> “As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript”
I don't think it does, so long as one uses a sufficiently broad definition of religion (e.g. crypto, wokeness).
Also my impression is that there was a spike of js hate ~3-5 years ago that has since subsided. I think it grew alongside the development of web applications, where more and more people who had little previous exposure to js were suddenly forced to confront it as some part of their workflow or other.
Can you point to a big dust up thread about js recently? I can't think of one personally. At most there are various complaints about specific js technologies like npm.
EDIT: Since everyone wants a definition of religion, here's the copypaste from my response downthread: Priests, holy writings, dogmatic beliefs, original sin, etc.
> I don't think it does, so long as one uses a sufficiently broad definition of religion (e.g. crypto, wokeness).
Crypto and wokeness are not religions in the actual sense of the word religion. It's a shame that people redefine words in order to change their meanings to fit what they are saying.
I suppose it's too soon to tell if they take off, but they seem to fit the bill to me: Priests, holy writings, dogmatic beliefs, original sin, etc.
As a way of bounding this definition, I don't think javascript would count as a religion. Although perhaps I'm not sufficiently tapped into that world to make the necessary parallels.
Definitely not, although any grouping of beliefs with a concept mapping to original sin strikes me as religious. So kind of a "not all rectangles are squares but all squares are rectangles" situation.
No, it's a game of labels, where people like to slap labels on things to assume commutative properties of other things they have attached labels to in order to celebrate or condemn the people who identify with those labels.
I get there similarities, but I worry we are engaging in semantic diffusion.
If we define religion as "anything people get super passionate and opinionated about" then it's pretty much tautological that people will argue about such things, without telling us anything about why such arguments start in the first place.
How do you define religion? And how does crypto and wokeness fit into that definition. I feel like you're using crypto and wokeness in a perforative sense, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming you have a working definition that's interesting and useful.
> For me, after spending two hours listening to an interview with a woman who escaped North Korea, it might as well be.
I think I listened to the same interview a few days ago. Most likely the Jordan Peterson interview with Yeonmi Park. Very interesting and well worth the time imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqa-SdJtT4
>For example, the question of the relative merits of programming languages often degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers.
Totally agree. Politics has ripped the fabric of society. I vividly remember how political discourse was in 2009. It was nowhere near as toxic, fascist, rage-fueled, woke, and dangerous as it is now. What has been lost? Truth. We've stopped caring about seeking truth and instead have resorted to subscribing to mob-mentality. Equally applies to both sides. The mere act of listening to both sides is considered as "silence is crime". WTF people. HN is probably one of the better places to have a political discourse but it has also suffered.
You are discounting the fact that 8 billion people are connected (nth-removed at worse) to the largest communication network ever. There are legitimately only large mobs at this point.
We’re fundamentally struggling with scale and there’s no two ways about it.
This happens to every question into which people are so emotionally invested that even discussing any modifications or alternatives seriously is painful for them.
That is, when it's a part of one's identity, like religion, or [list other protected classes here].
Maybe in 2009 people around pg were not emotionally invested in JavaScript so much. Like,they were more professional, or maybe just still preferred Lisp and didn't care about JS much.
In any way, the whole thread here just illustrates the pg's point, which only grew stronger since 2009.
Of course the unmentioned corollary to "keeping your identity small" is that you must want to make everything ground for an argument. Keep your identity proportionate to how much you want to argue about your identity.
I reached a similar conclusion after lurking on subreddits of opposite political leaning. I favored the views of one subreddit over another (naturally). Over time, I found that I was blindly believing the comments in my favored subreddit over the other one, only to find that the comments were false or citing unreliable sources. I saw this happen several times, until I stopped lurking on both of the subreddits. I guess it's better to keep your identity small ...
I watch material from mainly CNN, Sky Australia and NTD Media.
Virtually every big story on CNN in the past 2 years has had some kind of retraction (ie. lying):
- corona lab leak considered misinformation until a month ago
- first impeachment (orchestrated/funded by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden) which failed due to lack of evidence/coverup of a bogus FISA warrant extension by Joe Biden
- second impeachment (faked phone call transcript from Trump to an election official, retracted by WaPo)
- Hunter Biden story suppression just before 2020 election, with CCP and Ukraine bribing the Biden family with $1 billion and various drug/weapons/sexual favors/influence peddling/etc. counts
- CCP influence minimized (journalists are getting free junkets to Beijing, White House press corps contains multiple CCP organs nominated by US media outlets, etc.)
- Jan. 6 riot protesters killed nobody (4 died of natural causes and 1 shot by Capitol Police.)
Sky and NTD use old-school reporters, and have retracted nothing because they do factual reporting, not narratives. Their facts are ugly, but turn out to be very accurate.
NTD had some of their reporting on the lab leak suppressed by Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, and currently are semi-frozen and demonetized by Youtube, so they've had to create their own media website.
Sky reporters were insulted by other media outlets, yet tenaciously followed the lab leak, and have accumulated a lot of data not published anywhere else.
Is this the same sky news that calls Covid the China Virus and employs known racists and xenophobes to prop up one side of the Australian political landscape?
I skimmed the entire contents of the link your provided. There is no Guardian evidence that Sky is wrong, racist or xenophobic. There is plenty of evidence that the Guardian, CNN, etc. are wrong though as recently reported, the most obvious being that the lab leak is some kind of right-wing "conspiracy theory" - it's actually the most plausible origin of Covid-19.
Covid-19 is from China. Whether you call it the Wuhan, CCP or China virus, it's factual to call it using those terms - that's not racist. In the same way, the press reports variants from Brazil, the UK and India using the name of the country.
I've watched Sky for about a year, and they've never said anything racist.
Can you link to an actual racist comment by Sky or Trump?
Where I come from, calling somebody racist without any proof makes you the racist.
Or distrust factual claims by people on Reddit until/unless you track things back to primary sources that you can review. Same goes for traditional news.
Primary seems a little extreme, and looking at primary sources in isolation can often be misleading. I think secondary sources (or even tertiary sources) are much more important when it comes to evaluating claims on the internet.
Strongly disagree. Secondary sources are more likely to introduce statistical artifacts, weird biases or cherry-picking, which are often hard to detect even for experts. We don't look at primary sources nearly as much we should.
The only exception is for claims so dumb ("the time complexity of mergesort is O(n), the earth is flat, 1+1=5") that anything at all directly contradicts them.
It's not extreme at all. I don't think that's the only thing a person should consider, but it has to be part of the picture. Secondary sources can have their own agenda. Also the simple fact that they have to choose what to include from the primary source means you don't get a complete picture. Even somewhat responsible scientific reporting falls into this trap: They may successfully report that something has a correlation, avoid implying a strong causal link, but then fall flat on their face by failing to realize that it was a low-powered study with very few participants.
Tertiary sources are often reporting on secondary sources: The NYT reports on something that WaPo reports on. Any mistakes or biases present in the secondary source may be amplified & added to. I never read reporting about someone else's reporting without seeking out that first reports. At best, tertiary sources should be taken as commentary/opinion/interpretation.
Non-primary sources are for when you want something explained to you in non-jargon terms or a TL;DR, or you want an expert's opinion on the primary sources etc. A medical study comes out about hear disease, and you want a cardiologist's assessment of the study. Even then, you need to understand who the cardiologist is. The average cardiologist may not be a great source: There are levels of expertise within any community, and I want someone who is at the top of the field. I don't want the average cardiologist's opinion.
The problem is that no one has time to track down primary sources for everything they read/see/hear, or the level of knowledge to evaluate it. I'm fascinated by quantum computing, but I have no chance of understanding primary source research there. I have no choice but to rely on a secondary source or, if possible, the researchers themselves giving a higher level TL;DR.
My rule of thumb is that, absent prior knowledge of bias/agenda/ill-intent, I skeptically take what people say at face value but don't accept it into my own views/opinions/etc unless I've done some digging of my own. If I'm not capable (e.g. quantum physics) of doing that, I simply try harder to get a variety of expert opinions, and avoid presenting anything I say/think as anything other than an outsider's imperfect understanding.
