willingness to engage in open-minded debate. The problem is giving too much attention to extremist views.

seaourfreed3• 4 years ago

Paul posted this because this has escalated to getting people on the political right fired from their jobs (directly or indirectly).

See his words: "Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired."

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

“Political right” is doing a lot of work here. People aren’t getting fired for supporting lower taxes or environmental deregulation.

kevingadd• 4 years ago

Fired from their jobs for what, exactly? Being too fiscally conservative?

Most people in the US are under at-will employment, so they can be fired at any time for almost any reason. So if we're going to argue that they are being fired due to political persecution from the hard left, you have to make a thorough case there because you're saying their employer shouldn't be free to hire and fire whomever they like.

cs702• 4 years ago

We should all strive to keep an open mind, especially to ideas contrary to our own.

But it’s not easy, because every group, in every society, organically develops its own heresies – things you cannot say without consequences.

For example, here are some heresies common in the Silicon Valley startup community:

* Heresy: “Government regulations are, on the whole, a net force for the good of humanity.”

* Heresy: “All entrepreneurs in the US owe much their success to past government spending on infrastructure and education, so they should be personally taxed at high rates to repay their enormous debt to society.”

* Heresy: “High redistribution of wealth via government spending is necessary for sustaining economic growth.”

* Heresy: “Silicon Valley is an exclusionary club, not a meritocracy.”

Proclaiming any of these things, say, at a dinner party with startup CEOs, is socially equivalent to jumping on top of the table, pulling your pants down, and passing gas. In fact, the latter may be more socially acceptable -- it's less threatening to the startup zeitgeist.

glogla4• 4 years ago

For example, here are some heresies common in the Silicon Valley startup community:

You're basically just saying it is heresy to be moderately left-wing in Silicon Valley.

Which I don't doubt is true, even if I hope it is not quite as dire. Just wanted to point out the connection.

EDIT: though if we're talking "in front of CEO", that might be like talking about French Revolution in front of a monarch, or mentioning Mao in front of landlord, so I can understand why the CEO would not like it.

morelisp7• 4 years ago

1), 2), and 4) are not particularly inherently or exclusively left-wing positions. 1) and 2) have been popular with some Republicans (and republicans) in the 20th century, as well as many traditional and Third Way liberals.

4) is extremely contemporary, but it's definitely a common populist right-wing position these days also.

xqcgrek23• 4 years ago

All of those statements can be easily refuted factually, so no, they are not heresies.

beaconstudios23• 4 years ago

This is the thing - everybody thinks the heresies they are opposed to are also false. Many of which are based purely on ideology.

skellington8• 4 years ago

There is nothing brave or heretic about holding those views in Silicon Valley. SV skews quite left even though most people's actions don't match words. You'll find a high degree of acceptance of these views at all levels in SV including tech CEOs who worship at the altar of pseudo-socialism.

Sometimes, you will get nuanced pushback (since these are very old ideas), but I've never seen a person cancelled in SV for holding the suburban socialist/communist ideologies that you listed. You are more in danger if being labelled alt-right if you argue against these things.

beaconstudios23• 4 years ago

None of these views are socialist or communist - at most, they are social democratic, which is a very common and moderate position outside the US (and was also common in the US before the 80s).

CPLX3• 4 years ago

The ultimate heresy for SV culture is genuinely attempting to address even the possibility that the world is worse off because of their existence.

Of course any answer to that question has a lot of nuance to unpack. But SV culture I don’t think would even accept the premise that this question has valid answers on both sides.

javajosh4• 4 years ago

I bet you could say those things (and other provocative things) at a dinner party with other CEOs. It is, after all, what they do at Davos: fling socialist talking points at those immensely wealthy, smiling, capitalist faces.

throwaway5432092• 4 years ago

I wonder what would be his reaction to someone trying to unionize in one of his shop. He would probably not call that cancel culture but right to work.

mordae3• 4 years ago

* Meritocracy isn't, because merit cannot be easily measured and it is trivial for successful bad actors to build moats that prevent anyone else getting as valued as them.

* Higher economic growth can be achieved by investing in education, but nobody would do that, because it's (rightfully) illegal to sell yourself into slavery in exchange for education.

* Regulatory capture sucks and is super hard to work around. It should be combated instead of being relied on as a future moat against competitors.

Biologist1233• 4 years ago

This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently very sensitive too. It makes me wonder what happened - as given his lack of evidence - it appears to be an emotional reaction rather than a logical one.

As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wondered if that might be due to a change in the cost of university education, which means universities are more akin to businesses servicing clients. And the first thing you’ll always hear in a client-facing business is…

_”Don’t piss off your customers”._

A sad commercial reality because a diversity of opinion in education is valuable.

phillipcarter• 4 years ago

I have a far less positive view of education and many of the professors who have traditionally occupied it in the US. A whole lot of entrenched people with tenure who have formal authority over people (grad students) without even a hint of manager training and it really shows. Many of these people are downright childish, intentionally put blinders on the world immediately around them, and cause countless students unnecessary pain just so that their own eccentric personalities are accommodated.

ryanobjc4• 4 years ago

I’ve looked at some of these academic circumstances and the ones I looked at were very misleading. Often times the only account we have is from the fired person, who is obviously going to push the most favorable narrative. When you dig in, there is something else amiss.

But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.

byecomputer• 4 years ago

There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college.

Unless we're including religious colleges, this seems hyperbolic.

While I did find this[1], which appears to support the idea that left-wing voices are more likely to get fired/kicked out of universities for their speech (though not by a magnitude), I have no idea how that study split up which speech was 'censored by right'/'censored by left', because when I tried to do so myself with the dataset[2], the results were closer to 55/45 (left-wing firing/right-wing firing) for 2015-2017, which was the years the study chose to focus on, but almost exactly 50/50 for the entire 2006-2020 dataset.

[1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...

Biologist1233• 4 years ago

It’s a good point you make. I’m thinking of all the heterodox economists who don’t get hired - ie the throttle is applied at a different layer.

kemayo18• 4 years ago

But this focus - deliberately engineered btw - on right wing firing is misleading. There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college. It’s just there is no Fox News of the left to focus culture war agitprop on those cases.

If you're looking for a parallel that applies to cancelling the left, albeit outside the academy, union-busting is very common and tends to involve doing your very best to fire people who're speaking up about wanting to form a union. Such speech is pretty unambiguously treated as a "heresy" (in the Graham sense) by business owners.

imgabe10• 4 years ago

There is an order of magnitude more firing and suppression of left wing voices at college.

Where? Which colleges? Can you give a single example of someone being fired from a college or university for a left wing position?

ss1088• 4 years ago

I am not generally pro cancel culture, but a lot of the opposition to it is certainly whiney and low on evidence.

For example, there's this notion that the advancement of knowledge is somehow being suppressed and that naked, barely-regulated free speech has been essential to Western dominance, and that, accordingly, to backpedal on the principle would have some material affect on society.

However, no nexus between the kinds of speech and people being "cancelled" and any sort of practical benefit of the speech is ever identified. Nor do they consider the fact that the proper result of intellectual discourse is that some ideas get discarded, and that to constantly have to rehash debates, reestablish the credibility of basic authorities, etc, drags down intellectual discourse and in fact moves us backwards.

waqf• 4 years ago

But in actual intellectual discourse, if someone presents a point of view which is founded on a discredited idea, then we just ignore them. We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others.

Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.

alm1• 4 years ago

One can say that Solomon Asch experiments on social conformity are great illustrations of the benefits of free speech. Diverse opinions discourage group think and encourage critical thinking and discourse. That works even if the opinion is bogus, since in that case it may encourage the individual to avoid adopting an overwhelming majority point of view. As you mentioned it is indeed a slower process, but a much more fault tolerant one. The simple analogy is the slower, complicated democratic process vs fast, simple autocratic process.

dnfa• 4 years ago

I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here

Yeah this bothered me. His stance on this seems so defensive and personal and he gives very few examples of heretical ideas. It makes this essay more of a boomer diatribe than anything else imo.

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

It allows anybody who reads the piece to apply their own specifics to it. It means that if they hold any "heretical" beliefs, they can assume that PG supports them.

giraffe_lady5• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

sicromoft• 4 years ago

This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence

That's putting it mildly. It's littered with straw men and other logical fallacies.

He asserts, without any proof (because it's a faulty generalization that can't be proven), 'when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion'. He then wastes a bunch of time explaining the implications of his straw man.

Biologist1233• 4 years ago

I do tend to read his essays when I see them circulating and I must confess that I find them fascinating. I’ve wondered if Graham himself doesn’t entirely understand why he’s been so successful or what he’s achieved in creating - and indeed whether he’s aware of the deficit. When future historians of our increasingly interesting and shocking epoch are trying to work out what happened, I feel Graham’s essays will provide useful insights into the preoccupations and delusions of billionaire think: from arguably the most powerful clique ever to have lived. In that sense I’m thankful that he writes.

telchior2• 4 years ago

Trying to give it the article a more positive reading: at least for myself, I can imagine several opinions I could express in the United States which would count as "heresy". I'd imagine that if those opinions were said out loud (whether or not I really believed them) my employers would fire me, friends would unfriend me, etc.

But, I can't really think of any supporting real-world stories where that reaction wouldn't be justified. There are two that come to mind:

- Justine Sacco, the woman who was fired for tweeting a joke that she hoped she wouldn't get AIDS on her trip to Africa. I don't think the joke is necessarily indicative of some deep inner evil, but the lady was a PR exec; it does tend to indicate that she was probably dangerously incompetent at her actual job. Firing seems like the right response.

- Amy Cooper, the lady in New York who called the police on "an African American man threatening my life" in Central Park. He was a bird-watcher asking her to keep her unleashed dogs under control. Widely reported that she was fired for racism. But again, is this really a case of being fired for heresy? Or could it have perhaps just a case of the employer realizing their employee is a dishonest sack of crap? God knows what kind of havoc a person like this might wreak inside a company.

Those two are probably the most widely reported in the past few years. People here are referencing firings in academia; maybe those would give more nuance.

knorker6• 4 years ago

Neither was fired for work performance. I think anything else is a distracting justification, not a reason.

James Damore was fired by a mob who boldly proclaimed "I didn't read his manifesto. I didn't have to".

None of these firings were for honest reasons, but all just to appease the mob. A mob who at least in the last case didn't bother to even find out what he said.

There are many more examples. I could list them on and on, but I'm surprised you've only heard of the two.

There was the lady who appeared to scream in a cemetery

If those two are truly the only ones you can think of then I'd recommend you google this a bit better, and to read "So you've been publicly shamed".

Hell, a year ago you'd be kicked off the internet (social media platforms) as a racist (wat?) for saying the lab leak theory was plausible.

And of course then there's the chilling effect.

emmelaich• 4 years ago

Amy Cooper ...

Not saying what she did was justified, but there is more to the story.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-real-story-of-the-centr...

"May 2020 testimony provided by Jerome Lockett, a black man who said Christian had “aggressively” threatened him in the park. Among the details: “when I saw that video, I thought, I cannot imagine if he approached her the same way how she may have genuinely been afraid for her life.” He continued, “If I wasn’t who I was, I would of [sic] called the police on that guy too.”

Also see the talk page for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_birdwatching_inci...

nojs• 4 years ago

somewhat low on evidence

Paul did address this though:

I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era.
And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific heresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded will always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All they need is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the current one will be the last.

civilized2• 4 years ago

I like Paul and am very sympathetic to this essay. But I want to make some points that may subvert his thesis, in the hope that we can nuance things a bit, hopefully in an interesting way.

1. Some things may be true (or at least potentially true) but not appropriate to point out in a given social situation. Example: "Avi did a good job on this project in part because of his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, which conferred a genetic intelligence advantage." This could be true, it has some scientific support, but it seems to be not a good idea to say. It would probably still not be a good idea to say even if we definitely knew it to be true. A person who habitually says things like this might reasonably risk reputational and professional consequences.

2. Paul says there are more heresies than in decades past. Is that true, or are they just different?

3. Are there some things that should be heresies, like arguing vigorously for the legalization or destigmatization of adult-child sexual relationships? Don't those things provide some insight into why people might see themselves as legitimate in making X-ism a heresy?

Will add more as I continue reading.

vmception• 4 years ago

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not.

I’ve been asking, practically begging people, to comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of my statements than the way it makes them feel.

Looks like Paul Graham wishes for this too.

gottebp• 4 years ago

G.K. Chesterton boiled this down pretty well:

“The Special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it”.

Noteworthy to add that for Chesterton “heresy” is defined as the obstinate rejection of a dogma.

javajosh4• 4 years ago

Too complicated. The culture war was explicitly born of a left-wing power grab through cultural means, and it was foisted on college students starting in like 2014, and has had remarkable success (for its proponents). College kids believe a lot of stuff without knowing what, or why, and cancel culture rules are no different.

morelisp7• 4 years ago

The culture war was explicitly born of a left-wing power grab through cultural means

The current culture war got stoked in the early 90s by conservatives because it got them votes, and has been escalating since then because it still does. Or are you going full Buchanan to claim black and gay people getting equal treatment in the civil arena is a "left-wing power grab"?

philjohn3• 4 years ago

You seem to be ignoring Pat Buchanon who literally used the term "culture war".

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

Great essay as always, however the deliberate withholding of examples is irritating me. I'm not looking for witches to burn, but names or examples of "grumpy, censorious people in a group — the ones who are always first to complain when something violates the current rules of propriety." would be helpful to identify the described mentality.

Koshkin9• 4 years ago

Giving examples is left as an exercise for the reader.

woodruffw10• 4 years ago

Vaguely gesticulating at your stated enemy instead of identifying them is a time-honored rhetorical technique: it allows the reader to insert their individual grievances into the shape of the argument rather than reflecting on whether their grievances are actually well-founded.

Edit: And to be absolutely clear: it's a lame technique. It works because it's emotive, not because it reveals any particular amount of truth.

randallsquared2• 4 years ago

it allows the reader to insert their individual grievances into the shape of the argument rather than reflecting on whether their grievances are actually well-founded.

Given that it's specifically about the shape of these sorts of arguments, adding specific examples would produce tangents into the merits of the specific examples; omitting them encourages the reader to consider the pattern in the context of their own experience (as you say), but by removing the actual "grievance", this technique reduces emotion, and gives us more opportunity to consider the pattern dispassionately. This would actually be more "emotive" if it forced us to confront examples which we might violently agree or disagree with.

Providing specific instances of the pattern would only be necessary if the pattern itself has few enough examples that the typical reader hasn't encountered any. Given that Graham's entire point appears to be that this pattern is increasingly pervasive, by providing examples, he would undermine his own conclusions.

galaxyLogic6• 4 years ago

I find it illuminating how he ends his blog-post:

     "All we have to do is keep pushing back, and the wave collapses"

Sounds like a political rallying cry. A rallying cry for those on the ramparts. The line assumes the reader knows they are part of the "we" and calls them to action. Who are they? Stop the steal?

tootie8• 4 years ago

It's straw man after straw man. Facile and reductive. Basically a long form version of "you can't say anything anymore!" Could have been written by Archie Bunker.

Osmose4• 4 years ago

The behavior he's calling "heresy" here cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; these kinds of statements are all contextual, ESPECIALLY hinging on who is saying them. And the reason that is the case is because the consequences of saying something are different depending on who says them.

Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is judged in a harsher light because those words have a much stronger effect than if, say, some L2 software engineer on Twitter said them. If PG says something that _could_ be interpreted as racist, it threatens to normalize believing that in the minds of the people who follow him. If L2 says something that is on the fence, at worst some of their immediate friends will pile on to them about how uncool that was (barring the rare occasions of people going viral for bad takes, which is an outlier).

