What You Can't Say

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

by rms • 17 years ago

45 67 17 years ago

paulgraham.com

rms5• 17 years ago

This is apparently one of those things: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580981

Raphael• 17 years ago

Did he say he was going to take LSD to code better?

wheels• 17 years ago

There's a long list of things I support your right to say ... somewhere else.

SwellJoe7• 17 years ago

I just don't think the post is relevant to hacker news. Every once in a while someone will post something about their "hacking" with drugs, and it's generally just dull, self-indulgent, rambling. palish is a fine HN contributor, but I'm not interested in his acid trip. Nor am I interested in salvia, marijuana, etc. Another long-time, and usually excellent, HN contributor (whose name escapes me) has frequently hocked some herbal brain boosting drug that he imports and sells, and I find those posts dull, too.

It's not that you can't say it. It's that you should say it some place where it will be appreciated. I see that it got a pretty good amount of upvotes before being deaded by an editor or pg, so I may even be in the minority (you and palish have been around about as along as I have, so it's not an "oldfag vs newfag" question), but I definitely don't care whether palish has a conversation with God tonight while under the influence of LSD.

If I wanted drug experience discussions I would go to erowid: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/

And, if I wanted repeats of pg essays on HN...well, I would never want repeats of pg essays on HN.

radu_floricica4• 17 years ago

No, this was probably the matter of non-hacker news. But it would be a better behavior from the site not to delete the content of the submission, and just drop it from the front page.

SwellJoe7• 17 years ago

Obviously the content has not been deleted, as rms was able to link to it. As far as I know nothing is ever deleted here, it just gets deaded (which is a flag, and if you want to see dead articles, you can...just set showdead to yes in your profile).

tvon2• 17 years ago

(I offer some level of apologies in advance, but this whole thing has touched a chord with me and any attempts to express myself eloquently seem to come up short, so I'm going to just let it out... some foul language may follow... though I'll probably delete this in an hour or so to stem the karma damage)

I really don't want to hear about that crap. Not because i find it taboo, or offensive, or because it is somehow too extreme for my fragile view on the world, but because this kind of crap is mundane, uninspiring, unoriginal and juvenile.

FFS, the highest voted comment was "draw some pictures", you have to be kidding me, how lame and predictable can a thread like that get? This is HACKER NEWS, maybe the discussion could revolve around that a bit, ya think? How about you try to write some fucking coherent and maintainable Perl? Maybe you can do that on acid...

And did you read the list of questions he was asking? "When I see a shape shift or melt, then reach out and touch it, will I feel the shape that I see, or feel its true form?" Are you fucking kidding me, really? Is there a cute chick with a Velvet Underground t-shirt standing around here somewhere that I'm not seeing?

You want to drop acid? Great, go for it, you have my blessings, but don't post to HN about it pretending you want to take some lame fucking pseudo-scientific approach to it.

This is Hacker News, I don't want to come here and feel like a fly on a wall at an art school scenester coffee shop full of Volvo driving trustafarians. I sure as hell don't want to read an entire thread about someone discovering hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. That discussion has it's place, that place is not here.

Also, just because that story was flagged or moderated or whatever, does not mean that you are some how being persecuted for your "counter-culture" beliefs. All too often someone says something stupid on HN (more often Reddit, but it seems to be happening more here) and they're moderated into oblivion, so they edit their comment claiming that their statement was just too mind blowing for the sheeple to accept, so it unjustly modded into oblivion. The reality is that the sheeple are quite open minded, they just think the comment sucked, was stupid, and deserved being moderated into oblivion.

palish2• 17 years ago

So would you say all of that to my face? That was really harsh. I am a person, you know. I get happy and sad and have stupid ideas, just like everyone else.

I was trying to be helpful. I honestly thought it would be. I'm sorry for wasting a few minutes of people's time; trying to provoke an interesting discussion; not meeting your high standards of "worthy" content, and apparently churning out crap. I'm not sure what else to say. But I don't identify with Hacker News anymore, I don't think.

radu_floricica4• 17 years ago

Huh. I wish there was a wiki of such ideas. Just so we can check out taboos against other's.

Edit: http://taboos.wiki.zoho.com/TabooCollection.html

rms5• 17 years ago

One of the ones that comes up here every now and then and always generates a heated discussion that goes nowhere is the idea that there are genetic differences in intelligence between people with ancestors originating from different parts of the world.

radu_floricica4• 17 years ago

I'm a bit worried we keep discussing the same ideas and we miss the less obvious ones, and the more ingrained. We can pretty much all agree race, drugs, religion, pornography, sex and minors, copyright infringement are controversial topics, but (with the possible exception of sex and minors) they have been talked to death.