I don’t want anyone for a second to believe we are any different.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
The genesis of imposter syndrome. I am the role that I play, and if not, than what am I.
It’s a odd thing to realize that these simple digital avatars tech created would be the Roman/Greek/Egyptian god we pray to. At the altar of ourselves.
Edit: Good post by PG, he’s getting more in touch with what’s wrong.
It must be nice to have the luxury of choosing to keep one's identity small rather than having a big identity foisted upon oneself by society, history, and the circumstances of one's birth.
Fun realization I made over the past 18 months or so after 6 years living in USA continuously: When you're white, you can't be an immigrant.
This whole time I thought I was a plucky immigrant seeking a better life (economically). Turns out I was and am just white. Still grappling with this.
Learning your identity was wrong is very discombobulating. On some level it feels like maybe I've been here long enough that I've become accepted? Nobody ever asks "Where are you from?" anymore ... guess working on my accent finally paid off.
Friends have repeatedly told me I'm not allowed to complain or comment because "I can pass". Feels like if that were true I wouldn't need to pass, but when I ask that question it's like their brain gets a blue screen.
Anyway, just sharing one person's experience. This is not commentary, a value judgement, or anything like that.
I think I understand the point you’re trying to make, but I don’t understand this formulation: “you can’t be an immigrant”. It sounds like you are, by definition, an immigrant. I wonder if this statement would more accurately capture the truth: “I realised that my experience is not aligned with some dominant popular narratives of immigrant life”. Or even: “generalisations of the immigrant experience are fraught”.
If people are telling you that you can’t “complain or comment” on your experience.. I’d suggest questioning what kind of people you are calling your friends.
> If people are telling you that you can’t “complain or comment”
It’s because any such commenting is immediately seen in the context of the current social rights battles. Immigrant implies brown or hispanic in most people’s mind. Since I do not experience that sort of prejudice (supposedly), any complaining is immediately seen as “distracting”.
No, in my understanding expatriated has two specific meanings:
1. Legally expatriated by a Nation/government. Removed from a nation's territory by decision of said nation.
2. Comission/Secondment abroad, where an employee of a government/company gets assigned to work abroad for a fixed period.
From what I gather the term expat has been appropriated in British-American circles, to somehow detach higher income immigrants from the 'immigrant' stigma. I think this became a de facto convention when Investment Banking and Retail Banks (in non english-speaking countries) started adopting the term 'expat' in customer branding, to target higher income immigrants.
Hey there just wanted to say : not everyone in America thinks like this. there is this strange brand of modern racism where people reduce everything down to a race issue even when it is not. Ergo immigrant = not white. Same type of people that will claim that a given communities lack of resources is because it is a black community, ignoring that the community is poor and that there is a white community not 20 miles away with the exact same problems.
Ironically, this seems to come from highly educated individuals whom I suspect have never 1) been to a third world country, off the resort 2) lived in a financially struggling household 3) worked an honest day of manual labor ever.
Kibda got off in a rant there, but just wanted to say, fuck anyone who says "you can pass" when you say your an immigrant. If you want to call them out in language their indoctrinated brains can understand, say "are you denying my lived-experience?"
I suspect if you make your way closer to the midwest you will meet less of these people, and more people who treat you like just another person and couldn't give a fuck how you identify.
> I suspect if you make your way closer to the midwest you will meet less of these people, and more people who treat you like just another person and couldn't give a fuck how you identify.
As someone that grew up somewhere in the midwest (which isn't as homogenous as is often implied) and then moved to a stereotypically left-leaning coastal city, this was perhaps true in certain circumstances but definitely not others. I wouldn't bother with smaller towns/villages outside of the largest metropolitan areas (that aren't university towns) unless you want to feel prejudiced by a racial identity that's imposed on you, and reminded of that on a daily basis, but the same is true of these smaller towns in most states as well as countries in the west, in my experience. It's a bit idealistic to say that people in the midwest care less about how you identify if there are instead more that impose their own identity on you.
> im a member of the racial majority so take my words with a grain of salt I guess.
In that case, I probably will, unfortunately. The incidents I encountered directed at me almost never involved a witness who belonged to a racial majority, so if I had to guess you wouldn't have witnessed a representative number of them either. I suspect that's because most people are (thankfully) afraid of being seen as racist in public, so they're usually in a more one-on-one setting.
>Ironically, this seems to come from highly educated individuals whom I suspect have never 1) been to a third world country, off the resort 2) lived in a financially struggling household 3) worked an honest day of manual labor ever.
is programming the common denominator between them?
I mean yeah a lot of programmers fall into that catagory but no theres a plenty of people in all different professions (including blue collar professions) that fall into the catagory im describing
Compared to this, it's fun to live and work in NYC. Here everybody assumes that everybody else can be an immigrant, or at least moved across the country to live here. But everybody also assumes that everybody else may be local, independently from the skin color, eye shape, accent, etc.
(I personally love this arrangement. I've seen it in several other cities, like London and Moscow.)
> Friends have repeatedly told me I'm not allowed to complain or comment because "I can pass". Feels like if that were true I wouldn't need to pass, but when I ask that question it's like their brain gets a blue screen.
It was meant as a friendly warning, I think. Like a "Make sure you don't say this in public or to people you aren't super close with, you'll be crucified"
While there are those identities that may be easy or useful to inhabit (and pretty much all of us do this at least sometimes) you're still the one who gets to choose how you know yourself.
Slight correction: PG has the privilege of thinking that he can think for himself. And, everytime he posts such an enlightened self-aggrandizement, his post will be lauded and upvoted by many other similar free thinkers, all of whom are unorthodox, but never the victim, who see groupthink everywhere, but are never a part of it.
The self-congratulation will continue, until society improves.
> Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
I talk it he has not ever participated in Javascript or baking discussions.
It turns out that discussions have often nothing to do with identity, and a lot with depth of knowledge and depth of conviction. Shallow knowledge & deep convictions are what leads to disaster.
Maybe it's not labels, but the desire to position yourself as an expert, even if you don't really understand the problem.
> people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that
“that” being things that are not political or religious.
What vaccines and 5G have shown is that you do not need to be qualified to talk about a topic. A strong opinion about anything is what qualifies you to be an expert in 2021.
Based on that article and my memory, this is a phenomenon that has happened in the last 10 years. Why this may be the case is something I’m not sure of. There are some possibilities. Perhaps the rise of mainstream social media allowed everyone to find their people, which emboldened people with minority opinions. Or maybe rising income inequality is making people feel increasingly powerless and this influences them to assert themselves in areas outside of politics and religion.
I think social media culture has a lot to do with it. It is a cultural thing, after all.
Political culture of the last few years also has something to do with it. Almost everything can be associated with a political faction now, 5G, vaccines, celebrity squabbles, ocean acidification, early human migration theories... Political culture bleeds out.
It's a little dated now, but all your friends who were constitutional scholars last month are epidemiologists this month.
I agree that it seems to be a new phenomenon and i think it's partly social media but also our tendency to be always online. We see so many headlines and hot takes that it feels like actual knowledge.
I’m confounded by the advice to avoid conflict by restricting one’s identity. By all means, don’t conflate your preference with your identity. But this is an awful way to address people whose actual experienced identity is needlessly a source of conflict.
I spent most of my life shielding myself from admitting I’m queer, and nearly all of it shielding myself from admitting I’m non-binary and admitting I’m autistic, using this logic.
That didn’t prevent conflict, it just made it harder for me to navigate and almost certainly harder for people who mean well toward me to navigate as well.
My identity keeps growing and it only gets better for me and the people I keep in my life.
This isn’t about the big stuff. Queer, non-binary, autistic is a small fraction of your identity. Hell any major allergies should make the cut.
It’s the small stuff like considering yourself a Pepsi drinker that causes needless conflict. People buying bandaids have preferences, but it’s not something you’re going to argue about on the internet in all caps.