I think that's reasonable social policing to keep our discourse healthy. Having that influence over people demands a price in return. If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.

kspacewalk2• 4 years ago

If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.

No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.

Osmose4• 4 years ago

I mean, I agree that practically PG will never feel any serious repercussions for saying whatever he wants _because_ of his wealth and influence. I don't think that's healthy (as wealth and influence are often afforded to people due to privilege or luck instead of ability, wisdom, or empathy) but it is how the world is currently.

The cancel culture boogeyman generally doesn't destroy lives, which makes one wonder why people like PG feel it so important that they need to write essays decrying it.

pen2l3• 4 years ago

Is it a good thing that filters of all sorts are eradicated? Never before has a thought been able to travel as freely as it can now, 5 of the 8 billion people in the world have the internet, in a few seconds a thought you utter is potentially accessible to half of humanity. But this thought forgoes the chance to be interpreted, re-interpreted by mentors and participants in your community, your parents, peer-reviewed in some manner, honed, reconsidered before meeting the wider public.

Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.

teakettle423• 4 years ago

You have invented a “harm principle” to be used when evaluating truth, and the fact that you think this is a cogent argument is scarier than anything Paul Graham might have said.

One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.

Osmose4• 4 years ago

If I'm following you correctly, you're implying that in order to debate with others to determine what truth is, you must have the freedom to say things without being bound by how the act of saying them would affect other people, right?

And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.

solatic3• 4 years ago

You're equivocating between rational and emotional truths.

Rationally, only one thing can be true. This is what's most useful when applying the scientific method. Scientifically, there isn't such a thing as heresy - only rejecting the null hypothesis, or failing to reject it.

But people are not rational beings. The same message, delivered in the same way, can upset some people and not others. People do not react rationally. Trying to deny this (and claim that people are rational beings), in and of itself, denies a scientific truth.

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

Not when evaluating truth. When evaluating speech.

Humans don't communicate by simply listing context-free facts at one another. Connotation, implication, and context all play a major role. The idea isn't that the words themselves become evil when said in a different context, but that we recognize that they do different things in different contexts.

Let's consider a totally different scenario: the justice system. In criminal cases, the standard of evidence is way higher than in civil cases. This is a recognition of the fact that the state is capable of causing far greater harm and it should hold itself to a higher standard. Nothing has changed about the truth of say, OJ Simpson's actions, that meant that he was found not guilty in a criminal trial but was able to be punished in a civil trial.

Similarly, we might recognize that somebody with a powerful voice and a large following has a greater responsibility to careful communication than the person working the counter at the local Starbucks.

Animats2• 4 years ago

That's what Graham did say:

"They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they have to recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like something that can be banned."

pen2l3• 4 years ago

Test. (Please downvote me).

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

Heresy! Burn the witch! /s

j-bos• 4 years ago

Sorry, don't have enough points.

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

James Damore was a lowly software engineer and that did not save him from being canceled by the mob and losing his job. All the more outrageous because his working paper was an honest and forthright - and broadly accurate - response to an express request for feedback about how to improve working conditions. Shades of "let a thousand flowers bloom".

erikpukinskis4• 4 years ago

Is "honest and forthright" really the only qualification for working at Google?

What about being professional? Meaning... getting your work done in a way that you're not making other people hate you?

I can totally imagine a workplace where "It's not your problem if other people hate you" is the norm. And I'm happy for people who find an employer like that and enjoy that. But does every workplace need to be like that?

What's wrong with a workplace saying "you need to be clued in to how your colleagues are affected by you"?

For me, that's table stakes in being a profesional.

ryanobjc4• 4 years ago

His paper was definitively broadly inaccurate. A number of dissections online have illustrated at how he grasps at evidence that doesn’t say what he claims it to say. He over emphasizes the nature of statistical evidence, and ignores the minimal strength of effect as well.

Besides which this wasn’t a “all of a sudden I wrote a paper and then I got fired” - he had been posting similar ideas into internal forums and was getting push back and disagreements. He got his editorial feedback already and he ignored it.

faichai3• 4 years ago

I mean, he didn’t say it, but this identity politics driven perspective is entirely the current thing wrong with the left. I say this as a moderate.

Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine.

This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis.

A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.

ss1088• 4 years ago

We just had 4 years of an identity politics Republican president (which party has totally succumbed to its idiotic, tribalist, identity-driven, populist base, discarding a lot of good conservative ideas and values in the process), so your spin on this as being "entirely the current thing wrong with the left" is disingenuous.

Dems are holding the line far better, though they too will fail, and the progressive wing will take over the party, and I'm personally not keen on that, even though I agree with them on some things.

jimkleiber6• 4 years ago

I read it as he wants pushback—that he wants to engage in a back and forth discussion, almost like two people in a fight pushing each other, not a fight where people push each other for a minute and then the other pulls out a gun. I understood his definition of heresy as a tool for wanting to end debate, not deepen it.

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

Well, to take the analogy a step further, if you go out on the street and start pushing people around, and one of them pulls out a baseball bat and beats you to a pulp, should you really complain that they didn't just push back? Nope. You just had it coming, and if you are such a macho street-fighter you should accept you got owned that time.

Sure, if you were in a dojo practicing martial arts - an environment that is safe where engagement has clear rules and often a judge - then it's a fair point to make. So if you are in a very specific context that is intended and structured for open and fair debate (e.g. a debate club), that's a fair argument.

That begs the question of whether a university is such a place. Undoubtedly some of it is. But I do not think all of the university, all of the time, is. Just as going into a gym and doing a judo throw on someone in the middle of their yoga class is not right, even if the gym has judo classes.

Turing_Machine• 4 years ago

If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line

No one appointed you, or some random Twitter mob, to speak for "society".

skybrian• 4 years ago

The complete lack of examples means that essay doesn't work very well now, and I doubt it would work any better in the future. It's an extreme form of watering down your complaints via overgeneralization, to the point where it's very difficult to "read between the lines."

All that's left is a bunch of bare, generic assertions. It would be very difficult to convert them into falsifiable statements.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

Can somebody list “heresies” which we are not allowed to say but they are ok? I cannot find a single one. But maybe I’m missing something.

xqcgrek23• 4 years ago

A simple one is that evolution doesn't stop at the neck.

3qz5• 4 years ago

It just means not having the right opinion on the current issue of the month. Or anything about the groups of people you’re not allowed to criticize.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

Can you please be more specific? I really do not know what would be “heresy” now. Maybe I’m tweeting something which is “heresy” (and knowing that since nobody reads my tweets).

beaconstudios23• 4 years ago

Which groups are deserving of criticism that they're currently protected from?

wooque• 4 years ago

Some dog breeds are smarter than the others and it's not because of purely economic factors

beaconstudios23• 4 years ago

Yeah I often see this kind of vague posting about cancel culture, but generally speaking people are being cancelled (which can either just mean being criticised, or the more legitimate problem of people contacting employers) for either directly saying things that are offensive (the aforementioned -isms) or are implications that directly lead to -ist conclusions. My understanding is that the underlying complaint is that the social left has cultural power right now - conservatives are equally likely to "cancel" people for atheism or being gay or having an abortion, but when they are on the back foot use the free speech argument as a wedge against the same behaviour from the other side.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

Can you please be more specific? What is said which is considered ok but person got canceled? I’m definitely not left wing so I’m really confused with this GP post.

Is he defending racists? Is he defending sexists people? Nazis? I doubt so.

I understand that you cannot be Republican if you do not believe in gun rights. But these are political affiliations: nobody forced you to be Rebulican.

skellington8• 4 years ago

You must be pretty asleep to not be aware of the hot button topics now.

How about statements like:

- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines - the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants - there are two biological genders - the US is not structurally racist - cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites - young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) - math is not racist

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

Since when are those things not allowed to be said? I see tons of people saying things like that without any consequences. Often, it even results in them being elected to high office.

If the worst punishment is people yelling at you on Twitter, then I think the heresy metaphor has been stretched too far.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines

Not heresy.

- the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants

Not heresy.

- there are two biological genders

Bad - this sentence is telling part of population should just kill themself since they don’t exist.

- the US is not structurally racist

No heresy. This sentence needs to be context.

- cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites

Not sure. The sentence needs be in context.

- young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.)

Bad. This sentence is implicitly claiming than being gay is not ok (being gay makes you “ controversial “ human - better not exist).

- math is not racist

Bad. This sentence implicitly claims that girls are stupid. (Mistake I read this is as “math is not sexist”)

As you can see in you cannot say that certan type of people are less of a human. But I that think WW2 kinda solved this.

KaoruAoiShiho3• 4 years ago

Those aren't really heresies, more like you've been exposed to strawmen liberal positions probably from reading too much breitbart or something..

- people should have body autonomy when it comes to vaccines, never met anyone who disagreed with this, but it doesn't really contradict stuff like vaccine mandates.

- the US does not owe entry to illegal immigrants, also never met anyone who disagree with this, just that we should do more to help refugees.

- there are two biological genders, seems like you're confusing sex for gender as gender isn't a biological concept.

- the US is not structurally racist, it is but most people seem to agree with you, it's rather the heresy to say it is than to say it's not...

- cops don't kill blacks at higher rates than whites, not a heresy to say, just different interpretations of data.

- young children shouldn't be taught controversial topics (sex, etc.) In what world is this a heresy

- math is not racist ??? who said math was racist. There are some people who are racist who hide behind math though, but it's not the math that's racist it's the person.

emerged9• 4 years ago

By saying any of them, commenters must subject themselves to the witch hunt panel right here in front of our very eyes. Is that what you’re hoping for? “Anyone who is sick of being called a witch, come forward” (demanded while erecting the stake)

leephillips16• 4 years ago

(1) The concept of an inherent “gender” makes no biological nor logical sense. You can’t have been born in the “wrong body.”

(2) Socrates was mostly right about democracy.

(3) Seriously violent criminals, once convicted, should never bet let out of prison.

(4) The US (and all nations) should have essentially open borders.

(5) The US should make health insurance illegal and provide health care as a function of government, the way they provide national defense.

(6) All gun control is against the US constitution and poor public policy.

These are all my sincere opinions, and, although I think most of them are clearly, sometimes self-evidently true, most of them are heresies.

noelsusman3• 4 years ago

The only one of these that could fit Graham's definition of a heresy is the first one, and even then it would depend on what exactly you mean.

beaconstudios23• 4 years ago

Doesn't everybody think their ideas are self evident?

As for the gender one: imagine you woke up in the body of somebody of the opposite sex tomorrow. Wouldn't you be in the wrong body?

My understanding is that the "wrong body" argument is actually not an accurate explanation of trans people's experience though.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

The first one is problematic and it needs have some context. Do you think that person can define its own gender which is different that genitalia which define sex?

The other ones are opinions and I’m not aware of anybody being canceled or fired for saying those.

kemayo18• 4 years ago

I think you're exaggerating what qualifies as a "heresy". It's different from people thinking you're wrong, loudly disagreeing with you, or even not wanting to associate with you once your opinion is known. If we agree with Graham's definition, you need to be fired for saying them.

Beltalowda6• 4 years ago

All except the first one (possibly? I'm actually not 100% sure what your view is since it's phrased a bit confusing) aren't really "heresies" in the sense of "people will vigorously attack you for it". They are perhaps way outside of mainstream politics, but that's not quite the same thing.

I happen to think that private ownership cars should be severely restricted, perhaps even outright banned. I think everyone will be better off. It's a pretty hot take and something of a "heresy", but no one is going to call my employer to get me fired, or round up a gang on Twitter to badger me over it. They make thing I'm an idiot, but that's perfectly fine.

maccolgan• 4 years ago

Post 3, it's quite the inverse in my experience.

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

None of these would get you fired?

blindmute2• 4 years ago

"Despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks make up 52% of crimes."

alfor2• 4 years ago

- US is one of the least racist country the world has ever seen

- Climate change is not as bad as show in the news

- Most womans prefer to work in somethings else than engineering

- Most womans will find more satisfaction in raising kids than a job

- A father and a mother is what is the best for kids

- Trump wasn’t worse president than Obama

- The press and big tech is 90% democrat thus they push the narrative they believe on other (some people call that deep state, other stolen election)

throwaway5432092• 4 years ago

The comment you want to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977924

lil_dispaches• 4 years ago

What is the name for people who call you a heretic? This forum is full of them.

3qz5• 4 years ago

There are many on the far left who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.

This is a great point. I’ve seen the same with attitudes towards homeless people where they can harass people on the street all day long and get treated like they’re a poor victim who has no agency, but a “normal” person can get fired over an awkward compliment. It makes no sense to me.

multiplegeorges• 4 years ago

It makes no sense if you completely ignore context.

the_gipsy• 4 years ago

This can also be interpreted as an interesting piece on perceived martyrdom and persecution fetish.

typon• 4 years ago

The plight of powerful white men in positions of power is nothing to scoff at

kalimanzaro• 4 years ago

Kind of sleepy but maybe heresies are sort of like a self-published but hard to verify/reproduce social zero day. Imagine NSO describing their iphone exploit in vague terms on their very own homepage.. that would get a rise out of concernable folks for sure

tptacek19• 4 years ago

I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here

No, you didn't.

lekevicius• 4 years ago

Can you quote any he mentioned? I can't find any specific. Or, do you mean just general existence of "anti-vaxx" is a specific example?

tshaddox2• 4 years ago

I wish he would just give examples or at least speak slightly more plainly about his complaint. I would understand his complaint more (and be able to decide whether I agree with him, although I’m fairly sure I don’t) if he would just say something very plainly like “I liked it better in 1985 when you could say X and have zero risk of losing your job.”

tlogan11• 4 years ago

I think by not mentioning examples he clearly communicate them to the people who are “x-ist”.

bmm6o• 4 years ago

There's a quotation that "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." I think the problem is that PG is determined to demonstrate that he has a great mind, and must therefore discuss only abstract ideas. Lowering the discourse to include events or people is not an option. Unfortunately, the essay isn't exactly about heresy, it's about accusations of heresy, who makes them, and if the incidence is rising. So the essay can't really get to its subject.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

Lowering the discourse to include events or people would probably disgust people. Most of the heresies people get canceled for seem to range from pedestrian to absolutely vile.

I'm a freedom of speech absolutist, but my only sympathies towards anybody who has been canceled have either been because the people canceling them were extremely stupid, had the facts completely jumbled, and petulantly refused to be corrected; or because somebody sheltered had accidentally shared some inherited bigoted opinion that they had never really thought about in a small, relaxed context, and had that mistake blown up by cluster two clout-chasers trying to break into the opinion-haver industry.

batty• 4 years ago

Relevant tweet: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

invalidOrTaken3• 4 years ago

He can't do this because of the topic of the essay. If he could, it wouldn't need to be written.

tshaddox2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately any argument of that form can be rejected immediately on epistemological grounds. Take for instance the argument “we can’t say certain words any more because speaking them will summon an ogre who will immediately kill and eat the speaker…and I can’t give any evidence of this occurring, or give an example of any of these words for obvious reasons.”

dbsmith83• 4 years ago

Which wrongthink is not the issue being discussed here and is beside the point. This is about principle. The issue is not being able to hold any wrongthink beliefs (and discuss them) while also holding a job. If you can't think of anything which may be true but also offensive enough to get someone fired for proclaiming it, you may be guilty of being a 'conventional thinker'.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

This is one of the best reasons to learn a second language. Heretical concepts are often wrapped in layers of euphemism. For this reason, heresies tend to have problems crossing language barriers as that structure of euphemisms hasn’t necessarily been developed. One of the properties of the euphemism treadmill is that the mere existence of softer alternatives makes the original seem much worse than it was before.