I'd like to see a place where a Chinese reader can point out what he considers a default taboo in western culture.

Edit: And a list of 100 taboos has a better chance of hitting a couple I'm not aware of.

philh• 17 years ago

As the list currently stands, it looks more like a list of controversial topics. Maybe you "can't" question capitalism in a "right-wing" setting, or defend it in a "left-wing" one, but that seems fairly tame. And it's well-known and accepted that there are two groups who disagree on the subject. Noone will argue that you should be locked up for taking either position; you won't be ostracised from your community even if it predominantly disagrees with you.

Sex and minors is better; "children have sexuality" can be said but "children are emotionally capable of choosing sexual partners outside a narrow age bracket" probably can't outside of NAMBLA.

I've also added holocaust denial.

rms5• 17 years ago

"Post-term abortion" is quite a euphemism, I think that one goes beyond simple controversy to total taboo.

menloparkbum2• 17 years ago

add in "unit tests are not generally useful"

pg• 17 years ago

There's something like that at http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

rjprins2• 17 years ago

The subject of what morality exactly is has not been discussed. To keep it short, I think morality is a set of rules to keep a society functional. Therefor "good" morality would let a society be more functional, have no unnecessary costs, no unnecessary losses and have optimal productivity and innovation.

Here is a list of taboos:

- Religious beliefs. Not believing in God is OK, but it should be possible to freely criticize other people's beliefs.

- Sexual taboos. Bisexuality, swinging, S&M are all considered improper for no apparent reason. I won't dare even to hint child sexuality here.

- Nationalism. It is still considered perfectly normal to prefer people from your 'own' 'country' over people of another country. Tribalism is a very natural moral for obvious reasons.

- Political systems. Democracy is everything but perfect, but suggesting other forms of rule has not even been considered. A benevolent dictator will certainly be a lot better than a different charming elitist every 4 years.

- Drug use. Pot enjoys the popular vote, but XTC and other hard drugs are still very much not done. There are drugs which are inherently bad, but even most hard drugs aren't. Abuse is a symptom.

- Abortion (or further). Why are you not allowed to kill your own new born?

- Any criminal activity. These are just morals put to paper.

Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best. What really works best no one knows. It also depends on the goals. What constitutes a good society? The most productive? The one with the most happy residents? Evolution would say the one that survives. The moral fashions in that sense would equal genetic mutations in order to find the most optimal set of rules.

One thing is certain though. There are no such things as right or wrong moralities, there is only effective and ineffective moralities.

miked5• 17 years ago

>> Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best.

It was Nietzsche's great insight that internal considerations play a much larger role in constructing morality than external considerations. See, in particular, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_. Nietzsche's first questions on encountering a morality were always: what "instincts" are active here? Does this ethic arise from a overwelling of strength and confidence, or from resentment, envy, and fear? Nietzsche called the former good and the latter bad. He despised the Political Correctness of his time. I've no doubt he would have attacked the PC beliefs of our era as well, seeing them the same way that pg does: as arising out of fear.

adimit• 17 years ago

Nietzsche also hinted at the way moral rules get enforced: you aren't ashamed of your own thoughts, only of someone finding out about them. Basically, this is fear of being exposed.

In our (the Western) society, this is most true for sexual and/or violent thoughts, as well as anti-government or anti-religious thoughts. Particularly when it comes to sexual thoughts, I cannot find a reason for holding back any of them.

rjprins2• 17 years ago

I don't care who said it (My apologies, I'm always a bit critical of throwing in famous names in a discussion, the arguments should count for themselves.). Internal considerations is really all there is.

If you'd take the extreme ego central perspective, you get the double moral: "I can do anything I want, you may only do things that are beneficial to me." Obviously this doesn't work in society, and even for the strongest individual this becomes: "You should do things that do not hurt me, and I will do everything so as to not make you hurt me."

This may be further fine-tuned in a closely knit society:"If society benefits, I benefit, therefor everybody should do what benefits society".

Basically collective morality comes forth from selfish morality. And when it does not, it is 'naturally selected', e.g. as the French royalty which was beheaded by the plebs or more commonly, the governmental policing of individuals.

I wouldn't say there is any inherent good or bad in acting on strength/confidence or fear/envy. And ethics that arise from those feelings are also neither good nor bad. Some rules are more capable of continuing than others.

e.g. The 'serial-killer'-morale has less chance than the 'pacifist'-morale. This makes pacifism 'better', but not something inherently 'good'.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

"There are no such things as right or wrong moralities, there is only effective and ineffective moralities."

