Minor criticism: I wonder why including a statement like "like a vector field whose elements become aligned" was thought necessary. It does not make much sense technically and it does not even add to the content. If anything it makes me doubt the rest of the essay by suddenly making me aware that Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. From my point of view it is absolutely net-negative.
He's sort of thinking of a phase transition. I imagine it's included as a symptom of how he's visualizing the situation. The idea of a phase transition here makes sense, and I suspect is a fair description of some social phenomenon.
It’s pretty insane. Notice any comment which is against witch hunt culture is being downvoted. The tech industry is fairly heavily ideologically captured because of where startup culture is largely based (SF).
Just read the comments in here. This is a whole lot of words to say: "I wish I could say things without facing consequences."
As somebody else said in this thread, it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion" when he instablocks anybody on Twitter so easily.
> it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion"
Misquote. He said "implicitly ending the discussion by calling someone a x-ist", which is not the same at blocking someone who is annoying - blocking someone is just shutting your door, not making them lose their livelihood by defaming them.
The Us is a little culturally weird right now (and always), and it depends on your industry a little but he’s mostly fighting strawmen strapped to windmills. I mean, what would PG know about this whole topic?
Also, you want to write software without “being canceled?” Well, dust off your oscilloscope skills, in the unglamorous embedded world I hear toned down right wing rants about Putin being canceled and Covid testing as a mass surveillance program and all that happens is sometimes someone’s like, alright, let’s move the meeting along.
I witnessed someone get fired for wearing a MAGA hat in a Twitter picture at an unnamed tech company. Yes, that was the only reason. He was a good performer.
Holding a view that tens of millions of Americans have and you get fired.
What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics.
It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
Both of those topics are fraught with gaslighting ("nobody is teaching X") and misrepresentation ("don't say gay") along with outright fabrication ("it's a right").
You condemn “both sides” but the fact of the matter is that large groups of human being suck. It’s impossible to maintain any kind of nuance or individual compassion at scale. So, yeah not just both sides, all sides.
If you think there’s some large group of people that all wear white hats and aren’t being shitty or ruining anyone’s life, you are being willfully blind.
Furthermore, when you engage in this whataboutism garbage (“what’s always interesting to me”, yeah I’m sure it’s fascinating) when someone tries to point out something your “team” is doing wrong, you are part of the problem.
Yes, Trumpists suck—-that means everyone else should get a free pass? By that token shouldn’t Trumpists get a free pass because Putin is out there committing atrocities?
Whole thing boils down to "I've always been in the cultural in-group, but man it sucks here in the out-group," as he notices for the first time what life has been like for most people, for most of history. Hilarious.
That's a bad faith argument. He isn't complaining being shunned out of some culture, he is talking about people losing their job, people losing access to platforms that contain lots of people who want to listen to them.
Yup. If you want trans and gay people, history of racial oppression and female nipples on tv banned, that is just "normal" and "natural". But anything else is horrible attack on mah freeze peach.
This is pure bigotry. Allowing children to know that gay people exist is not grooming. It isn't even close to grooming. Knowing that two men or two women can be married isn't grooming.
Yes, but the commeter is saying that he's read the bill -- and it actually says nothing about whether you can tell children that men can be married. I personally dont see where it prevents this at all.
As far as I can see, the explicit wording of the bill is just to delay "social sex education" till c. 8/9 years old -- right?
I've also read the bill, and it's easy to quote. It explicitly says that any discussion about "sexual identity" is banned.
One of the requirement clauses states that the bill is "prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner". That quote is the whole clause. It doesn't ban instruction, it bans discussion. It is explicit. Those exact words. Anyone who says otherwise either did not actually read the bill, or they didn't read it very well.
I don't read that as saying a teacher can't say "men can be married" -- that isn't a discussion of sexual orientation. If I prohibit talking about atoms, I am not prohibiting talking about every physical object. I am prohibiting talk about the explicit concept of atoms.
Likewise here, how I read this is straightforward: explicit discussion of sexual orientation, ie., which genders/sexes people are sexually attracted to; must only occur from c. 8/9yo+.
Ditto for gender identity. That a person's born physical sex may deviate from their perceived sexual identity -- discussions about that don't seem all that urgent below 9yo.
The issue the bill seems to be addressing isn't mentioning that people are gay, are married as gay etc -- the issue is in having discussions about anyone's sexual preference "too early" with children. I think even saying "X person is trans" in classroom isn't forbidden -- rather just making "trans" or "gay" (or "straight") a topic of discussion.