Speaking another language often exposes you to people expressing taboo (to you as an outsider) concepts in a blunt and direct manner. This may strengthen or weaken the taboo to you, but at least it will make you think.

To give a very mild example, in English it’s taboo to mention someone’s weight. Even if they are a public figure that you will never meet. So we have a structure of euphemisms: “overweight”, “larger”, “plus-sized”, etc. But there are other languages where people literally do call each other fat, to their face, and it is not taboo. As you can imagine, this principle extends to political and social concepts too.

qsort• 4 years ago

+1.

Another related reason is that zealots love words. Big important-sounding words, preferably starting with capital letters (which kind of makes sense: arguments low on logic need to be high on rhetoric and wordplay to sound convincing).

Useful concepts easily translate: "chair", "sky", "screwdriver", "surjective function" are words in any language. On the other hand, difficulty in translation is a strong indication that the underlying message would be more appropriately described as "noise".

There are a few false positives (humor, contextual references) but they are fairly easy to spot.

darkengine• 4 years ago

The exact example you mentioned (a person's weight being taboo) was my first "culture shock" when learning Japanese. My mind was opened to the multitude of prejudices carried just by speaking English many times after that.

At one point I kept a Twitter account where I tweeted random thoughts about the world only in Japanese. Even though it hardly had any followers, there was something really freeing about this. It forced me to choose my words precisely (lacking a deep abstract vocabulary, it required careful perusal of the Japanese dictionary), and I also didn't feel subject to the cultural burdens of English (as for the burdens of Japanese, I wasn't yet aware of what they were). I definitely recommend to language learners keeping a little diary in their second language, once they get to a point where they are able to.

derevaunseraun8• 4 years ago

Something that's really interesting: if you are bilingual read the wikipedia of the non-English language. Especially topics that are more controversial. A lot of the controversies we talk about in the US are very specific to the English language

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

Well, it doesn't help that Wikipedia doesn't actually have a single canonical version that is translated, but rather versions that are independently managed by separate communities and therefore diverge significantly

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

I have worked as a translator and interpreter, and I agree. I have often found translation to be a great way to reveal sloppy thinking that is hiding behind a turn of phrase. I promised myself that if I were ever became important enough to publish things read by lots of people, I would be sure to translate them even if it weren't necessary, as a way to review them.

tomrod8• 4 years ago

I don't read too much of PG's recent work. Does he attack classism with the same vigor as he does the left?

kemayo18• 4 years ago

Mysteriously enough, the rich old man has his priorities aligned differently there.

Tangentially, I'd like to note "rich old man" as an example of one of those "just speaking an objective truth" things this essay supports, and the reason it can be problematic. Because objectively, Graham is a rich old man. (You could quibble about the precise boundary on "old", but he's 57 currently and that counts to me.) However, my saying it and calling attention to it certainly implies things, doesn't it?

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

He's insanely detached from reality. Dude should not be making social commentary lol

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

It's telling that you interpret an attack on heresy as an attack on the left.

tomrod8• 4 years ago

Nah, he clearly defined the rise in heresy to his perception that liberals instituted changes in academia in the 1980s.

Why do you feel it is "telling" to accurately and concretely identify something that the article was explicit about?

noelsusman3• 4 years ago

There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.

The implication here is there is currently no significant wave of intolerance coming from the right, which is baffling to say the least.

I see this a lot in modern free speech advocates. They seem to almost exclusively focus on censored speech that goes against liberal dogma and completely ignore similar behavior from the right. Is it just because liberals have more cultural power than conservatives?

sanderjd8• 4 years ago

The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left.

This is an (aggressively?) conventional idea that I have an (I guess) heretical opinion about. I'm somewhat persuaded that there is a recent outbreak of intolerance for differing ideas and ideals (though I suspect every generation expresses a version of this opinion as they get older and become out of step with cultural evolution), but I don't think it has any particular political valence. I have to watch my tongue just as much around "aggressive conventionalists" on either side, they just have different conventions. It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right, to express opinions like "immigrants are good", "the 2020 US presidential election ran smoothly and had a clear victor who was duly inaugurated", "gender is a social construct", "people who are attracted to others of the same sex are normal and should have the same rights as anyone else", etc. etc.

Honestly I think this whole thing is as simple as, people just have different views and lots of people of all stripes don't want to agree to disagree with the people they spend most of their time with.

randomtwiddler2• 4 years ago

Seems a false equivalency. The majority of the personalized destruction, cancelling, firing, etc, comes from one side.

sanderjd8• 4 years ago

This is a common claim that seems to be based more on vibes than on evidence.

ss1088• 4 years ago

Because that side simply has economic power.

philosopher12349• 4 years ago

How about bills restricting voting access to people of color, or the ability to say the word “gay”? Those don’t qualify as material consequences for violating conventions/ideology? You have a one sided view.

banannaise• 4 years ago

...which one?

slibhb3• 4 years ago

It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right

The question isn't "staying in good graces". While people should have friends with whom they disagree, the topic here is heresy. Heresy leads to punishment that goes beyond social consequences.

At this point, it's hard for me to know how to respond to people who remain skeptical of the thesis here. The NYT editorial board has acknowledged the problem. If you're still a holdout, you're probably part of it.

sanderjd8• 4 years ago

The question isn't "staying in good graces". While people should have friends with whom they disagree, the topic here is heresy. Heresy leads to punishment that goes beyond social consequences.

Potayto potahto. I was talking about the same thing that the article called "heresy".

My claim isn't that shunning and social pressure doesn't exist or isn't a problem. I'm just a bit skeptical that it's a lot worse now than in the past, and I'm a lot skeptical that it's only a problem on one side of the political aisle. I don't even think it's really a thing with a political valence, I think it's just a human thing.

chronolitus• 4 years ago

Another take on this particular question (that I found much more interesting) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/

sanderjd8• 4 years ago

Yeah his take is very interesting, but I think it's also very personal, very much coming from his own personal milieu (which contains a lot of very reactionary right wing folks...). I think it's an example of what I meant by saying this conventional wisdom seems to be more informed by "vibes" more so than data. It's definitely true that the SSC and pg crowds have are deeply convinced that this is a problem unique to the left, I'm just skeptical that their belief is as factually based as they might think. The SSC article does a good job of incorporating this uncertainty, but the OP does not, in my view.

asiachick• 4 years ago

ignoring your point to nitpic but, none of these (immigrants are good", "the 2020 US presidential election ran smoothly and had a clear victor who was duly inaugurated", "gender is a social construct", "people who are attracted to others of the same sex are normal and should have the same rights as anyone else", ) are position of the right. They are the left's worst spin on the right's positions.

alignItems• 4 years ago

The fundamental fallacy at play here is the human mental bias that we are at the peak of ethical advancement - and the corollary meta-bias that the historical witch hunters didn’t have this exact same bias themselves.

It doesn’t help that drama likes to portray them as intentionally evil.

In reality, most Christian zealots (or any historical enforcers of heresy) must have been very confident that they are doing the right thing. That their acts are sacred and justified. That they are on the right side of history.

Tolerance thrived when people realised that although you feel certain in your convictions you should have enough humility to let others express theirs, because everyone always thinks and always thought that they are right, yet they were obviously wrong most of the time. And we are likely to be too.

tootie8• 4 years ago

The fallacy that Graham is espousing seems to be that moral superiority (or even moral improvement) is utterly impossible and any attempt to raise the level of discourse is oppression. The change in tone in the 80s he refers to is the ascendance of civil rights, feminism and gay rights. All incredibly worthy movements. The fact that some adherents make mistakes is human nature. The notion that they can't be debated is patently false. The anti-progress faction is still very very powerful. Plenty of unequivocal sexists and racists face no punishment.

oh_my_goodness• 4 years ago

Points. On the other hand, how carefully did you read the comment you're responding to?

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

The change in tone in the 80s he refers to is the ascendance of civil rights, feminism and gay rights

Source? These movements are more than 100 years old. (yes, even gay acceptance basically got its start in the early 19th c.!) Did they really progress all that much from the 1980s to the present day? This is very much non-obvious, at least to me.

jimkleiber6• 4 years ago

How I understood his essay was that he actually wants more debate about things and finds statements such as "that is X-ist" to end debate.

Did you read that differently?

rayiner19• 4 years ago

The idea that there is an “anti-progress faction” is a self-serving delusion. What you have is different people with differing views of what “progress” looks like.

For example as to “feminism”—in 2022 nearly all women agree it’s a good idea women can have bank accounts. But Roe remains deeply divisive and most women reject the full scope of those “rights” (specifically the right to abort in the second trimester). Half of women with children at home would prefer to be homemakers, and many resent the social and economic pressures for mothers to work.

Same thing for “civil rights” or fighting “racism.” Does that mean Black and brown people being able to order food at any restaurant? Virtually nobody disagrees with that. Does that mean Black and Hispanic people getting racial preferences in college admissions or employment? Most Black and Hispanic people themselves reject that. As one of the oft-discussed “Black and brown” people, I would say much of what passes for “fighting racism” today is more like this: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ (“Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.”).

Don’t forget that there were lots of ideas advanced in the name of “progress” that turned out to be ideological dead ends. 60 years after “free love,” we have massively retrenched, pushing sexuality out of more and more contexts. I don’t see Malcom X-style racial separatism being the way forward in a multi-ethnic society. “Same sex marriage” was actually a moderate reaction in it’s time—a response to those who wanted to use gay rights as a vehicle for a larger change in norms around marriage and gender.

Finally, we don’t know the ultimate effect of these changes. I can’t help observing that the countries that initiated major shifts in views towards marriage and sexuality in the last 50 years have become dependent for their continued population stability on immigration from countries that have traditional views on marriage and sexuality.

twofornone4• 4 years ago

The anti-progress faction is still very very powerful. Plenty of unequivocal sexists and racists face no punishment.

If I dared to push back on diversity and inclusion mandates in my workplace I'd lose my job. That includes explicitly racist talk about not hiring any more white guys. These "anti-progress" sentiments may exist but effectively in a parallel society, relegated mostly to blue collar work. It's dishonest to pretend that this ideology hasn't effectively taken over nearly all of our major institutions, and this slimy sort of denial is partly how it happened.

And these topics are not nearly as black and white as culture warriors make them out to be, but God forbid if you express the wrong opinion or even ask the wrong question. Progress is great but sometimes you need to stop and listen to the people warning you that you're about to progress right off a cliff.

epicureanideal• 4 years ago

I’m happy to see Paul Graham taking this position.

One of the reasons I haven’t applied to YC is that I was getting the sense that he and YC might have the opposite opinion.

It seems plenty of SF Bay Area based startup, founder, investor networking groups are uncomfortable for people with opinions that might be considered heresy.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

I'm not pitching in my $0.02 here (although I have plenty to say, as I seem to be an irredeemable heretic).

Emo Phillips was never my favorite comic, but he did have one bit that dovetails quite nicely, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78

intrepidsoldier• 4 years ago

Why does this site not have a SSL certificate?

galaxyLogic6• 4 years ago

Another word for heresy is political correctness.

The problem with it is you can attack anybody you dislike with very little cost to you because you stand with a large crowd agreeing with you. And you don't even have to understand the issues since the opinion you put out is commonly accepted. It in fact might not be your opinion but you can still use it to attack opponents.

Political correctness is a quite naturally occurring phenomenon. People oppose other people. There's not much we can do about it except try to point it out. But that's not what Paul Graham is doing, he's talking about it in the abstract, only.

That is not a bad thing but I see an issue with it: It gets you far away from actual issues that harm us greatly.

It is not the biggest problem that political correctness occurs. The problem is some of the things it is used for.

For instance in Russia it is the ultimate heresy to say that Russia is fighting a war on Ukraine. The war is a real big problem. It is not caused by political correctness, supporters of the war are simply using political correctness to support the war. And state-sanctioned official heresies, yes that's what we need to fight and expose in general.

The real problem is not political correctness but using it for bad purposes. Like using it to support an unprovoked military attack on your neighboring country and putting the "heretics" into prison.

tootie8• 4 years ago

Political correctness was an epithet invented by conservatives who opposed things like women's rights, gay rights etc. The fact that advocates can be mistaken doesn't overshadow how wrong the other side is to be unwilling to acknowledge injustice.

galaxyLogic6• 4 years ago

Exactly, it is most likely an attempt to shift the conversation to something else. Ad Hominem.

lukifer2• 4 years ago

It does not follow that every reaction to injustice is inherently justice. As an exaggerated example, if the punishment for shoplifting was death, I can oppose that punishment without being in favor of shoplifting.

Obviously, those who criticize overreach of responses to injustice, will inevitably find themselves in common cause with reactionaries who do genuinely oppose progress, whether they want to or not. But that's all the more reason to be tolerant of good-faith dissent: the alternative is no one trusts anyone, and good-faith dissent itself becomes coded as a reactionary trick.

rendang4• 4 years ago

We live in a pluralistic society where there is a great deal of disagreement over the fundamental principles of ethics, justice and rights. This is not an easily soluble situation, it boils down to the is-ought problem.

However it seems that today many want to pretend that these differences don't exist, e.g. a progressive talks to a conservative as if the latter agrees on fundamental presuppositions but only misapplies them. In other words, we treat our opponents like they are heretics from our religion instead of infidels who belong to a different one.

dangoor• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a Popehat article I finally got around to reading yesterday: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

In that article, Popehat talks about the need to define cancel culture and understand how the free speech rights of the first speaker intersect with the free speech and association rights of people that respond.

I think the most useful aspect of PG's article is that he does actually define what he means by heresy:

Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done

PG doesn't give any examples, but I do think that trying to be clear around definitions in order to be able to say "is this an example of heresy at work?" or "has this person been unfairly cancelled?" is a valuable exercise.

FWIW, my main reason for commenting is that I find Popehat's article to be a valuable addition to the conversation because it's specifically addressing the "cancel culture" terminology rather than trying to swirl a new term (heresy) into the mix.

malnourish3• 4 years ago

I had not seen that article; thank you for sharing it.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

By reading comments here it seems like racists and sexists think this blog is written with intent to support their agendas.

I wish PG clearly spell out that is not ok to say that other people are less of a human. And with “heresy” he meant “vax mandates”, “gun control” and other general issues.

I’m ok dicusssing gun control, taxes, etc. but I (and anybody I know) are really not ok when somebody says “evolution does not end at neck”.

morelisp7• 4 years ago

I (and anybody I know) are really not ok when somebody says “evolution does not end at neck”.

Given how often Claire Lehmann and her coterie show up as a reviewer of his essays and their Twitter interactions with Graham, it's easy to figure out he's talking about exactly such a statement.

tlogan11• 4 years ago

And Claire Lehmann seems to be anti-gay and anti-transgender?

I was not aware who that person was but by reading her blog posts it seems to be way too anti-gay and racist to be considered serious.

0xy3• 4 years ago

Which ideas/thoughts should be banned and should result in immediate firing? You're suggesting gun control is okay, what's not okay?

galaxyLogic6• 4 years ago

To lighten up this discussion a bit here's perhaps the greatest song written about and against Heresy: https://youtu.be/s8leF4zV6lQ

Seattle3503• 4 years ago

This read a lot like Eric Hoffer's "True Believer". I highly recommend the book to anyone who liked this essay.

marricks2• 4 years ago

He really needs examples provided. Which group do you think is on his mind?

- Palestine and how many academics have been fired or silenced for supporting them l? Nathan J Robinson was let go form The Guardian for a joke about Palestinian treatment.