This. Obviously Coke is superior but 'Retric is on point with this. You can agree to disagree and move on with your lives. Sometimes Pepsi is all you have. Accept it. Spend energy on more productive things.
I disagree. Those things seem big when you first discover them -- there's really nice feeling that comes with finding them out. "Ohhh, I'm X, so that explains why I have preference Y". But some people try too hard, to hang onto the euphoria that came with that discovery. They identify with that experience, and center their lives around it, and group together with others who do the same. They are often threatened by others who identify in the same way, but have a very different experience or who choose not to wrap their lives around it. I think that's what's getting called out in this essay.
I saw a jokey-serious "transition timeline" photo set where it started with elaborate, carefully done outfits that would put Natalie Wynn's best to shame, then ended with something like "passed out drunk at 3am in a pile of unwashed bras"
You wouldn't know I'm nonbinary from looking at me because I look like any dude walking around with clothes plucked out of the closet at random. Presentation is just not a huge part of the identity to me, even though the stereotype is that presentation is everything.
Hey, I mostly decided I didn’t have more energy for this thread than I already devoted. But I appreciate your response and you, and wanted you to know I feel very similarly.
Which isn’t to say I haven’t had my fair share of exploring non-gender-norm presentation. It just doesn’t matter that much to me other than what feels good for me at the time.
To a stranger’s eye, I present he/him. I have a big beard and a shaved head, im tall with broad shoulders. And I’m not at all motivated to challenge that perception (to the point my preferred pronouns are he/him/they/them and when I came out NB to friends and family I made it clear I don’t expect to be addressed differently).
What was important for me was acknowledging that I never felt any attachment to that he/him perception, except the painful part of navigating other people’s expectations not matching my reality.
> Queer, non-binary, autistic is a small fraction of your identity.
I don't even know how to take this seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you want to clarify, as it seems like you don't want to minimize the big stuff, but... this feels like that.
- - -
Edit: it’s entirely possible people who don’t identify with these just don’t understand how huge they are for people who do. Which is part of what I found so offputting in the article’s examples.
It’s also possible I really substantively don’t understand what is “identity” to you or anyone else who thinks these are small or not aspects of identity.
If that’s the case, I’m having trouble filling in the blanks. Name? Family lineage? Job title? Work history? Relationship status?
I think the central idea is to not attach identity to unimportant facets. I agree the comment as written has issues, but think the summary is good advice.
Note the contradiction of big things and small part.
Importance isn’t the same thing as taking up a large fraction of your identity. Suppose you wrote an autobiography, the big stuff like age, religion, or sexual orientation are shared with millions of people. They have huge impacts, but the details are going to be stuff like past partners not simply repeating “I am Bi” for hundreds of pages.
Height is a great example, being 7’ tall, 4’, or even 5’ 10” all impact on every moment of your life. The language(s) you speak, the county you live in, having or not having every significant disease or disability. Education is another big one being a Dr. or a high school dropout again makes a huge difference but again isn’t on it’s own what separates you from everyone else.
I tried to write a response to you this morning and bailed on it because this conversation has been exhausting.
You’re taking important/big to you and projecting it on me. You’re insisting that the things about my identity that I consider big are small.
I could almost understand if you don’t fully appreciate the impact of discovering one’s sexuality and gender feels like. But you’ve included autism as small, and that suggests either you’re really ignorant of what that entails or, like so many other “big” things you listed you just don’t see how they intersect?
Either way it feels dismissive as hell. What’s small to you isn’t to me. If that doesn’t speak to identity than what does?
It’s literally small in the information compression sense.
Storing the pattern of your palm print takes up more space than a listing most peoples current bank account balances. People generally care a lot more about bank accounts than palm prints, but that doesn’t mean they take up a lot of space. As such palm prints are literally a larger part of your identity than your bank account balance.
You just described your queerness in 1 word, so that’s ~20 bits of information. Having also summed up the other 2 conditions in a single world call it’s at most ~60 bits of information to describe all 3.
Except not every word fits into sexual identity. If you where listing every person on earth let’s be generous and call it 10,000 options for sexual identity or ~15 bits of information.
Quoting myself in my first comment on this thread:
> I spent most of my life shielding myself from admitting I’m queer, and nearly all of it shielding myself from admitting I’m non-binary and admitting I’m autistic, using this logic.
You really think there isn’t more to shape me, to who I am and what shaped and continues to me, than what I described here? You really think the kinds of pain I described in responses from the process that led to these recognitions about myself are low information?
You’re talking to me like my life and my self is distilled down to the words I’ve written in a HN comment thread.
Honestly this isn’t worth my time. Go dismiss yourself.
You can acknowledge your preferences without making them your identity, though. E.g. you can admit to yourself that you are attracted to a variety of genders without thinking of yourself as being queer.
No, it's a very real difference. Do I think this is an important part of who I am, or a random happenstance? If I were attracted to different people, would that make me a different person, in an important way?
Realising/deciding that it wasn't actually important to me what sexuality people perceived me as eliminated a lot of stress and conflict, personally.
People recommend practices that worked for them. If other people have actually tried (rather than theorising) and found this didn't work for them then of course I'd be interested in hearing about that as well.
This specific “practice” was expressed in response to someone (me) who expressed having tried it, and found it unhelpful and hurtful. It’s not like hiding one’s queerness is a new revelation, it’s commonly associated with being closeted (often out of fear and/or self repression) and with abuse (conversion therapy).
I can’t speak for you and wouldn’t dare. I can only say that when I said verbatim these exact words what I was describing was “passing”. And in similar terms with neurodivergence, “masking”. I wasn’t accepting myself, I was accepting that I had a certain access and aptitude to be someone else for some social purposes. And even then, not really. Just kinda sorta.
This term is totally nebulous. What it means to be the "same person but with different features" or a "different person" is just pure meaningless semantics.
Meaning is what we make it. If anything is meaningful then one must start with one's own experiences (and if they only mean something to oneself, well, that's fine too).
No, I can’t. Thinking I could and trying to caused me a lot of pain. I am queer. It’s as much an immutable facet of who and what I am as my neurodivergence, or my right-handedness. It shapes me beyond preference in similar ways to those. Why shouldn’t it? If it makes my life better to recognize who I am, why discourage that? Is it harming you or anyone?
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).
I think what makes me really uncomfortable about this whole discussion, the article and the interaction in the comments, is it’s being discussed like my identity is some dispassionate academic subject, rather than my living experience that isn’t up for debate.
I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is.
It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s not available for scrutiny by an essay by Paul, or comments from you or anyone.
My contention with the article was that giving myself permission to let my identity expand to include things I hadn’t helped me begin to reckon with the pain of keeping my identity minimal, denying really important things about myself and hurting in the process.
The majority of the responses I’ve gotten have suggested that I should not let those be a part of my identity or have minimized their importance.
I cannot understand why. Why is it in your interest or anyone’s to tell me whether being queer, or non-binary, or autistic should not factor into who I am? Why do you or anyone get to decide whether any of those things should be important parts of me?
Why is it anyone’s business but my own? The only “conflict” here has been people scrutinizing the validity of my identity as I express it.
Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
But I'm not attacking you, and I don't think most of the other commenters are, either. You expressed a disagreement with its thesis and explained how identity has been useful to you. I just pointed out that perhaps there is a way to achieve the same goals without expanding your identity. I was trying to have a discussion about the essay. But it appears I misunderstood, and you did not actually wish to engage in a discussion, so I will stop here :)
I was absolutely engaging in a discussion. I just kept being told that my identity doesn’t count in some way. It’s not a discussion if I have to concede the points of the article to engage.
> Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
Okay. What is partisan about me being queer or non-binary or autistic, other than those are immutable facets of me that either people hate or callously disregard?
We'd much rather live in a world where gender/sexual/health identities are as significant as being left/right handed. Can't jump to that stage without first going through what we are now, which is recognising those identities exist as part of who we are. Other commenters like myself have the pleasure of being able to talk about the ideal future scenario, you've got the problem of dealing with the present.
Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.
The article or discussion in comments isn't about you. It is about human experience. The given advice is in good faith, as far as I can read into it. It is up to you to decide its worth. I don't think _your_ identity is under scrutiny.
The core of advice is to keep the identity _small_. That way I can pick my battles. The more labels I put on myself the more I will alienate other people. Each of those labels also means I'm not honest with myself. Label is just a single word for describing complex world views, preferences and emotions. If I attach this label to my personality, then over time I will also change myself to better fit it. It can also be source of frustration when I don't meet expectations that are set by any given label. For example, before I considered myself a bookworm and it was painful to discard this label from my identity as I found less and less time for reading.
Labels are still useful. They provide decent defaults for social interactions, and a sense of belonging. Birds of a feather flock together. It is too many labels that can be problematic, in a sense of crippling social interactions and turning them into ego duels. Again, this is just how my experience aligns with the article, and not at all scrutinizing _your_ identity.
> you can admit to yourself that you are attracted to a variety of genders without thinking of yourself as being queer.
Sure, I can think of myself as bisexual instead, which I do. (tongue in cheek)
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, bisexuality can't not be part of my identity. Like @eyelidlessness, it took a long time to come to the conclusion. It affects how others see me, how they treat me, if they'll date me, etc. It caused heartbreak, depression, and so on. These are all experiences that set me apart from most other people, whether I want them to or not. If that's not identity, I don't know what is. As one ages and settles down, these things can become less central to your identity, but they're still there and important. Stoicism is one thing, but dismissing the difficulties experienced when going against the grain in any area of life is wishful thinking.
I think Paul Graham could have gone one step further in his analysis. Identity is the combination of labels, community and emotion. Labels are very valuable tools as shortcuts in discussions. They can also lead to dissonance, when definitions don't align or context is missing.
The community aspect, especially in rainbow or mental health issues (not an exhaustive list), can be critical to well-being and survival. Could you find the same support network somewhere else? Yes, and plenty of people do, but that doesn't discount the value of the Pride movement or the Trevor project, for instance. The downside of community is it can evoke tribalistic tendencies.
What Graham seems to take issue with most is the emotional component of one's identity. What's relevant here is not whether you have emotions about your identity, but whether you can set them aside long enough to have a dispassionate discussion. It does require that participants have a healthy emotional baseline, are mature enough not to take everything personally and retain an open mind.
I feel it's also important to point out that there is a difference between having an identity and being an identitarian. You can be bisexual without being an activist. You can be an activist without going full woke and thinking of every interaction as power balances and oppression dynamics.
We can choose whether it becomes a central part of our lives, whether we need to surround ourselves with only like-minded people or whether we enter into discussions looking to be offended, be right or exchange ideas. In that sense, it's no different from having a political opinion, a profession, musical tastes, a hobby or anything else.
I think the advice is about not getting offended by differences in opinions about stuff you don't have to care about much.
This is not an advice to hide the key elements of your identity. Instead, it's an advice to concentrate on them, and protect them with the energy you saved by not wasting it on petty issues.
> This is not an advice to hide the key elements of your identity. Instead, it's an advice to concentrate on them, and protect them with the energy you saved by not wasting it on petty issues.
It led with two aspects that people almost universally identify deeply with, both of which are matters of life and death (politics by the subject matter involved and sometimes affiliation, religion even more times by affiliation) and whole moral constructs for life and afterlife. Those are not petty, they're just easily dismissed by people who can address or dismiss them casually.
From a social perspective, identities make us just as we make them. One is born in identities outside of their control. And it is not possible to separate yourself from an identity as easily as the author argues. But people can agree on clear rules of engagement, evidence, and interpretation, for a _better_ interaction.
I think it’s a good post, but I do wonder if it’s the British Army telling the Americans to fight with more class (line up like us, we’ll shoot, fair and square). Your identity should define your perspective.
The problem is, our society condones false identities. A true fifth column of lost souls.
Since we're digging up old notes on the topic, this George Orwell classic deals with (IMO) a similar them.
It's a surprisingly difficult topic to deal with in discreet analytical terms, so I suggest avoiding disagreeing with definitional points and looking to the wider picture. Don't quibble, fix it instead.
It is 2021. I am managing several identities across several sites. Some are semi-anonymous (Reddit, Twitter, Bitclout), some are real-name profiles (LinkedIn, Github, HN).
I don't think its a problem of one's own identify but rather the role one plays with it's own motivations in that given context.
Also, there are now so many bot accounts that many times I am wondering if the discussing is happening with a real person.
You have no idea how someone might misinterpret something you said, or believe in.
It could be a future employer, client, divorce lawyer, Lawyer collecting a judgment, business partner, investor, future friend, nosey neighbor wondering in you have a permit, disgruntled former lover, etc.
If you are a rich guy like PG, it really doesn't matter what you put out there, but for guys like myself; I stay anonymous.
I think what PG is saying will be more important in the future.
> There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost.
I definitely disagree. Sure, you can have an estimation of how much the new bureaucracy will cost in the short run, but you can never predict the second-order effects with certainty and disagreement about these is usually the actual conflict. The discussion is easier on some issues than others, sure, but I don't think you can predict any with any reasonable certainty.
Absolutely! Spending policies are often sold as cost cutting policies (spend $1 to get back $1.15).
It can get even more complicated when your new policy leads to large projects, many large, multi-year projects have certain assumptions baked into them which can turn out to be wrong. Years ago I was a minor participant in a root cause analysis for a government program that lasted 10 years and went way over budget. Our biggest finding was that the assumptions made when budgeting this project turned out to be incorrect and far too optimistic. These assumptions were actually fairly reasonable at the time they were made though.
This is dangerous advice that assists abusers and others from being called out regarding their behavior, because those who witness / are victimized / etc feel that they should “keep a low profile” and avoid getting involved. I know, because I used to believe this sort of thing and didn’t act when watching abusers operate in a variety of scenes, including Silicon Valley. Luckily, large groups of angry women have vocalized the before-hidden consequences of this sort of thing, so I’ve gotten wiser.
Hollywood producers and shadowy finance guys used to “keep their identity small.” We have learned quite a bit about them in recent years (and there’s obviously so much more we don’t know). As we live in a time when there is a crisis of trust across institutions — politics, religion, corporate, whatever — you’re much better off being transparent.
The thing that’s missing, of course, is that people aren’t “iterating on their beliefs” and people aren’t also accepting of the fact that people who had beliefs that were wrong or problematic in the past are able to iterate and change. This is a future area of improvement for human social development.
All of this “every human in the world is connected” stuff is very new. There aren’t really any absolute truths or rules yet. It’s going to take a lot longer than 30 years to sort out.
Edit: I would also say that there are binary opinions (ex: people shouldn’t harm kids) and what I call “spectrum” opinions (ex: the existence of America is a net positive to the world). We have to get better about engaging people on spectrum opinions and allowing differences to exist, without going to war as we would with a binary opinion that probably has only one right answer for any decent human. Again, things to be done in the future.
I don't understand the connection between this and abusers. The advice is to avoid attaching your identity to any particular ideology. What does that have to do with enabling abusers?
Because when you are a witness to something with which you disagree, speaking out and acting on it is a matter of making an opinion, and then attaching your identity to that opinion. And thus, you might be a developer who only cares about the superiority of C++ over Scala, but now you’ve got to attach your identity to “I didn’t think it was okay for my boss to take our young female employees home if they got drunk at our office party” (this happens!) or whatever.
Things seem totally benign until something goes wrong. Then all of this “advice” starts to look totally different as you watch everyone who should act and take a stand decide they need to “keep their identity small.”
You can make an opinion without attaching your identity to it. I don't even know where to begin with that. Are you seriously incapable of holding an opinion without it entirely subsuming your identity?
I think maybe you are viewing this from the perspective of your identity being how other people perceive you, rather than how you perceive yourself?
Like if you pull a drowning child out of a river, do you now become "guy who pulls drowning children out of rivers" and you have to quit your job and patrol the rivers looking for drowning children, because this is your whole identity now?