1. You started with this as a premise, and reached it as your conclusion.

2. Distinguish "right or wrong" and "effective and ineffective."

menloparkbum2• 17 years ago

it's deontologists vs. utilitarians. good luck solving that debate on the internet!

hs3• 17 years ago

yesterday i made a comment in swine flu thread: "can *.flu spread to plant? go vegetarian!"

i got -8 or so, at first i wonder if my post is irrelevant to the flu discussion. none of the replies indicates that.

reality is they don't like the 'go vegetarian' thing: unhelpful, unfeasible, malnutrition, deficiencies and more ridiculously labeling me as 'pusing an agenda'

just about everything like in pg's essay ... i said the taboo -- maybe i should keep the secret and live longer (read 'the china study' for scientific references)

hn, why so afraid? not eating meat won't kill you ... it's definitely legal and non-addictive ... about as harmful as giving up tv

just try it like a month or so, don't you like experimenting, go against the norm? are you not a hacker?

SwellJoe7• 17 years ago

I've been a vegetarian for 15 years. I would have voted such a comment down, simply because it is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because no one has contracted swine flu from eating pork, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm tempted to vote this comment down because it is complaining about you being voted down in a wholly unrelated thread. (See the site guidelines. Complaining about votes is distinctly uncool.)

And while I'm providing constructive feedback, your erratic use of punctuation, lack of capitalization, aggressive tone, and generally sounding like a self-righteous teenager all leave me feeling a bit negative towards you. I'm sure you're a very fine person in real life, but I'd prefer it if you weren't trying to start arguments in threads that aren't even about the topic you've decided to talk about.

hs3• 17 years ago

by definition, putting pork meat in mouth puts one in extremely close proximity to swine

no i'm never complain about being voted down, if it's really about karma, i won't say taboo things

my prev post is relevant because i happened to experience what pg described in his essay

sorry about the 'challenge', but really, i'm curious how many will take it

ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do

dejb4• 17 years ago

I agree with many of your points (uncool, sloganeering). But I find it interesting that you are saying the original idea is not worthy of consideration ('irrelevant') because you think it MIGHT be incorrect ('to the best of my knowledge'). There are actually a lot of contradictory reports on this but that isn't the point. To me it shows the disadvantages facing unpopular views when even you would so reflexively dismiss and vote this down.

david9274• 17 years ago

What you're bring up here, Paul, are framesets. Framesets are the context we place the information we gather. Every minute we get new information, what we choose to accept and reject (and the angle we view that information) is based on these framesets. The stronger you are emotionally, the broader your frameset can get.

Note that I didn't say, "The stronger you are intellectually." It has /nothing/ to do with how smart your are. I know amazingly smart people with tiny framesets on, for example, patriotism. Their country is great and everyone wishes they could live there, etc. It's a psychological trait and is worst in the aspects where we are weakest.

The stronger (and usually smaller) a frameset is, the more it can't be argued against. Logic won't work. And heresy is simply when we poke at strong framesets.

The way to battle them is: to be a good person. By being good (honest to yourself, honest to others, loving, and generous), you push up pool. When you do the opposite, you pull it down. The healthier we get and society gets, the less we'll need framesets. In other words, by making the world a better place we'll make it ... less messed up. :) You know what I mean.

jonmc12• 17 years ago

Do you have a reference for 'framesets'? They sound interesting, but I have not been able to find more info on google.

david9274• 17 years ago

It's a term I made up. It's actually part of a much bigger, more interesting subject: individual-society "ology". Where the individual comes into contact with the rest of the people around them. (Where psychology covers individual-individual, and sociology covers society-society relations.) In other words, when you lie on the leather sofa, you would be asked, "So how are the people down the street whose name you don't know?" The people we pass on the street play a huge role in our lives.

You see, everyone chooses a strategy around their teens or even into their twenties to say why they are valuable, why they have a right to exist. A woman might choose: sexy, smart, beautiful, motherly, etc. And that becomes their identity. So attacking that (call a smart person "stupid" and they'll light up) is attacking their entire identity, what they've chosen as their right to exist. Have you seen a university professor in a tweed jacket? There you go.

The framesets I mentioned are tied to that identity and defended with that same "raison d'etre" fierceness. Information that violates the frameset, violates the identity strategy. It's like you have all your money in a particular stock and someone is saying something negative about the company. The more stake you have in that company, and the more fear you have of it crashing, the more unwilling you will be to be rational about what others may say.