- The score of labor organizers fired in the tech and food service industry for expressing their right to organize?

- Tech workers getting fired for what could be claimed to be sexism/sexual harassment?

- People fired because they are extremely right wing?

People who talk about the limiting of free speech almost never care about the first two but they sure get high and mighty when their friends get cancelled for making off color jokes.

c1b• 4 years ago

So you just gave three examples off the top of your head but you need to make sure he picked the right one..?

marricks2• 4 years ago

Sorry, I thought it’d be obvious to everyone reading he clearly isn’t talking about:

- labor organizers getting fired

- Palestine

- Folks getting sexually harassed

woodruffw10• 4 years ago

I believe the author was pointing out that pg is selective in his application of "heresy."

Aidevah• 4 years ago

One of my favourite short stories by Borges is "The Theologians"[1], which deals with a contest between two theologians in suppressing heresy. It's absolutely wonderful how Borges managed to turn dry scholastic debate into a fascinating and gripping narrative. It also contains this wonderfully ironic scene when one of the theologian's past writings which was used to eradicate a previous heresy but have since fallen out of fashion was unearthed. The poor fellow insisted that it was still orthodox but everyone except him have moved on and under the latest opinion the old writing now appeared hopelessly heretical.

I've extracted a paragraph below, but the whole story is quite short and well worth reading.

Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones’ deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered by this crime obliged John’s judges to assume an unexceptionable severity. He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake.

[1] https://matiane.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/jorge-luis-borges-t...

neumann• 4 years ago

Thanks! That is a wonderful read.

gumby2• 4 years ago

The quotation about Isaac Newton was a poor choice for this essay as it was clearly allegorical about Newton himself. Even if you don’t know anything about the man, it should be clear from the claim that marriage might be a sin.

In reality, the comment reflects four important things about Newton: 1 - marriage: he never married and once complained about someone trying to set him up with a woman; 2 - heresy: he was a reformation era figure, quite religious in his Protestant (heretical to some) beliefs; 3 - crime: as master of the mint he bestowed justice high (mostly) and low on forgers and other criminals within his authority (and not in Cambridge) which leads to 4 - sin: a nice intensifying noun that encompasses not only his intense religious nature but the zeal with which he pursued and punished criminals and many with whom he disagreed, including friends.

cpr2• 4 years ago

I think it was just a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that he was a don, who don't marry.

gumby2• 4 years ago

Sure, though to be pedantic he wasn’t a Fellow during the period referred to by the quote.

Was there really a prohibition on marriage, or was that a side effect of dons being required to be priests (who in the CofE of course can marry). Interesting.

In general, restoration politics were weird.

stareatgoats5• 4 years ago

The way this post gets flagged repeatedly seems to underline the point pg is making. But the repeated unflagging also signifies something: that there is strong opposition to branding things as heresy in the current landscape.

This is a fault line that roughly follows the main party-lines in the US as far as I can see. And so pg can also be interpreted to be dog-whistling which side he is on. Which can also be the reason why the analysis comes across as a bit shallow; like when did we start to interpret historical phenomenon in terms of ad hoc personality types? (the "aggressively conventional-minded" personality type that supposedly is responsibly for crying heresy since time immemorial).

This struggle (between "the guardians of proper speech" and the "free speech advocates") has been extremely personal for several decades, but by bringing personality into it pg seems to turn flip the coin on the opponents; they are inherently bad humans (too). So it's perhaps not weird that this post has been flagged off and on, for that reason too.

But another take on this is how the political struggle has gradually invaded every nook and cranny of human existence, down to questioning the "way we are". It is likely a dead end that just might be one of the causes for increased mental illness in western societies.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that we need to take a step back and not so easily be drawn into the political talking points. Perhaps the answer is: let's not engage in ad hominem attacks, not on individual level, not on group level. Easier said than done perhaps, but I seriously think we need to get there.

softwaredoug2• 4 years ago

In the 90s and 2000s it would be “heresy” to be a gay or transgendered person. I remember sadly how people in hushed tones would talk about coworkers.

There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture that you didn’t defy very easily.

I'm a bit surprised how easily people forget these things.

vasco• 4 years ago

There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture

There _was_? I'm not sure what field of engineering you're in, but in software, hardware and electrical engineering which are the ones I have the most contact within 3 countries in Europe, this is the norm today. Through friends in mechanical and civil engineering I get the sense it's even worse there.

randomsearch• 4 years ago

I’ve seen glimpses of this in tech recently. Could you please give some explicit examples? I’ve been sheltered from it for a long time and I’m wondering if what I’ve seen are examples of what everyone means by “brogrammers”.

catears• 4 years ago

I also thought about transgender and gay rights.

Heresy to me sounds like it comes from an intolerant society. At least in regards to LGBTQ+ rights it feels like society has (thankfully!) become more tolerant. How many people would be fired from their job today if they said they are gay compared to 30-60 years ago?

Maybe PG is talking about specific contexts like academia, media, or tech companies though?

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

Yes great point. What we do is trade off "wrong-being" for "wrong-thought" or "wrong-talk."

haihaibye• 4 years ago

people in hushed tones would talk about coworkers

If they were still co workers, it wasn't treated as a fireable offence like the modern heresies

krainboltgreene10• 4 years ago

I mean you could do a modicum of research and find that people were often fired for being gay or trans. Still are, far more than "cancel culture".

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

Are you talking from a US/European perspective? Being gay was entirely open and mainstream in the 90s/2000s. Although I'm not sure what that has to do with heresy which was the topic of the essay.

softwaredoug2• 4 years ago

Gay marriage was only legalized in the US in 2015.

Barack Obama couldn't openly support gay marriage in 2012 or 2008 due to political repercussions.

Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard)

In my 90s high school slurs like f*g, etc were commonplace. It cropped up in popular media like Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (where now its bleeped)

darepublic2• 4 years ago

Make sure to use main instead of m*****

giorgioz• 4 years ago

Paradox of tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

Paul Graham is intolerant of intolerants of intolerance. I think to solve the paradox the way to go is not to solve by principle but weight on how much intolerance you are applying in order to prevent some other intolerance to someone else.

"Your freedom ends where someone else begins"

EXAMPLE

Person A: People from group X are more likely to be BAD at math.

Person B: Don't be racist/sexist/x-ist.

Person C (Paul Graham): Hey B, you are using x-ist but is the statement true or false? If the statement from A is true, then A should be allowed to say it without B calling him/her x-ist.

Well it depends on what's the approximation and opinionated consequences. Maybe group X is worse at math by a small percentage 1% and A is removing numbers to make a larger generalization that loose its context and is just demeaning of the group X. This is solvable by stating actual figures without implying consequences from it. Person A should have said: The study ALFA showed results where group X was 10% more likely to be BAD at math than group Y and Z. I will pass you the link to the paper of the study so you can review it.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

I think the author rather exposes his ideological biases in this paragraph:

"The most notorious 20th century case may have been the Cultural Revolution. Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, the Cultural Revolution was otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon. Mao said in essence: There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them. And that's all the aggressively conventional-minded ever need to hear. They went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels."

A more balanced approach would have included the rise of authoritarian fascism in Germany as an example of the persecution of the heretics, namely any who opposed the power of the Party or questioned the validity of the 'untermenschen' concept that relegated so many groups - Slavs, Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents to 'unperson' status. Indeed, Hitler's acolytes - like Mao's - also 'went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels.' A rather popular book was published about this phenomenon that's worth reading, called "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/784848.Hitler_s_Willing_...

In any case, whenever a commentator chooses to exclusively focus on fascist atrocities or communist atrocities when examing '20th century atrocities', you can be sure they have a severe ideological bias and are hardly honest interlocutors. In this context, 'x-ist' could refer to either communist or fascist, although I suspect the author is implying 'racist' or perhaps 'classist'?

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.

I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right. I'm curious how he can look at anti-"critical race theory" laws and "don't say gay" laws, which quite literally restrict freedom of speech among academics and teachers, and _not_ view this as a damaging and dangerous politics of conventionality. I'm curious as to how he can take a religious metaphor like 'heresy' and not apply it to the US American right which, in no small part part, advocates for a literal theocracy.

These essays often seem very reasonable, to me, when stated in the abstract. Of course we should support freedom of speech! Of course we should be sure that nobody is fired for expressing harmless opinions! But, consistently, the proposed solutions are uninformed, unfeasable, ineffective, or even counterproductive. The best way to make sure people are not fired for speech is not to make it unacceptable for minorities to argue vehemently with their oppressors; it is to end right-to-work, end at-will employment, and give labor more power. The largest threat to the academy is not "mobs" of students expressing their disagreement with their schools' administrations' policies, it is the systematic defunding and devaluing of the humanities, the pure sciences, and the arts.

hikingsimulator• 4 years ago

I have nothing to add. Thank you.

jacobolus• 4 years ago

Paul Graham grew up in a time when rich middle-aged white men with no relevant experience or credential could spout off about whatever topic they wanted, including pseudo-intellectual racism/misogyny, and everyone would be forced to listen to their nonsense unable to respond with more than an eye-roll for fear of reprisals. (For that matter, when Graham grew up those powerful white dudes could beat people up, sexually assault people, etc. with no consequence.)

Now when they spout similar nonsense, such dudes are publicly criticized, and the criticism deeply shocks and distresses them, to the point that whiny white/male supremacist grievance has now entirely taken over a whole US political party, which is trying to outlaw public criticism of white/male supremacist ideology.

Edit: Disclaimer to satisfy rayiner: I am a 6'2" married 36-year-old straight white male homeowner with 2 kids and a car.

Edit #2: Folks may enjoy https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

the criticism deeply shocks and distresses them

This is a really good point. It's frustrating, though predictable, to see people arguing about the precise threshold of "harm" to which speech should be held in the comments here when the harm done to most people Graham seems to be defending amounts to "someone was mean to me on the Internet."

And - yeah! That sucks! People being mean to you on the internet sucks. But until people like this are defending every target of KF/ED/4chan/etc hate mobs just as vehemently, I'm not really interested in treating them like they're neutral, rational parties.

ambrozk5• 4 years ago

This is a pretty shocking fairytale version of the past.

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

I am a 35 year old straight married white male homeowner and businessowner who identifies as reasonably right-wing and I endorse this comment.

wskinner• 4 years ago

a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights

If this is intended to refer to the United States, it is highly exaggerated. I doubt you could find a woman, disabled person, or LGBTQ+ person who seriously would rather spend their life in 1970s America than 2020s America. The normalization of rights and tolerance for these groups has been so total and swift that it can be hard to to put things in perspective and imagine what life was like in the relatively recent past.

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

I doubt you could find a woman, disable person, or LGBTQ+ person who seriously would rather spend their life in 1970s America than 2020s America.

That's not what I meant and, I think, not what I said. I did not say that we _had_ rolled back those rights, but that we were in the _process_ of doing so. Rather than moving in the direction of liberation for these groups, we are moving in the opposite direction, at least in some places, and more relevantly for this discussion, that politics of oppression is normative in the right-wing party here. Graham's essay is explicitly aimed at the left, yet effectively elucidates the precise tactics and goals of the right.

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

"In the process of reversing much of..." does not mean that things are worse than in the 70s. It means that things are being undone.

The right to abortion has been threatened more now than in the past many decades, for example.

rayiner19• 4 years ago

reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right.

Gee, how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections as not trying to turn back LGBT rights? One wonders.

Attempting to argue that the battles being fought today—fighting laws regulating private conduct in bedrooms versus teaching third graders about sexuality—is disingenuous. So is overlooking that the current flash point on “women's rights” (Roe) is unpopular with women in its full scope—specifically, Roe’s guarantee of elective abortions in the second trimester.

The best way to make sure people are not fired for speech is not to make it unacceptable for minorities to argue vehemently with their oppressors;

Oh please. Social progressivism is an overwhelmingly white movement. Elizabeth Warren’s voters in the Democratic Primary were about as white as Donald Trump’s (85%).

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections

More recently, the court seems to be looking to overturn Obergefell. [1]

the current flash point on “women's rights” (Roe)

I was referring to the proposed reinstatement of child marriage in TN. [2]

1: https://www.educationviews.org/clarence-thomas-signals-willi...

2: https://www.wlbt.com/2022/04/06/proposed-legislation-could-l...

UncleMeat22• 4 years ago

The GOP's national platform still says that they intend to overturn Obergefell. Laws that explicitly target the LGBT community (both gay and trans people) are being passed in numerous states, which are uniformly red states. And it isn't hard to see a partisan split in the Supreme Court on the topic of gay rights, even if individual Republican-appointed justices have been on the right side of several cases.

camgunz2• 4 years ago

Gee, how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections as not trying to turn back LGBT rights? One wonders.

Sure, Obergefell and Bostock were good, but op was talking about the country, not just SCOTUS. You can't ignore things like bathroom/locker room bills, the Don't Say Gay bill, book banning, etc. You're narrowing to things that support your position.

(Roe) is unpopular with women in its full scope—specifically, Roe’s guarantee of elective abortions in the second trimester.

This is a right-wing talking point that (predictably) ignores the facts, narrowing to data that supports their position. It's very hard to poll about abortion because it's so nuanced, and most Americans are really uninformed. Couple of things here:

If you look at Gallup's results (the poll Town Hall et al reference) [0], you'll even see majority support for abortion in the third trimester. 75% of respondents believe abortion should be legal when the woman's life is endangered, and 52% when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. You'll also see that 56% of respondents oppose an 18 week ban, which is well into the 2nd trimester.

The reason the right centers on the "second trimester" talking point is that a different question shows way lower support (65% think it should be illegal), but when they drill down, support in various scenarios (life of the mother, etc.) increases. This is similar to polling about the ACA: if you asked people about Obamacare they hated it; if you asked them about the policies in Obamacare (no lifetime caps on care, no preexisting conditions) they loved it. It's an old, disingenuous trick.

Social progressivism is an overwhelmingly white movement.

This is super untrue, but it's not that surprising since you're using Warren's primary campaign which, again, is a very narrow measure that supports your position (the demographics of the states she competed in are "overwhelmingly white" [1], so what you said applies to every candidate until Super Tuesday). The quick rejoinder is "then explain BLM", but something more substantial is the demographic breakdown of the Democratic vote in the 2020 Presidential election [2]. Quick synopsis is Biden/Harris won:

- 63% of Hispanic and Latino voters

- 87% of Black voters

- 68% AAPI voters

- 65% of Indian American voters

- 68% of American Indian and Alaska Native voters

- 43% of White voters (38% men, 44% women)

Maybe you'll quibble on Biden/Harris not being a progressive campaign? We can look at the last Quinnipiac poll from before the Iowa Caucuses [2] where Sanders' and Warren's non-white supporters made up 41% of their vote shares. Sure they don't match Biden's 70%, but they're decidedly not "overwhelmingly white" (might want to look at the Buttigieg campaign for that one).

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/01/31/just-ho...

[2] https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=3651

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

rilezg2• 4 years ago

Great points. I would also highlight the following:

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

I would offer the analogy of a broken (analog) clock. If a broken clock says the time is ten o’clock, and the time actually is ten o’clock, it is more important to note that the clock is broken than that the clock is correct. Similarly, if someone says something that is technically true, but they are a person who often lies or has goals that harm others, then it is more important to note that they should not be trusted than that they are correct.

Critics of 'intolerance'/'cancel culture'/'heresy' often invoke truth in their arguments. They miss that the phenomenon has nothing to do with the truth of an out-of-context statement, rather it is about whether a person should be trusted.