> “I didn’t think it was okay for my boss to take our young female employees home if they got drunk at our office party”
Since this is usually openly against the rules in nearly any company, of doesn't even take identifying with anything, it just takes following instructions.
Also, while you keep your identity small, reducing it to zero might not be the wisest approach.
I don't think you are using the proper words for what you are trying to convey. Forming an opinion doesn't attach one's identity to such transient factors.
"If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible."
Generally, what he's saying here is a really good idea and it's a good practice to the extent it's possible -- but, at the risk of beating this particular metaphorical dead horse, this is why the concept of "privilege" as we know it today came to be.
It takes a certain level of privilege to be free from "identity" constraints; put differently, the advice in this bit is FAR easier said than done for many.
At the time Descartes was a prominent mathematician of his time with significant following, heavily invested into his reputation and status.
After a certain dispute, where Fermat shed doubt on a work by Descartes, the prominent mathematician grew annoyed and tried to discredit Fermat. The only problem was Fermat's disinterest in his status - how exactly does one destroy a reputation of a provincial clerk and father of eight, who does math as a hobby?
Or, you know, go the other way and make your identity as big as possible. Identify with all humanity, all life, the whole universe. I mean it's probably closer to the truth than any other story we might tell ourselves?
Ha, this is the bane of design. You don't need any particular expertise, you just have to like or dislike something. Product managers, you know who you are.
The sentence that strikes me as the essence of the essay:
"More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."
Is that true? I really don't think it is. I could definitely have a fruitful (as precise as that can be) conversation with a Christian about religion or a "proud Black man" about race in America. Or even learn a thing or two about programming from a lisp evangelist...
I liked this essay at first, but when I read it more critically it doesn't hold up. It at first seemed to preach non-attachment. Now I feel like it's just an excuse for me to tune you out whenever I decide your identity has been engaged by the topic.
I guess I would ask a hypothetical-pg to define his idea of a "fruitful" discussion. I'll trust that he (and other VCs) would share my belief in the collective-objectivity of subjective human realities and aren't just having discussions on how to make as much money as possible :)
> "More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."
> Is that true?
I don't think so, but it approaches a truth. You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any two or more of the participants in areas where they have fundamental and intractable conflict.
But even this requires a very specific definition of “engage”. Its not just a matter of having overlap with content of the identity, but provoking a defensive, identity-based response. There are people who can converse around identity-related issues without their identity being engaged.
I think the amount of truth in that statement is "it depends". I've found that having conversations about certain controversial topics is can be unproductive unless you're talking to someone you know fairly well, and both parties are willing to listen with an open mind. When someone you don't know well says something that goes against your idea of common sense, it's easy to dismiss them as an out-group idiot. When it's someone you've known for years, who you know to be thoughtful about their beliefs, it's harder to dismiss them out of hand.
This is anecdotal, but I've also found that people who bring up those sorts of identity issues when you don't know them well aren't usually looking to engage with someone who disagrees. They're looking to see if you belong to the same tribe. If you do, it's an opportunity to bond.
It depends on what you mean by "fruitful discussion". If you are willing to listen to a person expound on their identity, and accept uncritically whatever they say, then most people will happily talk your ear off about it.
If you care to question any aspect of something that comprises part of someone's identity, then it can easily be perceived as a personal attack on that individual, and discussions where one person believes they are being personally insulted by the other are rarely fruitful.
> If you care to question any aspect of something that comprises part of someone's identity, then it can easily be perceived as a personal attack on that individual
I don't think it's healthy conversation to "question" what someone [you have just met] is saying in any circumstances.
Questioning without having a developed background and context is a polite way of calling them a liar, isn't it?
"Oh, I haven't experienced that" is less confrontational - you are not expected to have experienced it if you don't hold the same identity.
A discussion does not have to mean you are only talking about things you have personally experienced. It might mean things that you think should or shouldn’t happen in the future or implications about what is happening in the broader world based on your personal experiences or beliefs.
If the conclusions someone draws for one of these things are based on what they consider their identity, they may be very resistant to hear any contrary opinions.
A healthy (or fruitful) discussion should have room for reasonable disagreement about the meanings and implications of what one has personally experienced. You need not deny the reality of someone’s experience to draw a different conclusion from it than they do.
Indeed, in fact, I think it might be better to have as large an identity as possible, so that the group you associate with most includes all the people you're talking to. Getting all of nature into your 'in-group' is likely to the best way to hack your visceral ethical system into something approaching an actually ethical one.
Yes, it's hard to challenge things you think are core to your identity, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, and it's easier to do so if you're surrounded by people you know will care about you which ever identity you choose.
I agree to some extend with your comment. I think stance and open-mind is more important, it’s not for naught one of the rules here is “curious conversation”.
Or as this Bertrand Russel quote :
“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
> Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
I'd suggest another guideline: keep your claims falsifiable.
The most heated online discussions I've witnessed have been around non-falsifiable claims. These discussions may offer an adrenaline rush for the participant, but not much else. Minds don't change in these discussions. Quite the opposite.
However, topics like religion are noteworthy in that none of the claims are falsifiable. Lots of political discussions (the more heated kind especially) deal in non-falsifiable claims.
PG suggests that such discussions can't happen around technical topics (JavaScript, baking?). I think there's evidence to the contrary on HN not to mention many other discussion forums.
I think there is a similarity between both statements. The issue as I see it comes when people have strong opinions not based in commonly agreed upon facts.
So what we end up having is person A saying "we should get rid of ABC, it causes XYZ!", and person B says "ABC is amazing! Everyone should have ABC! The XYZ claim is overblown conspiracy", both opinions are very strong. But they don't agree on whether ABC causes XYZ. Before an intelligent conversation happens, the basis in fact has to be agreed upon.
This is basically impossible with non-falsifiable claims. But non-falsifiable claims generally means "there is no evidence for it". Because if a claim relies on evidence, then it is by default falsifiable. Show the evidence is wrong, and the claim disappears.
If there is no evidence... they didn't come to their beliefs through evidence. They came through some other means. Find out THOSE reasons, and you can have a fruitful discussion.
I've had plenty of fruitful discussions about politics just as I have about religion. The key in both cases is finding that reasoning. In both cases that reasoning is almost never the topic at hand. Don't start a political conversation with slavery. Start it with... idk... maybe what news outlets they pay attention to.
320 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI got some bad news for 2009 PG from the future…
Seriously, this reads like satire now.
Also my impression is that there was a spike of js hate ~3-5 years ago that has since subsided. I think it grew alongside the development of web applications, where more and more people who had little previous exposure to js were suddenly forced to confront it as some part of their workflow or other.
Can you point to a big dust up thread about js recently? I can't think of one personally. At most there are various complaints about specific js technologies like npm.
EDIT: Since everyone wants a definition of religion, here's the copypaste from my response downthread: Priests, holy writings, dogmatic beliefs, original sin, etc.
Crypto and wokeness are not religions in the actual sense of the word religion. It's a shame that people redefine words in order to change their meanings to fit what they are saying.
As a way of bounding this definition, I don't think javascript would count as a religion. Although perhaps I'm not sufficiently tapped into that world to make the necessary parallels.
Your list left out one thing that is in the definition of the word, religion.
You may not call it "religion"... but deep held beliefs of the Only True Way come out and I'm not sure what else it should be called.
If we define religion as "anything people get super passionate and opinionated about" then it's pretty much tautological that people will argue about such things, without telling us anything about why such arguments start in the first place.
Or knitting, or Rust, or the second amendment, or patents, or bitcoin, or Prop 13, etc.
windows or linux?
Kirk or Picard?
Marvel or DC?
Han shot first!
Wayland or Xorg?
Python or Go?
2) Neither: VMS
3) Neither: Dr. Who
4) Neither: Family Circle
5) That is correct
I think I listened to the same interview a few days ago. Most likely the Jordan Peterson interview with Yeonmi Park. Very interesting and well worth the time imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqa-SdJtT4
>For example, the question of the relative merits of programming languages often degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers.