The bill is a direct response to rare, but noted occurrences of teachers giving very young children lessons from highly controversial books on gender and sexuality at ages where those children are not being taught these subjects -- but necessarily, rather, being encouraged to accept (controversial) conclusions about them.
We arent talking about educating 5yos on the nature of sexuality. They don't have enough experiences and development to discuss this.
Lawyers completely disagree with your interpretation. Being say is part of someone's sexual orientation, so the don't say gay bill prohibits discussing it at all. Being trans is part of a gender identity so it is not allowed to be discussed. The law is very explicit in this, as I've quoted.
Calling it anti-grooming only is ignoring its ability to chill free speech (people will avoid talking about things that might get them sued, even if they're permitted) and be weaponized to suppress speech ("It would be a shame if someone took that thing that you said wrong..." even if it's permitted).
Same with CRT banning. The existence of a law, even an ineffective one, on the books provides opportunity for abuse.
(Said as someone who thinks the parts of both parties who are loudest over these issues are childish demagogues who ignore historical peril)
This is a lie. It blocks not discussions about "sex" but "sexual orientation". It bans students from saying they are guy. Calling people groomers who disagree with you is despicable.
Sexual orientation is about sex, it's literally in the name. It's quite pathological to sexualize classroom discussion in early grades, there's no possible educational purpose and the kids cannot be expected to be able to understand and relate to that sort of discussion like an adult would.
The flipside is that people like him get called "transphobic" and harassed despite his very reasonable objections to the way his kids get educated. I don't know that calling him "transphobic" is any less (or more) accurate than him calling others "groomers".
None of the competing thoughtcrime tribes seem to care about things like free thought, discourse, etc. This is the frightening part to me--people in the "other tribe" aren't worthy of things like due process, and authoritarian approaches are fine as long as they are aimed at the "other".
I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.
I have heard a scant few stories of people having their due process taken away.
There is some controversy though about whether the concept of due process as per law should be extended to a general principle that guides the operation of privately-owned websites. That isn't how the internet used to work so the jury's still out.
"aren't worthy of" is distinct from realized actions of the state. If you recall the impulse of the mob during me too was to burn without trial any accused--this sentiment is what I'm talking about.
Nobody’s trying to put you in jail for having differing views. But there’s never going to be a world in which there aren’t social consequences for having them. If you think, for example, that the world is going to greet people who think it’s ok to molest children (whether they do it or not) with open arms, you’re just deluded.
I agree this is true. But we can do better than we are now. There was a time when an Episcopalian wouldn’t consider being friends with a Baptist. We are a better society for the fact that this is mostly not true anymore.
I’m not saying it should be unlimited or anyone should be legally or morally obligated to refrain from social consequences for any and all speech, but I do think a society where tolerance is extended to a majority of the other people by a majority of people is healthier than one where that isn’t the case.
You can't put a jew and a nazi into a room and say "have a free thought discourse". Or a (american) white supermarics and (american) person of color. Or a homophobe and a gay person.
There can be no discourse when one side wants just to be left alone and the other wants to exterminate them.
You might want to rethink that 20th century lesson.
> His efforts to fight racism, in which, as an African American, he has engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), have convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
In fact, bringing people of different minds together is the only way to have free discourse, and the only way to change minds.
“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.
This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.
Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.
> “Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”
> “He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.
If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.
I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed ...
> In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US universities
I don't think this was new. Liberality tends to go hand in hand with seeking reality, as discovering something and then adopting it requires intellectual big-tentism. Perhaps the author bemoans the rise of bureaucracy within the university, which has demonstrably increased?
My concern is that these arguments about moral puritanicalism aren't without merit, but that they are often ignore the cancerous alt-right, which is bereft of morality beyond racial nationalism. Perhaps the cancel culture creedal concern is considered to be salvageable.
Is there an alt-right? People use that term, but they might as well be talking about unicorns. All these years, I’ve not met a single alt-right person despite being told this is a large and growing segment of our population, a pernicious and growing “threat to democracy!”Well, if they exist they look a lot like the old-right that voted in exactly the same fashion. If anything the right has gotten much more progressive. My statements here can all be quantified lest you disagree.
I think you know that the alt-right is mostly a fantasy created by the current neo-marxist religion. Religion always requires a devil, and if it doesn't exist you make it up.