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

Similarly, if someone says something that is technically true, but they are a person who often lies or has goals that harm others, then it is more important to note that they should not be trusted than that they are correct.

This is a great analogy, but I'd go even further than this; someone can say something which is true, but in context use it to signal harmful intent. Saying "you know, that last commit from Jane was awful" while venting about bad process over lunch with a good friend is very different than saying "the last code Jane committed was awful" in a meeting about hiring the team's second female employee - even if it's absolutely true.

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

Thank you - I was familiar with 'a broken clock is right twice a day', but hadn't considered the analogy with prejudiced statements before. Useful

moolcool2• 4 years ago

I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right

Good point! The "problem" is often framed that society is full of adult-babies who can't be disagreed with without dire consequence. But is it at all possible that it's just the case that in recent years people have just felt more empowered to tout anti-social ideas which are worthy of scorn in the first place? There's quite a bit of evidence for the latter (January 6, Charlottesville, Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers).

version_five3• 4 years ago

I'm curious how Mr. Graham can look at a country that is in the process of reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right

I see the former (and maybe the latter, I honestly don't pay too much attention), but my interpretation is that a major culprit for any reversals in rights is the far left, who have upped demands from reasonable tolerance (which we had essentially achieved) to ridiculous "you're actively protesting with us or your against us" proportions that have caused the pushback.

Just to add, in principle I'm against

anti-"critical race theory" laws and "don't say gay" laws

even if they are mischaracterized to a large extent. But I see them as the latest escalation in response to provocation from the left. They were not written in a vacuum.

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

the far left, who have upped demands from reasonable tolerance [...] to ridiculous [...] proportions that have caused the pushback.

This is the equivalent of the schoolyard bully saying "I wouldn't have hit him if he hadn't asked for his lunch money back."

nabla92• 4 years ago

PG's essays have smug 'fleeting above it all' tone. He gives the impression that he is not talking about himself or his in-group. There is kind of unsaid hint.

More than 1,500 books have been banned in public schools, and a U.S. House panel asks why https://coloradonewsline.com/2022/04/09/more-than-1500-books...

AlexTrask• 4 years ago

I think that Mr.Graham is not talking about rights and progress.

curl -sb -H "http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html" | grep "right" one will be the last.<br><br>There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine when, like the medieval church, they say "Damn right we're banning

NoraCodes15• 4 years ago

`grep` is not the solution to every problem, friend. Not using exactly the same words does not mean we are not discussing the same topic.

jzdziarski• 4 years ago

Graham seems to have missed the mark here. What he’s describing as the unjust labeling of x-ism usually isn’t related to the deviation from a norm, insomuch as it is the prejudices behind that deviation. He argues that truth is ignored, but it’s not the truth that’s usually at issue in such matters, it is the manner of delivery of whatever truth may be, filtered through a set of prejudices the hearer is offended by. The hearer then can either utilize the thought terminating x-ist label, and walk away, or attempt to address those prejudices directly. In the former, they are saying, “because I have identified these prejudices in the way you’ve presented your case, I cannot give credence to any of the truth you are arguing”. Reasonable, but less than ideal. The latter - and often better response is, “that’s x-ist and let me tell you why.” That’s how you cut through the BS and have a productive conversation. I hope this is what he was trying to convey, but didn’t quite get there.

What he seems to have missed in separating truth from prejudices is important to recognize. This is an expected communications problem in a society that struggles with decency, and decency is what’s at issue here - not truth. Because at least one party lacks decency, they’ve lost their credibility to convey any truth. The other party may lack tolerance, but that intolerance is, at least usually, about those prejudices, and not any underlying truth.

Regardless, actual heresy - of the biblical type that Graham is trying to use to support his argument here - has historically been more based on threatening a power structure, such as was the case with Martin Luther, for example. Ironically here, the tables were turned, and the “heretic” (Luther) presented factual information while it was the hearer that reeled with prejudice. The two cases are about as much alike as a camel and a spork. I am surprised he tried to make the comparison. Nonetheless, if that is what he’s trying to argue, then he’s seemingly suggesting the fault is always on the listener for being offended. In the cases Graham is describing though, it is far more likely to be the speaker who wraps whatever truth there might be into vitriol brought into the conversation. It at least would have made for a good essay to point out both possibilities.

Tl;Dr: truth always falls victim to prejudice, on either side, which is why we should work to identify and root out our own prejudices before engaging.

codedeadlock• 4 years ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

It's difficult to build strong opinions on a topic. Mostly we go with the safe opinions that are acceptable by society.

And problem comes up when we mix belief, perspective, facts and opinions.

https://binaryho.me/opinion/

Avshalom• 4 years ago

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

just sayin'. maybe 1985 sucked a lot for a lot of people that weren't paul graham.

jounker2• 4 years ago

Yup. Paul Graham doesn’t seem to have a very accurate memory of historical conditions.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

Totally. I have no idea about Paul Graham's upbringing, but back in the 80s and 90s I was a "fag" threatened with violence just for being a slightly effeminate nerd obsessed with computers and weird music, etc.. One didn't even have to be gay to be subject to homophobic hate and intolerance. I have teenagers now -- one self-identified queer high schooler and the other a middle schooler in a tiny rural school not unlike where I grew up -- and today's society is an amazingly tolerant dream compared to what I grew up with.

raxxorraxor2• 4 years ago

The following generations claimed that insult but its power has been given back by many that didn't understand the subcultures that moved beyond it.

imgabe10• 4 years ago

The idea is to make things not suck. Not to make them suck in the same way for different groups of people.

Have you considered the possibility that oppressing gay people and firing people with unpopular opinions are both wrong and should be opposed?

krainboltgreene10• 4 years ago

One still happens today and has received zero essays from PG, despite it still being an issue in the tech community, and the other doesn't actually happen.

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

The article was about heresy, not attitudes to gay people. I'm not sure why people are trying to conflate the two.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

We're not conflating, we're providing context. Western culture had/has a sickness of violence and intolerance that decades of activism is chipping away at. Some people perceive this activism as "intolerance to heresy" when to others it's "intolerance to intolerance."

I'm not in an oppressed group, and I've done my fair share of foot-in-mouth. But my sympathies are with the ... subaltern..., not generally with people claiming to be treated as heretics because they got censured (not censored) for using their public or corporate positions to pick on people or support picking on people.

Yes, there are excesses. I don't support them. But I'm glad I'm living through an era where it's becoming less acceptable to be a prick in public.

blub2• 4 years ago

Even if people may disagree about the specific year, the initial upward and currently downward trend is unmistakable and visible also all over Western Europe.

erikpukinskis4• 4 years ago

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion

If that's how Graham reads such statements, isn't he basically saying "It's heresy to call a statement x-ist" in his presence?

What am I missing, this seems totally hypocritical given the rest of his argument?

rendang4• 4 years ago

Does Graham say people who make those statements should be ostracized and fired? I don't see the parallel at all.

erikpukinskis4• 4 years ago

No, he’s not saying that.

I interpreted it as saying, for him, as soon as he hears one of those words, the conversation is over.

Which… sounds like… if not heresy, then taboo?

dorianmariefr• 4 years ago

Isn’t grouping people’s behaviour as heresy a start to look at them as heretic?

chasing• 4 years ago

I’ll point out that saying true statements but framing them in a racist or sexist way is an extremely common tactic. In fact, it’s the preferred tactic of many bad actors because it’s very easy to hide behind the “but it’s true!” defence.

Something can be true and also presented with racist or sexist intent.

sitkack2• 4 years ago

Is also a great way to get the other side to rage quit the "debate" and then you win by forfeit. Also the bullshit wrong thing gets pulled along closer to the truth by standing next to a true fact.

daenz• 4 years ago

intent

assuming you know someone's intent suggests a bias against the part that you disagree with. give me an example of a truth that can be perceived as racist or sexist, and i'll show you how easy it is to ascribe intent to it.

vannevar• 4 years ago

Yes, I think pg gets off on the wrong foot here---essentially saying that if something's true, it can't be x-ist---and proceeds in a circle. As you point out, many statements made with racist intent are at least partially true. This should also explain to Graham why whether something is x-ist can depend on who's saying it (and therefore what their intent is likely to be), while something that is true is presumably universal to the speaker: x-ism and truth are orthogonal dimensions.

native_samples• 4 years ago

One of the interesting things about this essay is the way it criticizes orthodoxy and heresies, then casually throws in people who refuse vaccines as "extremists" equivalent to people who enforce the concept of heresy.

But that doesn't really make sense because "thou shalt never question the divinity of vaccines" is a modern day orthodoxy, and those who do in fact question them are the modern day heretics, with scientific institutions being the modern Church. Heretics aren't actually set on fire these days but they are e.g. currently banned from entering the United States and many other countries, and just a few months ago they were banned from all public places etc.

A man truly dedicated to the abolition of heresy would recognize that by calling people as "extremists" is in fact (perhaps unrealising) the exact same behavior he is criticizing. After all, has he talked to these people to understand their heresy? My guess is no. Rather, he just feels in his bones that by Following The Science™ he is a morally and intellectually superior creature.

When an essay that thinks it's arguing for the ending of heresy cannot even avoid damning some heretics, I see no particular reason for optimism, as Graham does. Rather this problem will get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.

dragonwriter6• 4 years ago

I want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it probably will

It doesn't work now; it might work better in the future when the current claims (which are right-wing propaganda) are irrelevant, and only the vague, not particularly actionable, generalities.

Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for heresy was death

It still is. Did you miss 1/6 and the “hang Mike Pence“ chants? Did you miss the Pizzagate lies and the violence they instigated? Did you miss the current “groomer“ propaganda directed at the LGBTQ+ community and allies from the right for merely existing openly, including the Disney “bring ammo“ shirts being marketed? (All of which—at least, promotion of the ideas, if not the actual execution of the violence—is not limited to the fringes of the right, but mainstream major party political and media figures.

The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left

There can't be a reason for a thing that isn't true. Falsely portraying the intolerance as primarily a left-wing phenomenon is the central element of the persecution propaganda that is the common underlying foundation of all of the right-wing violent intolerance efforts going on; while PG is pretending to be above the fray and neutrally negative on the left only because of the dynamics of current condition, he is actively participating in the things he is criticizing by knowingly validating the false premises underlying the most violent, dangerous anti-“heresy” movements.

There are many on the far left who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.

“Many...seem“ is pretty weaselly, but I (and I bet I have more experience with the far left than PG, despite not being a far leftist) know of no one on the far left who believes in reintegration of felons for whom there is reason, at least negative, to believe are reformed that does not believe that for non-criminal moral wrongdoers.

Those who have neither reformed nor even acknowledged their acts or the wrongness of them are...not the same.

ineptech2• 4 years ago

Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

I think that whether this is or true or not depends a lot on how you define your terms. If cancel culture only means "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights on TV and then lost my job", then yes, the window is narrower now than in 1985. But if it also includes "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights in a bar and then got beaten up," it is not.

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

The article was about heresy which he defined as a factually correct statement that will destroy your life if stated. It wasn't about being an unpleasant person with unpopular opinions.

ineptech2• 4 years ago

PG is implying that the phenomenon of getting shunned for having said something right-wing on Twitter is new/different enough that it implies some shift in societal attitudes. I'm arguing that it is not, and the 1985 equivalent would be a progressive being shunned for being, let's say, pro-gay-rights in small-town Missouri. The mechanism changes with technology, but the cause has not changed since Hester Prynne at least.

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

I know this is going to sound insane, but what is the obsession with truth? Things can be true and harmful.

People should be judged for saying harmful things.

derevaunseraun8• 4 years ago

Yeah but how do you get people to form a consensus on what's harmful?

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

You don't need to. Society will always define this for you.

prepend3• 4 years ago

I don’t know about obsession with truth, but I think having a shared reality is the basis for relationships, trust, and many accomplishments.

I don’t think truth is something that people should obsess over, but it is very important to seek and hopefully gain understanding.

I remember reading 1984 and the breaking of people to admit that “2+2=5” was an interesting way that people accepting false things as true is very bad.

I think intent matters a lot as judging people for being mean is different from someone saying “the sky is blue today” and the listener is harmed because they hate blue or whatever.

That’s a completely made up example, but I think real, although dangerous, example is trans issues. There are bigots who say things like “women aren’t men” or whatever to hurt people and I don’t think that’s right. But then someone will say “men are generally stronger than women” to discuss some scientific principle and people feel harmed there because they don’t want any differences to exist.

the_optimist• 4 years ago

Once you start deviating from truth, you enable a wide range of extremely horrifically bad things. Things you have not witnessed, but humanity has. Do not do this. "Here be dragons," for the true idiots who don't bother understanding this.

RichardHeart• 4 years ago

Mr. Graham writes an essay supporting free speech. Thus the comments here, ironically, attack his speech, with tons of words found no where in his essay at all. The comments here literally prove the spirit of his essay.

moolcool2• 4 years ago

I don't see the irony. I don't think anyone is denying PG's his right to speak freely, they're just disagreeing with him.

stareatgoats5• 4 years ago

Freedom of speech is the freedom to disagree, including on completely irrational grounds (from someone's perspective). You seem to hold a common misconception about what it means to criticize someone.

scarecrowbob2• 4 years ago

Feeling that there are more "heresies" now than, say, 25 years ago says a lot more about the orthodoxy of ones' opinion than it says about the state of the world.

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

I don't think you need to put "heresies" in vague quotes. He's defined it quite clearly as factually correct statements which will destroy your career and social life if stated.

scarecrowbob2• 4 years ago

I have little confidence that the author and I wholly agree on the set of "factually correct statements".

hintymad• 4 years ago

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way.

This is such a great summary on the hypocrisy that went rampant in the past few years in the US media and US politics.

nabla92• 4 years ago

Example: More than 1,500 books have been banned in public schools, and a U.S. House panel asks why https://coloradonewsline.com/2022/04/09/more-than-1500-books...

adrianwaj• 4 years ago

"Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Chris Best, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Daniel Gackle, Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehmann, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Robert Morris, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this."

Why so many people?

fassssst2• 4 years ago

This is an essay about what is largely a social media phenomenon. You can avoid the whole thing by just not participating. Seems like a waste of energy to even discuss vs just realizing that arguing publicly on a global scale is not a good use of your limited time on Earth.

ethbr04• 4 years ago

Public policy, and the power stemming from it, is a social phenomenon.

Which isn't to say that Twitter is important to the United States' future, but also is to say that it's not unimportant.

Commons sway votes, which sway policy in a democracy.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

Commons sway votes, which sway policy in a democracy.

Evidence suggests otherwise[1]. In the US (and really anywhere else) public policy is elite driven, and if anything public discourse and public opinion is amorphous and shifts as a response to whatever is passed down by institutions, be that corporate, academia, the media or what have you.

This very intuitively is visible in the 'topic of the day/week/month' nature of American discourse where everyone seemingly synchronized goes into a frenzy only to move on to the next thing a while later.

The 'commons' are a giant entertainment machine where people who have practically zero influence on anything meaningful can spent their time, that's about it.

[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

derevaunseraun8• 4 years ago

You can avoid the whole thing by just not participating.

Except when people don't participate they get nothing out of the exchange and there's no discussion or progress

fassssst2• 4 years ago

Progress happens offline.

hansoolo2• 4 years ago

But participating in a Twitter flame war or something related mostly just hardens opinions. Everything happening online is behind the anonymous mask.

FerociousTimes7• 4 years ago

Except that the conversations on social media seeps into and spills over into other facets of real life and affects public discourse on traditional mass media and public policy in general.

josephcsible9• 4 years ago

You can avoid the whole thing by just not participating.