I yearn for pre-social media days.
We’re fundamentally struggling with scale and there’s no two ways about it.
http://paulgraham.com/diff.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html
That is, when it's a part of one's identity, like religion, or [list other protected classes here].
Maybe in 2009 people around pg were not emotionally invested in JavaScript so much. Like,they were more professional, or maybe just still preferred Lisp and didn't care about JS much.
In any way, the whole thread here just illustrates the pg's point, which only grew stronger since 2009.
I watch material from mainly CNN, Sky Australia and NTD Media.
Virtually every big story on CNN in the past 2 years has had some kind of retraction (ie. lying):
- corona lab leak considered misinformation until a month ago
- first impeachment (orchestrated/funded by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden) which failed due to lack of evidence/coverup of a bogus FISA warrant extension by Joe Biden
- second impeachment (faked phone call transcript from Trump to an election official, retracted by WaPo)
- Hunter Biden story suppression just before 2020 election, with CCP and Ukraine bribing the Biden family with $1 billion and various drug/weapons/sexual favors/influence peddling/etc. counts
- CCP influence minimized (journalists are getting free junkets to Beijing, White House press corps contains multiple CCP organs nominated by US media outlets, etc.)
- Jan. 6 riot protesters killed nobody (4 died of natural causes and 1 shot by Capitol Police.)
Sky and NTD use old-school reporters, and have retracted nothing because they do factual reporting, not narratives. Their facts are ugly, but turn out to be very accurate.
NTD had some of their reporting on the lab leak suppressed by Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, and currently are semi-frozen and demonetized by Youtube, so they've had to create their own media website.
Sky reporters were insulted by other media outlets, yet tenaciously followed the lab leak, and have accumulated a lot of data not published anywhere else.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/24/sky-n...
Covid-19 is from China. Whether you call it the Wuhan, CCP or China virus, it's factual to call it using those terms - that's not racist. In the same way, the press reports variants from Brazil, the UK and India using the name of the country.
I've watched Sky for about a year, and they've never said anything racist.
Can you link to an actual racist comment by Sky or Trump?
Where I come from, calling somebody racist without any proof makes you the racist.
Let me know if you have any questions, so you can stop looking sorry.
AMA.
The only exception is for claims so dumb ("the time complexity of mergesort is O(n), the earth is flat, 1+1=5") that anything at all directly contradicts them.
Tertiary sources are often reporting on secondary sources: The NYT reports on something that WaPo reports on. Any mistakes or biases present in the secondary source may be amplified & added to. I never read reporting about someone else's reporting without seeking out that first reports. At best, tertiary sources should be taken as commentary/opinion/interpretation.
Non-primary sources are for when you want something explained to you in non-jargon terms or a TL;DR, or you want an expert's opinion on the primary sources etc. A medical study comes out about hear disease, and you want a cardiologist's assessment of the study. Even then, you need to understand who the cardiologist is. The average cardiologist may not be a great source: There are levels of expertise within any community, and I want someone who is at the top of the field. I don't want the average cardiologist's opinion.
The problem is that no one has time to track down primary sources for everything they read/see/hear, or the level of knowledge to evaluate it. I'm fascinated by quantum computing, but I have no chance of understanding primary source research there. I have no choice but to rely on a secondary source or, if possible, the researchers themselves giving a higher level TL;DR.
My rule of thumb is that, absent prior knowledge of bias/agenda/ill-intent, I skeptically take what people say at face value but don't accept it into my own views/opinions/etc unless I've done some digging of my own. If I'm not capable (e.g. quantum physics) of doing that, I simply try harder to get a variety of expert opinions, and avoid presenting anything I say/think as anything other than an outsider's imperfect understanding.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
The genesis of imposter syndrome. I am the role that I play, and if not, than what am I.
It’s a odd thing to realize that these simple digital avatars tech created would be the Roman/Greek/Egyptian god we pray to. At the altar of ourselves.
Edit: Good post by PG, he’s getting more in touch with what’s wrong.
“You will never be able to reach your full potential until you first confront your deep-seated fear of success! Now get into the bag.”
This whole time I thought I was a plucky immigrant seeking a better life (economically). Turns out I was and am just white. Still grappling with this.
Learning your identity was wrong is very discombobulating. On some level it feels like maybe I've been here long enough that I've become accepted? Nobody ever asks "Where are you from?" anymore ... guess working on my accent finally paid off.
Friends have repeatedly told me I'm not allowed to complain or comment because "I can pass". Feels like if that were true I wouldn't need to pass, but when I ask that question it's like their brain gets a blue screen.
Anyway, just sharing one person's experience. This is not commentary, a value judgement, or anything like that.
If people are telling you that you can’t “complain or comment” on your experience.. I’d suggest questioning what kind of people you are calling your friends.
It’s because any such commenting is immediately seen in the context of the current social rights battles. Immigrant implies brown or hispanic in most people’s mind. Since I do not experience that sort of prejudice (supposedly), any complaining is immediately seen as “distracting”.
If they are working abroad with the intention of returning, then expatriate is the correct term.
1. Legally expatriated by a Nation/government. Removed from a nation's territory by decision of said nation.
2. Comission/Secondment abroad, where an employee of a government/company gets assigned to work abroad for a fixed period.
From what I gather the term expat has been appropriated in British-American circles, to somehow detach higher income immigrants from the 'immigrant' stigma. I think this became a de facto convention when Investment Banking and Retail Banks (in non english-speaking countries) started adopting the term 'expat' in customer branding, to target higher income immigrants.
Ironically, this seems to come from highly educated individuals whom I suspect have never 1) been to a third world country, off the resort 2) lived in a financially struggling household 3) worked an honest day of manual labor ever.
Kibda got off in a rant there, but just wanted to say, fuck anyone who says "you can pass" when you say your an immigrant. If you want to call them out in language their indoctrinated brains can understand, say "are you denying my lived-experience?"
I suspect if you make your way closer to the midwest you will meet less of these people, and more people who treat you like just another person and couldn't give a fuck how you identify.
Cheers
As someone that grew up somewhere in the midwest (which isn't as homogenous as is often implied) and then moved to a stereotypically left-leaning coastal city, this was perhaps true in certain circumstances but definitely not others. I wouldn't bother with smaller towns/villages outside of the largest metropolitan areas (that aren't university towns) unless you want to feel prejudiced by a racial identity that's imposed on you, and reminded of that on a daily basis, but the same is true of these smaller towns in most states as well as countries in the west, in my experience. It's a bit idealistic to say that people in the midwest care less about how you identify if there are instead more that impose their own identity on you.
But like yeah I mean I grew up in one town, lived 1 life, and im a member of the racial majority so take my words with a grain of salt I guess.
In that case, I probably will, unfortunately. The incidents I encountered directed at me almost never involved a witness who belonged to a racial majority, so if I had to guess you wouldn't have witnessed a representative number of them either. I suspect that's because most people are (thankfully) afraid of being seen as racist in public, so they're usually in a more one-on-one setting.
is programming the common denominator between them?
I mean yeah a lot of programmers fall into that catagory but no theres a plenty of people in all different professions (including blue collar professions) that fall into the catagory im describing
(I personally love this arrangement. I've seen it in several other cities, like London and Moscow.)
“Friends”
I'm not sure what you are trying to say really. But definitely victimhood is also a type of identity.
The self-congratulation will continue, until society improves.
I talk it he has not ever participated in Javascript or baking discussions.
It turns out that discussions have often nothing to do with identity, and a lot with depth of knowledge and depth of conviction. Shallow knowledge & deep convictions are what leads to disaster.
Maybe it's not labels, but the desire to position yourself as an expert, even if you don't really understand the problem.
“that” being things that are not political or religious.
What vaccines and 5G have shown is that you do not need to be qualified to talk about a topic. A strong opinion about anything is what qualifies you to be an expert in 2021.