It's not "don't say gay", it's "don't subject, expect or mandate young kids to learn stuff about things like sexual orientation (or even gender identity) that they cannot possibly relate with prior to the biological changes of adolescence, and that are enough of a minefield for adults already. Leave this stuff to family and broader society for the time being."
Do you really think that young kids don't notice their parents affection for each other? Or that their older sibling is dating someone? Or that people get pregnant?
The teachers can’t address why someone in the class has two dads without risk of being sued. Heck the wording is vague enough you might not discuss marriage.
The ambiguity in the law is there as a feature to hush normal conversations that might otherwise happen.
Arguably, using "Mom" or "Dad", or even gendered pronouns is restricted. Of course not using these would upset the very people who wrote the laws, which is another part (beyond the enforceability) that makes them insane.
Why is an individual students parents a subject for a classroom? That is utterly bizarre and it sounds like the teacher in your hypothetical is singling out the student.
Florida education law, and this law, and education law in general, all have some real problems.
It's somewhat unfortunate that misinformational memes of this sort travel much faster than reasonable understandings of its problems (this is but one example.) I believe it impairs the resolution of the nation's problems. Yeah, it galvanizes some support, but also hardens the opposition, and impairs the ability to make any sort of incremental progress, leaving achievable reforms stalled for years or even decades.
Moreover, as a matter of principle, I don't really want to be part of a political movement which values spinning a story to its advantage more than it cares about informing the public. Build your movement on something solid.
It’s important to read all the parts of the law. The concerning parts are 1/the vagueness of it, and 2/enforceability though a private right of action (instead of having the state enforce it, parents get to sue the schools). It’s a minefield that educators must now trepidatiously tiptoe through. It makes their jobs significantly harder and more stressful.
And for what real benefit, exactly? How is this improving our society in any real way?
I don’t think this is true; it’s not a criminal statute. While the law is problematic for plenty of reasons, the threat of imprisonment is not one of them.
Yup. It is conveniently one-side. I don't think it's by design, just accident. When you've concluded that there is a partisan problem, it takes a lot mental discipline (more than even some prominent technology figures have) to see it on both sides of an acrimonious divide. Nothing could be more cancel-culture than ethnic nationalism and efforts to disenfranchise large groups of persons.
Who even came up with the phrase cancel culture to begin with? When? Why does it rhyme and is a just a few syllables? Why doesn't anyone who creates and pushes these slogan/memes and what their motivation is?
Who are the major anti-cancel culture pro-CRT figures?
It seemed to me that the firing of Timnit Gebru at Google was superficially the political reverse of the firing of Antonio García Martínez at Apple. And yet the latter case is considered cancel culture, while the former is not.
I find these "the same people who argue for/against X are the same people who argue for/against Y" comments odd. Do you have a specific example of this outside of politicians*, or are you lumping everyone in camps X and Y together without proof of significant overlap?
*Politicians don't start from "I believe X/Y, let's do something about it." They start from "How do I get my voters agitated and eager to vote for me, and what position should I take on controversial issues X/Y during an election year to achieve this goal?" Politics/electioneering is showmanship first. Silly things like real personal political beliefs only get in the way of politicians' end goal of power.
Another thing I have found related to heresy is that the strongest accusations of heresy often involve ideas and statements that are the most difficult to argue against.
Recently, I was involved in a workplace conversation about how the org had a certain gender/racial proportional makeup and there was a goal of those diversity numbers being different within a specified timeframe. I suggested that this implied bias, and was warned that what I said might offend people. I think this was because I said something fairly rational and it would have been difficult to argue against in rational terms. Along these lines, the calls to cancel Dave Chappelle for example are largely because he has made some good points.
Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.
E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.
(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)
I think you're the one who is confused here. The paradox of tolerance was not conceived to describe people who merely hold opinions.
To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted):
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Which is fair. If someone is going to respond to you by beating and shooting you, you shouldn't have to tolerate them. The justification for the intolerance of the intolerant is that the intolerant use violence to get their way.
But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.
In practice it seems Popper's Paradox is frequently cited as a justification of force against heretics, accompanied by claims that the heresy is in and of itself a form of violence.
> But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.
Neither was I. Nor do I think Paul should be "rounded up" either. Just that I believe his mode of thinking is flawed. I expressed an opinion just as he did.
Then I may have misinterpreted your statement. Would you mind elaborating on exactly which part of the essay confuses the paradox of intolerance with heresy?