No you can't. If someone records you saying something heretical, they can share it on social media and the cancel mob will get you fired from your job, even if you don't have social media yourself.

atoav• 4 years ago

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.

I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a women which very clearly was the polar opposite, or how all people with a certain enthnicity have a certain negative trait etc.

These people were not guilty of heresy they were insensitive assholes (when done on purpose) or at least ignorant.

In an honest discussion with someone about e.g. the differences between men and women, I never called someone a sexist, just because their ideas were outdated and flawed as long as it actually was an discussion. The thing is, that more often than not the goal of people spouting such things is not getting to the bottom of things, but validating their own opinion. This is of course out of insecurity, which is why calling someone sexist is not a good way to respond in such an situation. Better is to ask them what they mean and have them explain it to you. And if they realize themselves they are sounding a bit odd, you can just tell them this is not your experience.

smugma• 4 years ago

There’s a big difference between calling it out in person and over the Internet. You were rightly calling out the person’s language as unacceptable. Maybe the hope was to change their behavior (unlikely, at least in the short term) or at least stand up for what you thought was right.

When this is done over a mass medium, there are many other motivations. Could be to make themselves look good within another group, attempt to cancel, etc.

It may come from similar positive/good faith motivations but easily becomes distorted.

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

It’s tempting to point out a few heresies. My hunch is that you’d err on the side of feeling uncomfortable. “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy, the way that clouds are telltale signs of a thunderstorm.

I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.

This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.

Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.

I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.

Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.

Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.

The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.

I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.

It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?

There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?

Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.

otterley17• 4 years ago

“Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy

Some would call them telltale signs of knowledge, wisdom, and a moral framework that places great weight on respect for others, when used in a corrective context.

exolymph2• 4 years ago

Another fraught heresy, which I'm about to commit, is that men and women are intrinsically different (in aggregate, on average, blah blah blah) and thus if you swap the genders in your story, it is a genuinely different story. Granted, I can't say that I have positive regard for older women who sleep with teenagers, though I'm glad you didn't garner any trauma from it, but my personal experiences lead me to have a very negative opinion of older men who sleep with teenagers. Maybe it'd be different if that weren't a highly stigmatized thing to do, but currently the selection effects are such that 99% of them are scumbags. For the same reasons that counterculture groups have a higher-than-average incidence of rapists (anecdotally, I admit) — when you gather a bunch of people willing to transgress societal norms together, well, said transgression continues.

The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.

I just proved your point, didn't I? :P

mise_en_place• 4 years ago

Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.

It could still be a net positive for the teenager, even though it was an extremely inappropriate/problematic relationship.

joshuamorton8• 4 years ago

and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.

But this begs the question, doesn't it? Like the real answer is that

1. Lots of opinions were guarded or hushed or held closely even 20 years ago even in much of the western world (being trans or gay, being particularly nonreligious, socialism/communism/any kind of viewpoint left of Obama, all kinds of things about dating and sex, and more)

2. People weren't generally having discussions, or figuring things out with tens of thousands of listeners. Saying really dumb things because you don't actually know what you're talking about because you're a nonexpert is common and has been common forever. But people didn't start doing this until social media.

3. Things that were previously handled by whisper networks ("This professor says all kinds of wild racist shit", absolutely something said in my undergrad, and "this prof gives better grades to women who wear short skirts in the front row", something that absolutely was said in my parents undergrad) are now handled more openly and explicitly. This is probably a globally more optimal result, in that fewer people have to deal with sexual or racial harassment. But it also means that misunderstandings can blow up.

That's it, that's the issue.

freebuju4• 4 years ago

It may be too late to have the kind of conversations you are envisioning with young people raised in this generation. They have conjured up big words and terms that don't even mean anything in the practical sense and will easily take offense with anything or anyone about whatever values they strongly identify with.

This is the generation that needs (and sometimes demands that) their spaces online be protected from any ideas that are divergent to those they subscribe to.

causality03• 4 years ago

That's one of the more depressing parts. Even the people I agree with never engage with the actual argument of their opponents. For example, I'm pro-choice. The people who are anti-choice believe that abortion is the murder of a child. The people who agree with me, however, never engage with that argument. They just point out ways in which the anti-choice people are sexist or otherwise hate women. Similarly, the anti-choice people refuse to engage in discussions about body autonomy. A similar pattern is reflected in almost every other contentious political issue. Factions don't argue with each other, they just talk at right angles as loudly as possible.

jounker2• 4 years ago

Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

I know, it's a very common but very bizarre centering of the general concept of intolerance on China and on lib college students. States make laws denying work to people who support BDS. Announcing that you don't give a shit about whether Russia takes over Ukraine could get you fired, especially if you're ethnically Russian, but announcing that Ukraine should fight until the breath of the last Ukrainian is spent and the last blade of Ukrainian grass is burned will get you a spot on local TV news in Milwaukee, WI, USA.

The BBC had MI5 vet its employees for correct political opinions and associations into the 90s, and won't deny that they do it now.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/16176527.revealed-mi5-vett...

http://tonygarnett.info/mi5-and-secret-political-vetting-at-...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/14/bbc.research

The major difference is that captains of industry used to be able to almost completely dictate orthodoxy, and now in the age of the internet there are competing orthodoxies - some of which don't consider power and wealth synonymous with wisdom and genius. It also turns out that plenty of powerful people who control institutions don't care about being seen as philosopher-kings, and are happy to let their PR and HR departments deal with controversy. They will happily capitulate to all orthodoxies in order to protect the institution.

The problem is that labor rights have been overrun by freedom-of-contract at-will libertarians, so instead of people just hating you for things you've said and done, everyone also has to deal with apolitical sociopathic corporations that will excise you like a suspicious mole at the first whiff of controversy.

chernevik2• 4 years ago

Why a high school teacher needs a position on gay rights in the classroom, in 1985 or 2022, is beyond me.

kemayo18• 4 years ago

Ignoring for a second that it's perfectly legitimate for a teacher to do something like have a rainbow flag bumper sticker on their car, or be openly gay and mention their same-sex spouse in class, all of which would not go well in many places in 1985... you can't think of a reason to discuss gay rights in, say, high school level social studies, history, or literature classes?

johnday2• 4 years ago

Because it is the role of a teacher to educate, and it's entirely possible that some children enter the classroom with a set of values incompatible with modern life?

johnday2• 4 years ago

Because it is the role of a teacher to educate, and it's entirely possible that some children enter the classroom with a set of values incompatible with modern life?

In other words, for the same reason that a teacher should have "a position" on any other civil rights.

odonnellryan12• 4 years ago

What topics are acceptable for teachers to hold views on?

Barrin922• 4 years ago

The man seems to have also forgotten the cold war and the entire era of McCarthyism because if he thought being a socialist in cold war America wasn't a heresy he should ask some. I'd pin 1985 as one of the most monotonous periods of American discourse (mirrored in the election results of the time). Discourse is much wider today, mirrored in the resulting polarization that everybody talks about.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

I've also noticed that these things are taking on the aspects of religion, i.e. they are faith-based.

Kosirich• 4 years ago

Does HN community generally agree with a statement that current "left x-ist aggressive woke purity ideology" is an extension of white puritanism and puritanist like ideology. As portion of white protestants lost their faith they found a replacement in the "holier than thou" approach of the hippy left? As a non american I see Occupy Wall Street as being more of a catholic left movement while everything after as protestant left one.

philosopher12349• 4 years ago

The issue isn’t consequences for speech. Conservatives like Paul Graham are perfectly fine with consequences for certain kinds of speech (speaking out against a company in his portfolio, for instance.)

The issue under debate is what kind of speech merits what kind of consequence. The idea that there should be no consequences for speech oils only remotely believable when you are a member of the white, cis, wealthy class who’s lived without consequence for speech for their whole lives.

Skiiing11• 4 years ago

The article was about heresy which he defines as something which is factually true, not generic notions of free speech.

If I can respectfully say something here: you're making sweeping statements about people based on their race etc. It's going to be difficult to make persuasive arguments if that is your debating starting point.

Animats2• 4 years ago

Part of the problem in the US is the decline of routine democracy. Democracy works properly when you have a vote, you get a decision, and the issue is settled and done. That's rare today. It leaves us with no way to settle things and go on.

Useful question: do you belong to any democratically run organization, defined as one where the members can fire the leadership?

alkonaut• 4 years ago

"Hi, I'm important and I find it's hard to be an asshole these days without someone immediately calling me an asshole"

Did I read this right?

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

The thing that makes x-ism x-ism is not truthiness (or the lack thereof), but intent and omission and what it implies. The thing that is explicitly being said is always accompanied by a lot more that is not being said and this makes all the difference.

Let's stipulate that group A has statistically more X than group B. This is the truth, measurably.

If we state this fact on public television, but omit, overlook or belittle the (also stipulated) fact, that this is due to unfair advantage Y (which then accelerates development that furthers the unfair advantage of group A) that's X-ism.

The devil is in the cherry picking and context. The outcome might not even be intended. Or it might be. The crux is: Saying "that's not what I meant" is just as easy as saying "that's what you meant" (or "that's sexist") and neither is a sign of sincerity.

whatever_dude• 4 years ago

Another day, another PH essay with some kind of defense for being an asshole disguised as higher discourse.

alanlammiman10• 4 years ago

Wow, 802 comments here. No way I can go through all that, but I'm really curious. If you happen to have read a significant % of the comments could you do a summary? (wasn't there a blog that had that kind of thing?)

evocatus2• 4 years ago

Fantastic essay, as is par for the course.

randcraw• 4 years ago

I think what Paul is describing is blasphemy more than heresy. Blasphemy is a single public statement contrary to official doctrine while heresy is the public endorsement of a school of thought that contradicts official doctrine in some nontrivial way.

Paul's connotation for heresy is: A dismissing B due to a specific statement from B (blasphemy) that contradict A's canon of orthodox beliefs (religion).

But I think that incorrectly conflates individual opinion into an unforgivable sin, punishable only with excommunication or death. Historically, cases of heresy arose when someone like Gallileo proposed a viable model of the universe that contradicted dogma, not when they made a single isolated statement of dissonance. The latter were commonplace in secular writing even early in the Enlightenment. (Blasphemy did alienate freethinkers like Voltaire to the Church and Royalty; but it didn't get him imprisoned or killed. It was direct opposition to Royal dogma that did that, like Sir Thomas More's excommunication by Henry VIII).

BTW, 1918's Sedition Act was passed after the US entered WWI, as an emergency expedient intended to squelch open opposition to the war. It isn't really comparable to the concepts of heresy or blasphemy against a canon of beliefs, since Wilson's decision to go to war wasn't a persistent dogma that needed protection. The Act was a temporary martial law (like Lincoln's suppression of the Maryland government for the duration of the Civil War) to be lifted after the immediate threat to fighting a war had passed.

keithwhor3• 4 years ago

The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and often destroy large amounts of healthy tissue and in some cases, entire organisms.

I don’t think his assertions are wrong but I don’t think castigating people as “aggressively conventional minded” is the right approach. In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It’s not enough to have an opinion, there has to be a bad guy or an evil group of people intent on destroying society.

I’m not sure how to solve this problem — open to suggestions and brainstorming, it’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.

AnimalMuppet2• 4 years ago

I think, in your second paragraph, you kind of contradicted yourself. If "weaponized victimization and othering" are the problem, well, victimization doesn't weaponize itself. Somebody is doing those things. So now we're at "a group of people are causing these problems".

That means that, yes, we kind of do arrive at an us-vs-them mentality - even you do, if you think a step or two further.

Now, you could be pleading for the Christian "love the sinner, hate the sin" idea - people are doing these things, but we need to not "other" the people. And that may be a real point - if "othering" is what they are doing, and we think it's wrong, then we need to be careful not to "other" them. At the same time, while we try to figure out how to help them not destroy society, we still need to keep them from destroying society.

bendbro4• 4 years ago

aggressively conventional minded

An aside:

One thing I love about VCs is the perfectly fitting, memorable terms they coin. This is a perfect example, I can't stop laughing.

choppaface• 4 years ago

COVID has changed a lot because it brought into public debate how to evaluate deeply held beliefs about predicting the future. The discussion is high-strung because it covers a life-or-death topic, and it’s so diverse (e.g. science vs region vs conspiracy vs liberty etc) that it forced the quantization of opinions. Once you swap an opinion for a symbol, game theory takes over the conversation.

What could help solve this? Real reconciliation of the different perspectives. There’s a common overlap: we all want to live, and we all have nonzero ignorance.

The tragedy is that the inordinately rich like paulg continue to divide with these self-serving essays instead of helping other to grapple with the K-shaped recovery we’re in now. The place to innovate now is not in blue-sky futurism but to innovate the recovery of those who COVID hit the hardest.

seaourfreed3• 4 years ago

Paul posted this because people are getting fired from their jobs now (directly or indirectly).

See his words: "Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. ... You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired."

People on the political right have moderate discussions and they are banded aggressively. Here are two examples:

* James Woods had 137,000 subscribers removed in two days, by twitter admins

* Ron Pauls' entire YouTube channel was censored and removed.

This is the "Heretic hunting" point Paul Graham is making.

tptacek19• 4 years ago

Well put. I don't think this is new for him; there's always been a vein in his writing of someone scarred, late into life, by bad experiences in high school. Maybe it's not deliberate, but it is a vibe he sometimes manages to give off.

When he writes about Lisp, or (for the most part) about startups, or about being a dad, he seems happy and well-adjusted (I'm looking for a better term but let's roll with that). When he writes about cancel culture, or maybe really culture of any sort: different story.

He should take a break from this stuff and write about teaching his kids Lisp.

zozbot23411• 4 years ago

When he writes about cancel culture, or maybe really culture of any sort: different story.

Is there anyone at all who writes "happily" about cancel culture? Even SJW's themselves can only give an impression of being perpetually angry and frustrated; they try to present their inner frustration wrt. the world at large as some sort of zeal for superior justice and universal social liberation, but don't quite manage to convince anyone.

musicale2• 4 years ago

When he writes about Lisp, or (for the most part) about startups, or about being a dad, he seems happy and well-adjusted

I could imagine that even unhappy or poorly-adjusted people might sometimes have worthwhile things to say.

He should take a break from this stuff and write about teaching his kids Lisp.

What would be the main benefit from doing so?

at_a_remove5• 4 years ago

Those feminists are so angry when they write about feminism. They seem happier when they write about other topics. Clearly, then, we know what to advise them to write about.

You see how that works?

sleightofmind• 4 years ago

"He should..."

As my great aunt (born circa 1899) said, "Sometimes the 'You shoulds are the shits.'"

I'd like to see more on topics of enduring interest from Paul than on the ever-evanescent fluff of tech. That his concern lies with teaching his kids not to be social gangsters rather than teaching them some current tech meets with my approval.

foobarian• 4 years ago

Honestly it reads a lot like something one would write who had lousy childhood/schooling experiences. I say that because I had one, and recognize a lot of the points as things I idly fantasize about in a "revenge of the nerds" rubric.

FerociousTimes7• 4 years ago

I didn't pick up on any "misanthropic" undertones in his essay but I echo your sentiment regarding the labels not for the same moralistic reasons you cited but for their weak construction; I'd have opted for "collectivist vs individualist" instead of "conventional vs independent" and "militant vs casual" instead of "aggressive vs passive" but the premise of his thesis remains intact which is that we need to counter the pervasive influence of these elements not to ruin the public discourse for all of us.

keithwhor3• 4 years ago

Aha. Great observation; what you interpret as anti-collectivist / pro-individualist I interpret as misanthropic.