Following the analogy, it might seem that diversifying is the answer: you're smart, but also into extreme sports and healthy, etc. That's not really the answer, though. The trick is to get your money out of the stock market; you have to care as little as possible what people think. Sound easy? It's one of the hardest things you can possibly do.

miked5• 17 years ago

>> If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky could, I suppose, be taken as a heretic. After all, he did write an introduction for a book that denied the Holocaust. He also traveled to Lebanon and had hail-fellow-well-met meetings with the leaders of Hezbollah.

He also demands that people divest from Israel -- a nation he has criticized -- while owning several million dollars of real estate in the U.S., a nation he has criticized a lot more -- to worldwide applause. Indeed, in a poll a few years ago -- Europeans rated him the world's most important intellectual. Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism (often, not always, dressed up as anti-Israeli sentiment) are some of the most widely accepted normative beliefs in the world today.

All of these would be criticized by many on the American right, but, with the partial exception in developed countries of Holocaust denial, most of the world's people would have no problem with them.

You seem to see Chomsky as a heretic. I see him as a prime example of something Eric Hoffer wrote about over a half-centruy ago in _The True Believer_: the formerly creative man who has lost his powers and who compensates by becoming a fanatic. Chomsky's books are international bestsellers. Chomsky's MIT faculty peers made him an Institute Professor. I'm a fan of your writing PG, but I'm sorry, I'm missing the heretical heroism. YMMV.

david9274• 17 years ago

> Europeans rated him the world's most important intellectual

The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."

He's not anti-Semitic; he's Jewish and is critical of some of Israel's policies.

miked5• 17 years ago

>> He's not anti-Semitic; he's Jewish...

The history of Jewish anti-semitism goes back at least to Josephus, who sold out his fellow jews to the Romans. Karl Marx, whose early writings were filled with anti-semitic hate. Etc. Etc. (I should add, BTW, that I'm not Jewish, just a friend of Israel who's never been there.)

>> ...and is critical of some of Israel's policies.

Well, that would certainly explain his hanging out with the mass murderers of Hezbollah and fronting books on Holocaust denial.

>> The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."

Ah, well, that clinches it.

mark-t3• 17 years ago

Read the notes: http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html

[15] By this I mean you'd have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky's opinions = what you can't say. If you actually said the things you can't say, you'd shock conservatives and liberals about equally-- just as, if you went back to Victorian England in a time machine, your ideas would shock Whigs and Tories about equally.

miked5• 17 years ago

Well, I stupidly did not follow the link to the notes, and hence missed that. In my defense, I think pg would have done better to pick a different example. The context, indeed the whole essay, is about "what you can't say". For the reasons stated, Chomsky either says things that a lot of people in the world agree with or things that are horrific (praise of Hezbollah). Neither of these puts me in mind of Galileo.

My suggestion to pg: use George Orwell as an example.

Thanks for the catch, in any case.

galactus• 17 years ago

We all love to think of ourselves as rebels.

nebula• 17 years ago

Wondering if this piece would have been upvoted this much if it didn't have PG's brand.

Now don't get me wrong; I read this one years ago, and I liked it. Just that from what I have observed of social behavior on HN, no one would have bothered to go read it and appreciate the ideas, given that its title is not catchy and doesn't have the right keywords in it.

babyshake• 17 years ago

I couldn't help but think of all of the taboos surrounding Israeli politics.

http://bit.ly/ZycR9

sethg• 17 years ago

A friend of mine once remarked that it's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

In a world with almost seven billion people, there are many folks who believe that Darwinian evolution is a fraud, or that 9/11 was actually a Mossad plot, or that astronauts never actually landed on the moon, or that Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans should be the absolute monarch of France. I see no reason to waste my time giving these "theories" the attention required to even refute them.

I don't care how much of a bold and contrarian and politically incorrect thinker you are--at some point you have to draw a line and say that certain ideas deserve to be ridiculed because they are, well, ridiculous.

Raplh5• 17 years ago

Sure, you can't evaluate every dingdong idea. But when you find one you are going to skip, you can either do so respectfully, or you can declare to everyone around you that even in the absence of any thought on the matter, you happen to know (how?) that this is just wrong and BS and worthless.

Sure its frustrating when you stop trashing all the ideas you reject. But it has some good results too. Like you get a more realistic idea of how limited what you know (vs what you think) is.

rms5• 17 years ago

Deeply ironic that this was vote weighted... I guess that's probably the general policy on repeats though.

What You Can't Say

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