Title: Stewart Lee - These days, if you say you're English ...
Is a clip from a BBC show (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, worth a watch if you enjoy British comedy) so copyright block not too surprising depending on where you're located.
He basically takes the piss out of a taxi driver. The stereotype goes that a taxi driver will share their "bloody immigrants" opinions with their fares whether the fares care about hearing it or not.
Cabbie says: "These days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you."
Stewart "wears him down" in the bit by repeating the question back with increasing incredulity and after about 3 minutes the cabbie character eventually just says, "no, you don't actually get arrested."
Graham has forgotten his own essays if he thinks that this is a rebirth.
"What you can't say" [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html] is one of the first of his essays I ever read. It eventually directed me to this site.
At the time, I thought it was brilliant. 18 years on, I think it's a good piece of writing but he's only got half the story. Sadly, today's essay suggest to me he hasn't found the other half in the intervening nearly two decades.
Taboo is a powerful tool. Some taboos, to be sure, outlive their usefulness. But some compress lifetimes of experience into easily remembered lessons for people who have not yet had that experience so that we can ever progress... If every generation has to keep relearning the same lessons over and over, there's no time for more.
The counterweight to the philosophy Graham is espousing here is this one (https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...). A taboo is a social analogy to a fence. Someone built it at some point for a reason. That reason might be gone, in which case the fence is unnecessary. But if you're going to tear down a fence, understand why it's there.
18 years on, I don't think Paul is wrong, but the repeated mistake I see people in my field make is assuming that they're the smartest person in the room when they encounter a heresy or taboo and falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.
Graham didn't say it's a "recent" rebirth in the sense that we often use that word in the technology sector. It's "recent" in the sense that historians use it, i.e. sometime in the last generation or two. In TFA he places the cultural shift somewhere in the late 80s, long before his 2004 essay on the matter.
I've read both essays and it seems that Graham's opinion on the topic hasn't changed much over the last 18 years. We can probably all guess which "recent" event prompted him to revisit the topic, whether we agree with him or not.
I've heard that, but it doesn't apply here... Graham's position doesn't appear to have changed. Indeed, he seems to be retreading old ground like he forgot he wrote the other essay.
smartest person in the room ... falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.
I think you've made an interesting argument, but isn't this evidence that the taboo mechanism is failing at its job and needs to be replaced with something better?
The advantage to the taboo system is that if it's the smart folk who are getting themselves into sticky situations jumping fences, at least they're smart enough to have a fair shot at getting out.
Anything we replace it with needs to maintain the feature of protecting the most vulnerable... Taboos have the advantage of being simple, so you don't have to be smart to adhere to them.
When you say or do socially unacceptable things, there can be consequences. Is that “heresy”? I always associated that word with religion, myself, but it’s interesting that religion is so out of favor right now that you can use it as a comparison to argue that any action not explicitly illegal should be free of negative consequence.
It doesn't require a great intellectual jump to see how the word 'heresy' which has a tradition of being applied towards organized religion is an appropriate description of people that behave in a religious way in general.
Religion is just a belief system. So is Marxism. Libertarianism. Etc.
Hard disagree. I see this idea a lot, and it drives me nuts. This is how you get to silly takes like "atheism is just another religion", "science is just another religion", and all that. I get that religion can be hard to nail down (belief without evidence maybe?), but it's no use just giving up and defining it so broadly that it means nothing.
This does not broaden the concept of religion, but narrows the idea of science as something sacrosanct (ironically).
There is a belief that the scientific methodology will lead to truth. This is the same as any other religion who is steeped in ceremonial practices. The issue of how practically applicable and successful at producing models, science has been, is incidental. As a religion, the concepts fit together nicely.
> There is a belief that the scientific methodology will lead to truth.
Except scientists themselves do not espouse such belief. They know what they know, and also they know what they don't know; the scientific methology, too, is also based on knowledge; there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
When a scientist puts forward a hypothesis, which is not, strictly speaking, knowledge (yet), it does not mean that they "believe" in it, either; it's remains just that - a hypothesis, which gets thrown away as soon as it is disproven.
One could argue that knowledge requires some kind of faith - you have to believe that you know something (while in reality you may or may not); but much of the knowlege we possess is "hard knowledge" - the kind that prevents us from taking actions that would definitely hurt us, for example; scientific knowledge is just as "hard," and so is the scientific method.
> Except scientists themselves do not espouse such belief.
Every religion has members who know what they know.