Admittedly this is probably cultural on my part; growing up in a working class Canadian family bestows different social ideologies. It’s a complaint I have about Canadian culture (not individualistic enough) but I do think a problem with American discourse is it can err so far on the side of individualism as to become misanthropic: the extreme being the sentiment, “I, and people like me, are the only group that matters.”

That’s not what Paul is saying here at all. I just think discourse about “social heresy” might be more productively framed as — what do we all agree on, how can we focus on channeling that energy productively, and how can we accommodate the people who disagree? Generally speaking capitalism can be a force for good here if you pick big, juicy problems everyone is excited to solve. Climate, energy, etc. And I think Paul is funding some of those companies!

rectang6• 4 years ago

In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering.

It's just plain old tribalist hypocrisy: people Graham agrees with are encouraged to weaponize their victimization, while people he disagrees with are denied. First-degree intolerance (including but not limited to "x-ism") is acceptable in any amount, second-degree intolerance (intolerance of intolerance) is verboten.

tomcam6• 4 years ago

people Graham agrees with are encouraged to weaponize their victimization, while people he disagrees with are denied.

Where do you get that from the original post? I am not seeing it.

Natsu• 4 years ago

The degrees are more a matter of perspective than fact, though.

Christians consider Satanists the intolerant ones and vice-versa. Both can be claimed to be voluntary association, but if one isn't a choice, then neither is the other.

tomcam6• 4 years ago

I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering.

Would you mind giving me quotes from the post to back up these assertions?

keithwhor3• 4 years ago

Simply categorizing human beings as conventional vs unconventional and passive vs aggressive, and then establishing an enemy in one quadrant is an example. Unconventional people are the victims, aggressively conventional people are the others.

I think the thing Paul really has a problem with is social brigading and mobs attacking people unfairly. Which is fine; but you can make that argument without painting yourself or people like you as a victim. Otherwise you’re just using the same tactic mobs use.

We’re all guilty of this to different degrees because social media algorithms are finely-tuned to propagate outrage and we’re being conditioned to respond to and generate said outrage. I think the way out of the loop is to recognize this pattern and try to break it.

mhh__• 4 years ago

I don't think it's immutable for a given person, but I think it is a sad fact of life that a lot of people are simply unable to have these kinds of discussions - even if they're motivated, which is even more rare.

MisterBastahrd7• 4 years ago

He's a thinker.

Just not a deep one.

He addresses topics just enough to scratch the itch he wants to scratch without putting any meaningful thought into them, which is why his essays are so easy to discard. Sure, they work for like-minded people who want to drink from the tap of the successful businessman stereotype, but they're usually not useful whenever he strays from talking about business.

dragonwriter6• 4 years ago

It’s shallow with a purpose; the evasive on details is necessary to use the vague platitudes as a vehicle for validating right-wing propaganda points without making it clear that that is what he is doing.

PG is capable of at least somewhat greater depth, and has displayed it on occasion, but it suits his purpose to avoid that here.

rayiner19• 4 years ago

The immune response example is instructive, but supports Graham's position, not yours. Immune responses often are destructive--but we've evolved to have them anyway because the consequences are potentially far worse. There's some really important principles of our society--not just free speech, but meritocracy, color blindness, etc.--that are under attack right now by a novel ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology.

It's not an ideology that's widely embraced, but has outsize influence in key institutions (kind of like Scientology). And it manipulatively invokes large groups of faceless minorities to paper over the fact that it's being advanced by a small, affluent, relatively homogenous minority: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/

rectang6• 4 years ago

I'd never heard of this "Successor Ideology" before today. Turns out it's a straw man crafted by its originator, Wesley Yang, for the sake of tearing down: he opposes it.

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

Yang coined the term "successor ideology" in 2019 to describe an emerging ideology among left-wing movements in the United States centered around identity politics. Yang opposes this ideology and believes it may replace traditional liberal values.

Never mind "outsize influence", it has no influence at all — nobody follows "Successor Ideology", not even the person who made it up.

BobbyJo2• 4 years ago

I don't see it as anything other than a useful label in his writing personally. If you want to talk about something, you need a name for it, and I don't think there is one more apt yet bland one can ascribe to a group of people who take an arbitrary set of conventions to an agressive extreme.

incomingpain• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

Obama is a very smart dude. 2 years ago he saw it building and he misidentified this as activism.

John Mcwhorter I believe better identified this as a religion: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/11/2/2272...

As an atheist you see the same pattern often. Here's a hour long video of sam harris and john talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHUu9sAGKo&t=2s

This new religion has the christians, muslims, atheists, and others all worked up.

It's unusual for a new global religion to form, nothing there to really prevent it. The big difference this time is they got really big while remaining undercover.

I guess my prediction as well. You could become a preacher for this new religion, set for life to serve. Just need to figure out how to. If you do try this, make sure you are following the golden rule every day. Make sure you're 100% positivity. Try to merge religions, I'm pretty sure 'coexist' is a big part of this.

FerociousTimes7• 4 years ago

I wish he touched on the point of how public discourse on social media platforms is inevitably doomed to descend into a cesspool of populist rhetoric, and the more masses the platform attracts, the more hierarchical it gets, the more emphasis it puts on vanity metrics, the likelier it would be a breeding ground of populists of all stripes, and that this cancel culture and mass-produced outrage is symptomatic of a greater social problem, and the witch hunts conducted by the vindictive online mob in pursuit of a perverted sense of justice that he so lamented in this essay is just one manifestation of the underlying issue of the infliction of populism that struck the society in our modern times.

d--b• 4 years ago

At some point one has to ask about the coincidentality between the rise in “heresy” (since he calls it that way) and the rise of social media platforms and new technology in general.

It’s one thing to complain that it exists, and another to discuss the roots of the phenomenon and how to address it.

Yes, I am implying that the guys at Silicon Valley with all their non-evil intentions are a major part of the problem. That the incentives of making money off data collection somehow got aligned with creating mobs of think-alike people who suddenly felt empowered to just shut everyone out of their bubbles.

Ask people to stay off facebook and twitter, Paul. Or are you in too deep?

femiagbabiaka• 4 years ago

When has freedom of expression ever been promised within the workplace? Genuinely curious.

titzer• 4 years ago

I was nodding along up until this:

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does. [2]

I think there is a ton of nuance that contradicts this. For example, a white, upper-middleclass college graduate could proclaim:

"College graduation rates are lower for black people. It must be difficult for them to finish."

And a black person with a low income background who has failed to finish college can utter the exact same words and it means something totally different.

The first might be considered subtly racist, depending on how its delivered, who it is delivered to--maybe even flagrantly racist under the right circumstances. The second might be considered exactly the opposite, alleging racism while not itself being racist.

The context and speaker matter a lot for these value judgments, not to mention tone, implication, insinuation, etc. Paul is bordering on socially crippled here.

aidenn0• 4 years ago

In addition, all communication is context sensitive. When a politician who needs nei-nazi votes to get elected says something questionable, it's not unreasonable to assume it was intentional.

Dog whistles are why we can't have nice things.

taneq2• 4 years ago

Just struck me that the term 'dog whistle' to the general population just means something you toot to get a dog's attention, whereas to a select target audience it has far more sinister implications and acts as a call to action of sorts. Ironic.

taneq2• 4 years ago

I agree with what you're saying here, just want to add that your example also kind of upholds the original line. Delivery, audience, tone, implication/insinuation factors all matter a ton... but in a text medium, barring access to any of the above, we kinda assume that if someone's white, upper-middle class and well educated, they're at least a little prejudiced against black people. Which was the original point.

(For bonus points I likewise kinda assumed with nothing to go on except the broader context that our "white, upper-middleclass college graduate" is going to be male and likely middle-aged or older.)

civilized2• 4 years ago

Judging racist insinuation from tone of voice, emphasis, and social context can definitely be valid. But I think it's really not a great idea to jump to negative conclusions about what a speaker said based primarily on the racial identity of the speaker. And making judgments primarily based on identity is what Paul is criticizing.

themacguffinman• 4 years ago

You're just demonstrating PG's point exactly: that the x-ism depends on who says it even though it has no relation to truth.

You didn't even try to argue once that the statement is less true when a white graduate says it. The most you can say is one "might be considered" x-ist and affects a vague "value judgement". What does "might be considered subtly racist" have to do with truth?

You're technically correct, the first statement might be considered subtly racist because as PG argues: that's the heretical world we live in. I'd find it hard to argue that PG is socially crippled when he is precisely spelling out this social dynamic that leads to heresy.

The only difference is you seem content that society works this way.

krainboltgreene10• 4 years ago

But in this case one can be true and one can be false. If you imagine a world where either situation is true, then the context changes the truth of the statements.

bzbarsky2• 4 years ago

The issue is that there is an implied difference in implied causation ("difficult because of their personal qualities" vs "difficult because of the college environment", say) and the truth values _with that implication included_ might be quite different.

duvenaud• 4 years ago

I'm confused - it sounds like you're simply agreeing with Paul here, while claiming to disagree.

voidhorse• 4 years ago

pg employs this style of argumentation so frequently that it's almost time to devise a new term for it; for those sympathetic to his argument, realize that it is not an argument for free speech but rather an argument for free speech without consequences.

pg likes to do this thing where he takes some noble instance of a counterexample (e.g. Newton being declared a heretic for important scientific discoveries) and uses it to butter up the audience to be sympathetic to what ultimately becomes a defense of racism/sexism/whatever-ism you want without consequences because, wait a minute kids, the homophobes and racists might be right! What he manages to do rather surreptitiously, is attempt to get abstract enough that he can bring all forms of discourse to the same level. He reduces all discourse to the "search for truth" but if he had even a passing knowledge of speech act theory, any linguistics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy etc. he'd quickly recognize that much of the speech and discourse human beings are engaged in is not about finding the truth.

Ultimately, we determine our own values, and just because something is true does not mean it aligns with our values. Can a statement be "xist" and true? (let's call it what it is, pg means the negative isms here, racism, sexism, etc. (see how suddenly it's hard to agree with him when he says what he means and doesn't hedge? he hedges and hides behind abstraction because he realizes his position is indefensible to most "conventional minded" (read not bigoted) people)) yes of course. a statement can be totally racist and somehow true. Does that mean we should accept all these statements in all realms of discourse and that such the authors of these statements should be free of consequences because the statement happens to be true. But we don't just live in the world, as humans we have agency and we might decide that when truth and morals conflict, we prefer morals.

Is calling someone ,e.g. racist an attempt to stonewall their speech? Of course it is. People don't like racism. Paul claims this is a "wave of intolerance" while conveniently ignoring the fact that the positive content of "xism" speech is also a vehicle of intolerance, and usually a much more aggressive one at that, to the point that your speech is trying to do the work of not tolerating the very existence of classes of people in society.

Human society is an amalgam of all sorts of discourse. Even we "conventional minded" simpletons can recognize that the intent of a "xism" discourse is usually not truth seeking so much as it is the active exclusion of certain classes of people from equal participation in society. It's nice to think everything is reducible to something like "Newton V. the Church" but this is a reductive move that ignores all the particularities of such discourse and tries to make things that are fundamentally distinct (scientific process v. racism, sexism, all manner of exclusionary discourse) equivalent. Should scientific exploration be punished with the stake? No. Should racism be punished with loss of a career? Possibly. As with every moral problem, we often need to judge case by case. Can "cancellations" be a way too severe given the violation? Of course. Can they also be appropriate? Sure. Moral problems are not reducible to a abstract mathematics that removes human particulars from the equation or to technical description and the part of your brain responsible for empathy must be pretty lacking if you think otherwise. Morality is not some abstract calculus. That's why we have juries and judges.

I'm really sick of pg using his platform to come up with these absolutely piss-poor pieces of sophistry that are ultimately defenses of horrible shit veiled behind "smart" abstract language so that "conventional minded" people are tricked into thinking this guy actually has something interesting to say about society and isn't secretly a massive bigot. Continue being a great capitalist or whatever but keep the pseudo-intellectualism to yourself, please.

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

I wonder if people are becoming less forgiving to others. That is the concept of redemption doesn't exist for everyone.

Ie, is Harvey Weinstein redeemable? What if he saved 1,000 others from sexual abuse, to redeem his sins, in the next year. Can his past sons be forgiven?

quantum_mcts• 4 years ago

when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment

Here is my problem with it: It is not something that "appeared in the last 20 years". It was always like that.

You just from a group that was completely shielded from it.

Now the protective shield that you so used to starts to dissolve.

You start to realize how the real world works. Not so perfect. Not so happy.

And think that it is some new ill destroying your perfect happy world.

noduerme2• 4 years ago

While the logical proof is interesting - of x-ist statements being acceptable or not based on who says them, and therefore potentially true and worth evaluating - it naively presumes that the general interest values truthseeking over ideological conformity. I think a lot of collective activists will freely admit that to them, capital-T Truth is less important than unity, and by this avoid the apparent contradiction.

As to the charge of undue weight being given to certain statements: Is there no statement that should result in the firing of an otherwise excellent employee? None? What about praising Hitler or advocating sacking the Capitol? If there is one, is there more than one?

Lastly, I hate to bring this up, but I was silently shadow-banned (had all my posts publicly censored) on this board by Mr. Graham himself for the heresy of criticizing some of his business approaches.

Sure, it was his right to do that, as the moderator. Isn't it an employer's right to fire someone for a statement that will harm the company - true or otherwise?

There have always been consequences for unpopular speech, some of which strike us as unjust. The line has shifted radically away from valuing free expression in recent years, unfortunately. But to say that "heresy" in this sense ever went away is a false statement. The only question that's ever been in play is where the line is drawn, and that's what should be addressed, by anyone claiming to seek justice; case by case, individual by individual, and not by countering one hyperbole - "you're an x-ist" - with its opposite, e.g. "you're the Spanish Inquisition".

honkycat• 4 years ago

This is pathetic. Why is multi-millionare Paul Graham bothering to write trite generalizations about "the left's cancel culture?" It is boring and tired no matter now pretentiously you dress it up. At lest Tucker Carlson knows how to deliver the goods in less than 500 words.

And I'm sorry but: what specific opinions does this guy hold that he is so angry about? It feels dishonest to whine like this without expressing any of the heresy himself.

Also, it isn't "cancel culture" if your belief system is trying to dispossess and devalue people I care about. It is self defense. 30 years ago you could wear blackface and speak open hatred towards non-binary people. I think it is a good thing we don't tolerate hate anymore. Apparently Paul Graham disagrees.

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.

I can't think of the last time a thing like this happened to me. I seriously doubt it has ever happened to Paul Graham outside of social media. If you are being kind and honest, I can guarantee someone will be interested in having a conversation with you about the subject. Unless they are an asshole.

I get the feeling Paul is main-lining Fox News and not actually having discussions with that many people. The TV man is making him angry about dumb culture war issues.

I've spoken before about how I feel the left can have shitty priorities and be extremely whiny. But here is the thing:

There are a lot of mentally ill people on social media who do nothing but harass and terrorize others based on their narrow world-view. This happens on both the left AND the right. It is impossible to know if these people are acting in good faith, or trying to give the left/right a bad name by being annoying and reactionary.

Every time you see someone say something controversial, they complain about "death threats on social media." While that IS vile and disgusting, it happens all the time. Every time. You can get death threats for saying Super Mario World is overrated.

Why are we still taking these pathetic social media people seriously?

Answer: Because they are a useful tool for the opposite side to use as a cudgel to while about "cancel culture."

You don't need a straw man anymore. You can always find an idiot or crazy person to represent an insane world-view and present it as if this person is The Pope of Leftists/Conservatives.