Based on that article and my memory, this is a phenomenon that has happened in the last 10 years. Why this may be the case is something I’m not sure of. There are some possibilities. Perhaps the rise of mainstream social media allowed everyone to find their people, which emboldened people with minority opinions. Or maybe rising income inequality is making people feel increasingly powerless and this influences them to assert themselves in areas outside of politics and religion.
Political culture of the last few years also has something to do with it. Almost everything can be associated with a political faction now, 5G, vaccines, celebrity squabbles, ocean acidification, early human migration theories... Political culture bleeds out.
I agree that it seems to be a new phenomenon and i think it's partly social media but also our tendency to be always online. We see so many headlines and hot takes that it feels like actual knowledge.
Simple: Facebook
I spent most of my life shielding myself from admitting I’m queer, and nearly all of it shielding myself from admitting I’m non-binary and admitting I’m autistic, using this logic.
That didn’t prevent conflict, it just made it harder for me to navigate and almost certainly harder for people who mean well toward me to navigate as well.
My identity keeps growing and it only gets better for me and the people I keep in my life.
It’s the small stuff like considering yourself a Pepsi drinker that causes needless conflict. People buying bandaids have preferences, but it’s not something you’re going to argue about on the internet in all caps.
You wouldn't know I'm nonbinary from looking at me because I look like any dude walking around with clothes plucked out of the closet at random. Presentation is just not a huge part of the identity to me, even though the stereotype is that presentation is everything.
Which isn’t to say I haven’t had my fair share of exploring non-gender-norm presentation. It just doesn’t matter that much to me other than what feels good for me at the time.
To a stranger’s eye, I present he/him. I have a big beard and a shaved head, im tall with broad shoulders. And I’m not at all motivated to challenge that perception (to the point my preferred pronouns are he/him/they/them and when I came out NB to friends and family I made it clear I don’t expect to be addressed differently).
What was important for me was acknowledging that I never felt any attachment to that he/him perception, except the painful part of navigating other people’s expectations not matching my reality.
I don't even know how to take this seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you want to clarify, as it seems like you don't want to minimize the big stuff, but... this feels like that.
- - -
Edit: it’s entirely possible people who don’t identify with these just don’t understand how huge they are for people who do. Which is part of what I found so offputting in the article’s examples.
It’s also possible I really substantively don’t understand what is “identity” to you or anyone else who thinks these are small or not aspects of identity.
If that’s the case, I’m having trouble filling in the blanks. Name? Family lineage? Job title? Work history? Relationship status?
Importance isn’t the same thing as taking up a large fraction of your identity. Suppose you wrote an autobiography, the big stuff like age, religion, or sexual orientation are shared with millions of people. They have huge impacts, but the details are going to be stuff like past partners not simply repeating “I am Bi” for hundreds of pages.
Height is a great example, being 7’ tall, 4’, or even 5’ 10” all impact on every moment of your life. The language(s) you speak, the county you live in, having or not having every significant disease or disability. Education is another big one being a Dr. or a high school dropout again makes a huge difference but again isn’t on it’s own what separates you from everyone else.
You’re taking important/big to you and projecting it on me. You’re insisting that the things about my identity that I consider big are small.
I could almost understand if you don’t fully appreciate the impact of discovering one’s sexuality and gender feels like. But you’ve included autism as small, and that suggests either you’re really ignorant of what that entails or, like so many other “big” things you listed you just don’t see how they intersect?
Either way it feels dismissive as hell. What’s small to you isn’t to me. If that doesn’t speak to identity than what does?
Storing the pattern of your palm print takes up more space than a listing most peoples current bank account balances. People generally care a lot more about bank accounts than palm prints, but that doesn’t mean they take up a lot of space. As such palm prints are literally a larger part of your identity than your bank account balance.
How so? Your example doesn’t make this clear as I can’t relate those things to the actual parts of my identity you’re addressing.
Tell me more detail about how small my queerness, NBness and neurodivergence are.
Except not every word fits into sexual identity. If you where listing every person on earth let’s be generous and call it 10,000 options for sexual identity or ~15 bits of information.
> I spent most of my life shielding myself from admitting I’m queer, and nearly all of it shielding myself from admitting I’m non-binary and admitting I’m autistic, using this logic.
You really think there isn’t more to shape me, to who I am and what shaped and continues to me, than what I described here? You really think the kinds of pain I described in responses from the process that led to these recognitions about myself are low information?
You’re talking to me like my life and my self is distilled down to the words I’ve written in a HN comment thread.
Honestly this isn’t worth my time. Go dismiss yourself.
Realising/deciding that it wasn't actually important to me what sexuality people perceived me as eliminated a lot of stress and conflict, personally.
And that is fine, but it doesn't mean it should be prescribed to everyone.
This term is totally nebulous. What it means to be the "same person but with different features" or a "different person" is just pure meaningless semantics.
I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).
I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is.
It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s not available for scrutiny by an essay by Paul, or comments from you or anyone.
My contention with the article was that giving myself permission to let my identity expand to include things I hadn’t helped me begin to reckon with the pain of keeping my identity minimal, denying really important things about myself and hurting in the process.
The majority of the responses I’ve gotten have suggested that I should not let those be a part of my identity or have minimized their importance.
I cannot understand why. Why is it in your interest or anyone’s to tell me whether being queer, or non-binary, or autistic should not factor into who I am? Why do you or anyone get to decide whether any of those things should be important parts of me?
Why is it anyone’s business but my own? The only “conflict” here has been people scrutinizing the validity of my identity as I express it.
Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
But I'm not attacking you, and I don't think most of the other commenters are, either. You expressed a disagreement with its thesis and explained how identity has been useful to you. I just pointed out that perhaps there is a way to achieve the same goals without expanding your identity. I was trying to have a discussion about the essay. But it appears I misunderstood, and you did not actually wish to engage in a discussion, so I will stop here :)
> Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
Okay. What is partisan about me being queer or non-binary or autistic, other than those are immutable facets of me that either people hate or callously disregard?
Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.
The core of advice is to keep the identity _small_. That way I can pick my battles. The more labels I put on myself the more I will alienate other people. Each of those labels also means I'm not honest with myself. Label is just a single word for describing complex world views, preferences and emotions. If I attach this label to my personality, then over time I will also change myself to better fit it. It can also be source of frustration when I don't meet expectations that are set by any given label. For example, before I considered myself a bookworm and it was painful to discard this label from my identity as I found less and less time for reading.
Labels are still useful. They provide decent defaults for social interactions, and a sense of belonging. Birds of a feather flock together. It is too many labels that can be problematic, in a sense of crippling social interactions and turning them into ego duels. Again, this is just how my experience aligns with the article, and not at all scrutinizing _your_ identity.
It’s about identity. And specifically about rejecting expansion thereof. How could I not have personal feelings about it?
Sure, I can think of myself as bisexual instead, which I do. (tongue in cheek)
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, bisexuality can't not be part of my identity. Like @eyelidlessness, it took a long time to come to the conclusion. It affects how others see me, how they treat me, if they'll date me, etc. It caused heartbreak, depression, and so on. These are all experiences that set me apart from most other people, whether I want them to or not. If that's not identity, I don't know what is. As one ages and settles down, these things can become less central to your identity, but they're still there and important. Stoicism is one thing, but dismissing the difficulties experienced when going against the grain in any area of life is wishful thinking.
I think Paul Graham could have gone one step further in his analysis. Identity is the combination of labels, community and emotion. Labels are very valuable tools as shortcuts in discussions. They can also lead to dissonance, when definitions don't align or context is missing.
The community aspect, especially in rainbow or mental health issues (not an exhaustive list), can be critical to well-being and survival. Could you find the same support network somewhere else? Yes, and plenty of people do, but that doesn't discount the value of the Pride movement or the Trevor project, for instance. The downside of community is it can evoke tribalistic tendencies.
What Graham seems to take issue with most is the emotional component of one's identity. What's relevant here is not whether you have emotions about your identity, but whether you can set them aside long enough to have a dispassionate discussion. It does require that participants have a healthy emotional baseline, are mature enough not to take everything personally and retain an open mind.