> there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
There is a belief that the scientific method is optimal for discovering truth. How well it works, is not relevant to the fact that it's a practice. This isn't complicated or doublespeak.
Huh, "religious" people also like give plenty of evidence before they burn/shun/deplatform anyone. Evidence can be a thing whatever mob tries to enforce. Main thing is people look evidence in support and not contrary to their beliefs.
This is a crappy hot take. Monetary and labor contributions to religious endeavors are way down and have been for a while. I understand the desire to call any strongly held organized belief 'religion' but you're misrepresenting most of human history when you do so.
This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird. I have the right to judge your statements just as much as you have a right to say them. I have the right to leave jobs when it turns out the people working there hate people like me, and companies have the right to hire people who aren't going to alienate future potential employees.
When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes. People aren't getting fired for picking nomad over kubernetes. People are getting called out for denying the existence of people who aren't like them. When someone gets fired for, as an example, purposefully misgendering their colleagues- that isn't getting fired for having a bad opinion, that's being fired for making a hostile work environment.
What's always interesting to me is that these "free speech absolutists" are explicitly calling out the left here, when the right is the one passing "don't say gay" legislation and refusing to allow trans children the healthcare needed to save their lives. The right is also kicking everyone out of their party who doesn't bow before Trump. To say that the left is creating heresies while ignoring that the right is literally creating new dogma is just delusional to me.
Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept. Does that make for a hostile work environment or "deny the existence" of anyone? I submit to you that the answer is no, except for die-hard adherents of the new ideology. Well, that simply isn't my religion, and I resent attempts to force it on me.
> Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept. Does that make for a hostile work environment or "deny the existence" of anyone? I submit to you that the answer is no, except for die-hard adherents of the new ideology. Well, that simply isn't my religion, and I resent attempts to force it on me.
Here's the question:
Are you tolerant of people who do? Or do you make the lives of those people (who viscerally feel their gender identity to be true) more difficult than those who share your belief?
The latter is a fairly broad concept with multiple shades and blurry lines within. Which is why people with good intentions can still disagree badly on whether something someone did was okay or not.
Has GP crossed the line merely by expressing his/her/their opinion? This probably depends on his/her/their social status as well. The CEO of a company saying something in an official meeting carries a different weight for all employees than some random employee saying the same thing.
Or does GP need to say or do something personal to someone in order to be considered to have crossed the line? Be careful there: add too many constraints and we will end up giving a free pass to people who genuinely offend and cause serious discomfort to those around them.
These are the kinds of issues about which we as a society need to have reasonable discussions and make consensus-building efforts, but it all descends into name-calling too soon.
you wouldn't consider it "positive affirmation" of most people to simply accept the name and gender they provide, it is simply the bare minimum for normal interaction.
why do you consider it beyond reasonable accommodation for some people? do you think you know some deeper truth about these other people than they know about themselves? why do you think you can reliably identify that case? couldn't you simply leave them alone, and not make a big deal out of it?
if you think it doesn't matter, prove it. refuse to recognize anyone's identity. start misgendering and misnaming people you wouldn't do that to before. see how far that gets you.
> do you think you know some deeper truth about these other people than they know about themselves? why do you think you can reliably identify that case?
I think the debate is less about what someone's inner life is like, and more about whether gender words (like man, woman etc) refer to inner feelings or to someone's physical sex. Historically they have been used to refer to both, and many people. use their own gender label to refer to their physical sex rather than any inner feelings.
> You don't get to decide for other people who or what they are.
Yeah, but neither do they. There is such a thing as objective truth. I have no right to be treated as four-legged, because I do not have four legs. Neither can I claim a right to be treated as the Queen of Englang, because I am not the queen of England. Nor do I have a right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex because I am not in fact a member of the opposite sex.
I agree with this, but I do think that there is a genuine debate to had about:
1. Whether people of different sexes ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
2. Whether people of different gender identities ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
My own view is that in the vast majority of cases we shouldn't be treating people differently on the basis of either sex or gender identity, and that identity-based gender and sex-based gender are about as bad as each other!
In many normal circumstances, I am entitled to disagree with people about who or what they are.
Someone might think they're charming, and I might find them a great bore.
It's obvious in this example that equivocating that with deciding for that person, anything at all, is asinine.
Most social settings, and all professional ones, require that I be more polite to this "charming" person than I would otherwise be inclined to, given my own feelings on that subject.