Candice Owens is a great example. She doesn't exist for CONSERVATIVES. Sure, they like her ( maybe ), but that isn't why she is famous. Her job is to have reactionary takes that gets picked up by centrist / left leaning orgs so the TV man can make the TV viewers angry.

"Cancel culture" is a TV show that has been doing nothing but re-runs since the 80s when it was called "political correctness."

renewiltord• 4 years ago

My ultimate problem with all these heretics is that their heresies are ultimately just reactionary - There is a constant thread of the “good old days” and “in the past” and essentially their ideal is some past state.

It just feels a bit meh to me.

But perhaps that’s how all things are. I have a view which I think is heretical: I believe that banning organ trade is unethical and exploitative and that bringing organs to the market in a safe way is not only possible but required by us. I think it doesn’t fall into this fallacy because there is no time when this was considered except one year before NOTA passed. But perhaps you all think that is boring.

grappler• 4 years ago

paulg, despite saying "There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left", immediately follows that with a fixation on the left:

"The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like."

We don't need to imagine. We're over a year into a wave of moral panic from the right focusing on local school boards in the united states, in which they seek to purge reading materials dealing with subjects that make them uncomfortable, fire people for raising those subjects, and impose rules against raising those subjects, in some cases carrying criminal penalties.

Looking over at Russia, we see the worst case scenarios Paul references in the esssay playing out quite explicitly, today. The example of how we'll know we're really in trouble ("Damn right we're banning ideas, and in fact here's a list of them") and the example of Mao saying "There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them"? Putin and his followers have already entered that territory [1] [2].

  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-protests.html
  [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.html

rsanek• 4 years ago

There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago

I see this sentiment expressed often to the point where it seems to just be accepted as true without the need to provide proof. Is anyone familiar with a methodology that attempts to examine this view with more rigor other than just, "boy it seems like more people are being cancelled these days"?

krallja• 4 years ago

the current wave of intolerance comes from the left

Banning Critical Race Theory, teaching kindergarteners about gay people, and removing certain books from school libraries are all being done by the far right, today, via legislative bodies.

thawaya3113• 4 years ago

The idea that people could speak freely in jobs earlier without getting fired is beyond laughable.

The only thing being exposed by this is that a certain group of people were exempt from the rules most faced and are now having to face some small fraction of that.

jensensbutton• 4 years ago

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.

What a load of shit. So he sets up this opinion piece with a poorly constructed straw man (quite literally a false statement in every _discussion_ I've been part of) then uses this as an anchor for the rest? I mean, this is one of the most aggressively conventional takes on cancel culture I've read over the past year.

Maybe he should get back to being active with YC again so he has less time to embarrass himself like this.

ykevinator2• 4 years ago

Did Paul cheat on his wife with Jessica? Is heresy bad?

lookalike74• 4 years ago

To disable heresy you'd need to disable personal or moral offense. But it's as unrealistic to think that could ever happen as it is to blame "the left" for reacting to the deliberate incitement and cultivation of prejudice that's so popular right now. People die because of "x-ism" and pretending "the left" are to blame is ludicrous in the worst possible way.

unityByFreedom• 4 years ago

This is the pot calling the kettle black and serves to divide more than it does unite. In the past PG was heavy handed on HN, later handing over the reigns to dang et al. That doesn't mean his influence is gone, or that the initial thumb on the scale had no lasting impact.

More competing tech from non-SV sources would be a boon for everyone including YC. There's no motivator like healthy competition.

mjirv• 4 years ago

Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.

I would amend #1 to “the adherents of the conventional view are convinced its truth is beyond question.”

Truth is actually really important, maybe the most important thing for heresy. A defining feature of heresies is that those enforcing them believe strongly that the heresy is untrue.¹

Take PG’s example of doubting the divinity of Christ. Truth isn’t secondary in that case - just the opposite. Believing it, literally, is the core feature of Christianity.

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

This is a fallacy. Insofar as this phenomenon exists (less than people think), it’s because the belief content of the statement is different depending on who says it. There’s a common view on the identitarian left that “minorities can’t be racist because racism is about power and they don’t have any.” But a Latino professor who spends his time arguing that Black people are genetically inferior to other groups will get cancelled just as quickly as a white one.

¹Or need to be seen as believing it 100%

DenGorbachev• 4 years ago

They went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels.

Indeed, some people chase heretics to take their wealth / power.

thomassmith65• 4 years ago

At this point, there are more essays decrying "cancel culture" than there are rabbit's noses. On an ideological level, many of them are rousing, but if they enter the realm of everyday life by listing specific examples, the arguments weaken.

Many forbidden ideas are taboo because they, often obviously, have little potential to help society, and great potential to harm it.

  I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.

I'll give the author credit for bringing that to the reader's attention. Then I also wonder if he wrote a draft with examples (the heresies of anti-feminists? groypers? race scientists?), and realized he would disgust his audience.

ComradePhil• 4 years ago

Paul conviniently makes it seem as if it was a organic grassroots thing and not a result of the rulers directing them from the top.

There's never been stable rulers who didn't get rid of the naysayers. "Drain the Swamp" was unsuccessful and it was like the vaccine for them. Now, they just know what can be used to attack them, so they are just fixing those things, whether it's gripping technocrats by the balls or getting rid of punishments for pedophiles.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

There seems to be some irony in this essay since the viability of today's "heresy" is particularly dependent on the use of computer networks, individuals, software and websites that are actively promoted by or otherwise connected to the author, e.g., through investments, mentoring and the like. Because the "business" of these websites is to generate web traffic for the benefit of web advertising, the operators can profit from the traffic that "heresy" generates. Imagine a "social media" or similar UGC-based website today that forbade the use of the website to identifiy "heretics". If that was the norm, would this essay have been written. Using the internet to pursue "vigilante justice" comprises such a large portion of UGC and associated traffic that it is arguably crucial to the "tech" company "business model." There are other uses of the internet. They might not be as profitable in terms of generating large amounts of traffic, satisfying advertisers and lining the pockets of "tech" companies and investors, but they might be equally or more beneficial to users.

Werewolf255• 4 years ago

I knew this was gonna be a rough read after the setup. And then he got to the part where he's "just drawing parallels" between the Cultural Revolution and college campuses, and I knew there wasn't anything else I needed to read. And of course it leads into "maybe we don't really need to make sure eeeeeveryone is vaccinated, freedom of choice" apologia.

The part he's missing, or being wilfully ignorant of, is intentionally distorting heresy and orthodoxy through bad faith and selfish uses of both. I can understand that the person who challenges the system due to experienced injustices or inequities is coming from a different place than the person challenging the system because they aren't allowed to dump mercury into the water supply. One is trying to speak to a system they perceive to be unfair while the other is trying to keep the system from performing as intended in order to further entrench their own interests. That they might seem similar is mostly window dressing.

I heard this argument in 2008 when folks loved to point out that Obama was popular with youth, just like Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It's Sinophobia, full stop.

Bostonian• 4 years ago

It's heresy to say that the races, having evolved in different environments for millennia, likely have different average levels of intelligence, consistent with patterns of scores on IQ tests and college admissions tests. Charles Murray's book "Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America" (2021) expounds this heresy.

The proposition can certainly be debated, but it's important that it is debated rather than shunned as heresy, because if it is true, pushing to make blacks represented according to population in high-IQ professions such as law, medicine, and engineering will erode standards and reduce productivity in those fields.

Geste• 4 years ago

Sometimes, all I wish is to have the life of a rich white guy. How your mind could be free to go to such lengths !

Connor_Creegan• 4 years ago

The values assumed by the author of this essay are so far removed from my own that it would be useless to attempt to engage it on its own terms in this forum, but I do find this piece interesting from the perspective of an anthropological study of language. Graham's criteria for heresy are :

"(1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done."

This obviously has nothing to do with the classical conception of heresy most pronounced in the Christian tradition, which is well-defined and well-documented. Anyone with intellectual honesty can discover on their own that "heresy" simply denotes teaching that is markedly false in virtue of being contrary to dogmatic teaching, almost the opposite of what is implied in point (1).

Based on many of the underlying assumptions in this piece, I think it would be entirely fair to describe Graham as some kind of liberal. This is evidently something he would bemoan me doing (see: the bit about "x-ism" in discourse), but the ideas expressed, the value-judgments made, and the characterizations of medieval Europe made in this piece are by no means original or historically-unprecedented.

The liberal or perhaps whiggish historiography (a conception of history, in this case, in terms of the degree of negative liberty allotted to individuals not only by the state but the body politic as a whole) implicit in this piece appears at least prima facie to lead to its author's either mistaken characterization or perhaps purposeful recharacterization of the notion of "heresy". Liberalism ad absurdem would, in performance, consider a classical conception of "heresy" nonsensical, because it assumes the truthhood of a dogmatic teaching which isn't immediately obvious to everyone. However there is something that, at least if pushed on it enough, no one will deny without performative contradiction, and that is that certain things are good and true, and others not. No systematic thought can be non-dogmatic, because the dogmatic rejection of dogmas is a dogma (it is, in truth, only the dogmatic rejection of dogmas existing in some form on the present world-stage). Of course, the dogmas of the varieties of liberalism are, more or less, incompatible with orthodox Christianity, which popularized the term "heraese" in the Latin West, and this accounts for the different notion of "heresy", which appears to me now as a corpse of a term, once mostly denoting false teaching, now emphasizing the persecutory aspect of espousing teaching contrary to certain dogmas. Similarly, "paganus" once referred to a rural, bucolic person in the Roman Empire, and through pejorative use by Christians simply began to denote those who practiced the religion common among the rural Romans. Now, the so-called "neopagan" movement self-identify as such, appropriating the term entirely. I have also witnessed the phenomenon of some "far-right" people I know crying about being labeled "fascists" because they were not "fascists" as defined in the doctrinal document ghost-authored by Gentile, but then years later willingly adopted the term, accepting that the nuanced differences between their worldview and the IFP's were negligible from the perspective of people who use the term "fascist" pejoratively. I think a similar thing is going on here with the use of "heresy". The author clearly believes that the dominant thought-forms during the middle ages are "antiquated" (his word), and because the differences between traditions with different declared dogmas probably appear to him negligible from the perspective of his values and historiography, the only thing the word "heresy" signals to him is the mere existence of socially-imposed consequences for expressing this or that belief.

Quite fascinating how we, as a species, use language.

mib32• 4 years ago

People in the West, please, don't complain. In Russia right now, if you just call a war in Ukraine a "war", you'll get arrested. Please enjoy what you have now, it's so much better. Left wing people are WAY much more soft than from the right.

mosew• 4 years ago

"when someone calls a statement 'x-ist,' they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion."

This thesis is the real "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". I can respect that it applies truthfully to many would-be SJWs, and the labels are indeed used to end conversations. However, meaningfully calling something racist, sexist, etc. is a start of a process, not an end. This meaningful discussion (and, much more frequently, reflection) is too often precluded when one party is too defensive to look honestly, openly, and beyond themselves, at their own biases.

engineeringwoke2• 4 years ago

So you let people control your life by letting them intelligently split interest groups by race and gender so that you can't effectively fight a class war? Bravo, you really fell for it.

jimkleiber6• 4 years ago

The challenge I have when someone calls something racist or sexist, or even good or evil or beautiful or ugly, is that a person seems to be taking how they feel about a thing and labeling that thing as if everyone feels the same way with regards to that thing, which I think is rarely if ever true.

Which can lead to this:

Person 1: That thing is beautiful.

Person 2: No it's not beautiful.

Person 1: Yes, it is beautiful.

Person 2: No, it is not beautiful!

or slightly better, this:

Person 1: For me, that thing is beautiful.

Person 2: Well, for me, that thing is not beautiful.

Person 1: Why don't you find that thing beautiful??

Person 2: I just don't see it as beautiful.

or much better, this:

Person 1: I feel so much joy when I see that thing.

Person 2: I don't feel joy, I actually feel disgust.

Person 1: I'm confused, why do you feel disgust when you see that thing?

Person 2: It reminds me of this one thing that caused me a lot of pain before.

So while yes, I don't think labeling something as universally X necessarily ends the conversation, I think it can lead people to a binary debate about universals instead of open up the conversation for people to share their own experiences and more personal perspectives.

Epiphany21• 4 years ago

This was a very interesting read, but I think there are some base assumptions left unanalyzed.

In my opinion, the reason why "cancel culture", or heresy as the author calls it, is so dangerous is because it legitimizes A) dehumanization, B) the idea that any evolutionary strategy is off the table, and C) the idea that you are not obligated to explain yourself if you want people to listen and take you seriously.

A) Society is regressing to the point where the mere utterance of a word or phrase can be deemed so offensive that it justifies murder, permanent injury and/or sexual violation being perpetrated against the speaker. This is a level of barbarism most would associate some distant dark age or the fauna of an unexplored jungle, yet here it is.

B) By evolutionary strategy, I am referring to the knowledge, experience and skill we apply individually and collectively for the purpose of survival, and the decision making processes we engage in along the way. People do not have to believe what you believe. They don't have to pray to what you pray to, or eat what you eat, or wear what you wear, or speak your language. And that's perfectly okay as long they aren't stepping your toes, and vice versa. There are many paths that can be taken to attain fitness and fulfillment. Monocultures suck, and stifled speech breeds them like there's no tomorrow.

C) A lack of transparency deprives us of the chains of logic used to reach a given conclusion, whether it's true or not. Tying this back into point B, in nature there is generally more than one right way to do something, yet the ugly monoculture that has come out of American social media and acadamia would seem to disagree. There is an all-pervasive "my way or the highway" attitude. When everyone is fearful and secretive it creates a chilling effect in every strata of society. It doesn't matter if you're a burger flipper or an electrical engineer. In all environments poisoned by this culture of hosility it becomes impossible to build enough trust to get the work done, let alone innovate or do it efficiently.

Human beings are smart enough to choose our own whetstones and sharpen ourselves in a controlled manner that leads to a lot less pain, suffering and death. But apparently not smart enough to overcome misplaced pride and petty tribalism. In my opinion this is the great filter. Not aliens, not an energy crisis, not space travel. Just learning to work well with others is going to be the hardest thing in the universe.

gverrilla• 4 years ago

Early 2000's I was in school as a teenager and reading about feminism. It looked to me very obvious, even before that, the oppression of women, and the need to stop it, alongside all violence - which demanded consciousness and dialog. I tried to advertise the concept to the females in my classroom, and with only 1 or 2 exceptions they ridiculerized me and feminism, and some even told me I was a "fag" or some equivalent. I would tell them that the "level of emancipation of women in a society is also a measure to this society's general level of emancipation" [0], and they would reply: "ok, nerd. why would you even care if you are a man, supposedly?". I'm pretty glad with the deep advances we've been able to produce since then. Love produces love, and vice-versa - and that's universally desireable. On our way to Harmonia[1].

[0], [1]: Charles Fourier

invalidOrTaken3• 4 years ago

Reading the comments, there is a definite Dark Forest (or similar) effect here, where heretics can't say what they think because it's heresy, and inquisitors can't say what they think because it doesn't stand up to sustained inquiry. Thus both sides try to goad the other into going first.

mancerayder• 4 years ago

He's right in that there's a very important and popular Zeitgeist here in the U.S. where person A and person B can say a particular fact P, and depending on certain external physical visual characteristics of person A or B (how the light bounces off of them or refracts), P can be taken to be false, or evidence of heresy. And what is interesting is even just raising the above objection in purely logical terms, is enough to have the dark shadow of suspicion cast upon thee.

Let's hope the liberal values prevail, and we return to our search for truth, which does exist.

Heresy

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