I feel it's also important to point out that there is a difference between having an identity and being an identitarian. You can be bisexual without being an activist. You can be an activist without going full woke and thinking of every interaction as power balances and oppression dynamics.
We can choose whether it becomes a central part of our lives, whether we need to surround ourselves with only like-minded people or whether we enter into discussions looking to be offended, be right or exchange ideas. In that sense, it's no different from having a political opinion, a profession, musical tastes, a hobby or anything else.
This is not an advice to hide the key elements of your identity. Instead, it's an advice to concentrate on them, and protect them with the energy you saved by not wasting it on petty issues.
It led with two aspects that people almost universally identify deeply with, both of which are matters of life and death (politics by the subject matter involved and sometimes affiliation, religion even more times by affiliation) and whole moral constructs for life and afterlife. Those are not petty, they're just easily dismissed by people who can address or dismiss them casually.
The problem is, our society condones false identities. A true fifth column of lost souls.
It's a surprisingly difficult topic to deal with in discreet analytical terms, so I suggest avoiding disagreeing with definitional points and looking to the wider picture. Don't quibble, fix it instead.
NOTES ON NATIONALISM https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I don't think its a problem of one's own identify but rather the role one plays with it's own motivations in that given context.
Also, there are now so many bot accounts that many times I am wondering if the discussing is happening with a real person.
You have no idea how someone might misinterpret something you said, or believe in.
It could be a future employer, client, divorce lawyer, Lawyer collecting a judgment, business partner, investor, future friend, nosey neighbor wondering in you have a permit, disgruntled former lover, etc.
If you are a rich guy like PG, it really doesn't matter what you put out there, but for guys like myself; I stay anonymous.
I think what PG is saying will be more important in the future.
I definitely disagree. Sure, you can have an estimation of how much the new bureaucracy will cost in the short run, but you can never predict the second-order effects with certainty and disagreement about these is usually the actual conflict. The discussion is easier on some issues than others, sure, but I don't think you can predict any with any reasonable certainty.
It can get even more complicated when your new policy leads to large projects, many large, multi-year projects have certain assumptions baked into them which can turn out to be wrong. Years ago I was a minor participant in a root cause analysis for a government program that lasted 10 years and went way over budget. Our biggest finding was that the assumptions made when budgeting this project turned out to be incorrect and far too optimistic. These assumptions were actually fairly reasonable at the time they were made though.
Hollywood producers and shadowy finance guys used to “keep their identity small.” We have learned quite a bit about them in recent years (and there’s obviously so much more we don’t know). As we live in a time when there is a crisis of trust across institutions — politics, religion, corporate, whatever — you’re much better off being transparent.
The thing that’s missing, of course, is that people aren’t “iterating on their beliefs” and people aren’t also accepting of the fact that people who had beliefs that were wrong or problematic in the past are able to iterate and change. This is a future area of improvement for human social development.
All of this “every human in the world is connected” stuff is very new. There aren’t really any absolute truths or rules yet. It’s going to take a lot longer than 30 years to sort out.
Edit: I would also say that there are binary opinions (ex: people shouldn’t harm kids) and what I call “spectrum” opinions (ex: the existence of America is a net positive to the world). We have to get better about engaging people on spectrum opinions and allowing differences to exist, without going to war as we would with a binary opinion that probably has only one right answer for any decent human. Again, things to be done in the future.
Things seem totally benign until something goes wrong. Then all of this “advice” starts to look totally different as you watch everyone who should act and take a stand decide they need to “keep their identity small.”
If I saw my supervisor taking home a young female employee, I'd go right to HR about it, done, next question.
This step is optional. The argument is that it is in your interest to do the former without the latter.
I think maybe you are viewing this from the perspective of your identity being how other people perceive you, rather than how you perceive yourself?
Like if you pull a drowning child out of a river, do you now become "guy who pulls drowning children out of rivers" and you have to quit your job and patrol the rivers looking for drowning children, because this is your whole identity now?
Since this is usually openly against the rules in nearly any company, of doesn't even take identifying with anything, it just takes following instructions.
Also, while you keep your identity small, reducing it to zero might not be the wisest approach.
It takes a certain level of privilege to be free from "identity" constraints; put differently, the advice in this bit is FAR easier said than done for many.
At the time Descartes was a prominent mathematician of his time with significant following, heavily invested into his reputation and status.
After a certain dispute, where Fermat shed doubt on a work by Descartes, the prominent mathematician grew annoyed and tried to discredit Fermat. The only problem was Fermat's disinterest in his status - how exactly does one destroy a reputation of a provincial clerk and father of eight, who does math as a hobby?
"More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."
Is that true? I really don't think it is. I could definitely have a fruitful (as precise as that can be) conversation with a Christian about religion or a "proud Black man" about race in America. Or even learn a thing or two about programming from a lisp evangelist...
I liked this essay at first, but when I read it more critically it doesn't hold up. It at first seemed to preach non-attachment. Now I feel like it's just an excuse for me to tune you out whenever I decide your identity has been engaged by the topic.
> Is that true?
I don't think so, but it approaches a truth. You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any two or more of the participants in areas where they have fundamental and intractable conflict.
But even this requires a very specific definition of “engage”. Its not just a matter of having overlap with content of the identity, but provoking a defensive, identity-based response. There are people who can converse around identity-related issues without their identity being engaged.
This is anecdotal, but I've also found that people who bring up those sorts of identity issues when you don't know them well aren't usually looking to engage with someone who disagrees. They're looking to see if you belong to the same tribe. If you do, it's an opportunity to bond.
If you care to question any aspect of something that comprises part of someone's identity, then it can easily be perceived as a personal attack on that individual, and discussions where one person believes they are being personally insulted by the other are rarely fruitful.
I don't think it's healthy conversation to "question" what someone [you have just met] is saying in any circumstances.
Questioning without having a developed background and context is a polite way of calling them a liar, isn't it?
"Oh, I haven't experienced that" is less confrontational - you are not expected to have experienced it if you don't hold the same identity.
If the conclusions someone draws for one of these things are based on what they consider their identity, they may be very resistant to hear any contrary opinions.
A healthy (or fruitful) discussion should have room for reasonable disagreement about the meanings and implications of what one has personally experienced. You need not deny the reality of someone’s experience to draw a different conclusion from it than they do.
Yes, it's hard to challenge things you think are core to your identity, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, and it's easier to do so if you're surrounded by people you know will care about you which ever identity you choose.
Or as this Bertrand Russel quote : “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
I'd suggest another guideline: keep your claims falsifiable.
The most heated online discussions I've witnessed have been around non-falsifiable claims. These discussions may offer an adrenaline rush for the participant, but not much else. Minds don't change in these discussions. Quite the opposite.
However, topics like religion are noteworthy in that none of the claims are falsifiable. Lots of political discussions (the more heated kind especially) deal in non-falsifiable claims.
PG suggests that such discussions can't happen around technical topics (JavaScript, baking?). I think there's evidence to the contrary on HN not to mention many other discussion forums.
So what we end up having is person A saying "we should get rid of ABC, it causes XYZ!", and person B says "ABC is amazing! Everyone should have ABC! The XYZ claim is overblown conspiracy", both opinions are very strong. But they don't agree on whether ABC causes XYZ. Before an intelligent conversation happens, the basis in fact has to be agreed upon.
This is basically impossible with non-falsifiable claims. But non-falsifiable claims generally means "there is no evidence for it". Because if a claim relies on evidence, then it is by default falsifiable. Show the evidence is wrong, and the claim disappears.
If there is no evidence... they didn't come to their beliefs through evidence. They came through some other means. Find out THOSE reasons, and you can have a fruitful discussion.
I've had plenty of fruitful discussions about politics just as I have about religion. The key in both cases is finding that reasoning. In both cases that reasoning is almost never the topic at hand. Don't start a political conversation with slavery. Start it with... idk... maybe what news outlets they pay attention to.