It does not really matter what your stance on that topic is. If your co-workers don't what to be called a certain way, just respect that. E.g. I don't want to be called by my full first name but rather a short version of it. If you deliberately disrespect my request that is simply hostile.
I have taken to referring to everyone as "they". It's much easier than trying to remember individual pronouns for everyone. It doesn't really seem reasonable to me for people to be bothered by this. Your view is that people must refer to your gender when speaking about you?
It doesn’t seem reasonable to me for people to get offended if I use the pronouns that best match the gender presentation I see. This is what English speakers have been doing since there have been English speakers.
But there are people out there that tell me it is bothersome. Out of respect, I modify how I speak and write. Why shouldn’t I get the same courtesy?
>> I have taken to referring to everyone as "they". It's much easier than trying to remember individual pronouns for everyone. It doesn't really seem reasonable to me for people to be bothered by this. Your view is that people must refer to your gender when speaking about you?
What is the point of specifying pronouns then? Isn't this just a lazy form of misgendering?
Instead of using someone's name you could just refer to everyone as "Hey You", but that seems discourteous and disrespectful. Why not just use their preferred name and pronouns?
When used as a singular it’s the pronoun for people that identify as non binary. You are absolutely misgendering people but you get a free pass because contra fosefx this whole pronoun thing is about power and who has it, rather than universal respect.
But I am not an unknown person. If you know who I am and you’ve had an opportunity to see my preferred pronouns but choose to disregard those preferences you’ve misgendered me the same as if you’d referred to a transwomen as he.
> you’ve misgendered me the same as if you’d referred to a transwomen as he.
I think it's more analogous to referring to a transwoman as "they", which I also do. "They" does not gender you at all, so it can't misgender you. I don't think you (or anyone else be they cisgender or transgender) have a right be referred to by your gender, whether you prefer it or not. I think that's different to be referred to by a gender you consider worng. In that case someone is actively labelling you as a gender. By calling you "they" I'm saying I think you're genderless, whereas by calling someone "he" I think you are saying you think they're male.
If you had a strong preference to be referred to by your gender then I probably would make an effort to do that, but I don't think you are owed that (to be honest I wish trans people weren't so hung up on pronouns too - I think it's silly to be so fussy about language - but I have seen cases where they're used maliciously so I can somewhat understand why they are).
I'm saying I think you're genderless, whereas by calling someone "he" I think you are saying you think they're male.
Right. As it turns out, I identify as male not genderless. But this is not something you are obligated to honor under threat of being fired for some reason.
>> this whole pronoun thing is about power and who has it, rather than universal respect.
That is my point.
If I provide my name and preferred pronouns, if you respect me and my wishes, why not use my name and preferred pronouns when addressing me or referring to me?
Using "they" when I don't want it as a pronoun is misgendering.
transphobic people transphobic people would bring up to support their ideology
No one has said anything about trans people, we were talking Gen z butchering the English language. Also, is it a disorder (“phobic”) or an ideology? Or do you not understand that distinction either?
I think my point is more that there are tons of various requirements that people have that are at best unreasonable and as a society we don't indulge every request that people make. One day someone comes in and says I must now refer to them as xe or emself after years of knowing them without mistake is not reasonable. I still refer to lots of women as their maiden names because that how I remember them. It isnt out of meanness or vitriol. That is just the label my brain still applies to them because I knew them for many years as that.
I dont care if you are male or female or whatever you want to be. I just want everyone to be happy to the extent they can be, but be tolerant of those who remember you as you were to them as well. It isnt just a switch you can turn off instantly.
> One day someone comes in and says I must now refer to them as xe or emself after years of knowing them without mistake is not reasonable.
This seems to be a common fear, but it’s not rooted in reality. As long as you make a good faith effort, no one is going to get mad at you for messing up their pronouns. You might get corrected; just apologize and move on. It’s not a big deal.
If someone suspects you’re messing up in bad faith, they might be harsher with you. Which is, I think, entirely reasonable.
Maybe you have friends who wrongly assume bad faith when you mess up. I’ve never seen that happen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t! You could have some shitty friends who don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. But comments like that “your highness” hypothetical really aren’t doing you any favors.
(People on Twitter probably assume drive-by repliers are speaking in bad faith by default; that is, unfortunately, just a feature of the Internet)
So, your new colleague says their name is Richard. You decide it’s hilarious to call him “dick” and refuse to stop even after he’s asked you multiple times.
Pronouns aren’t any different - if you had a masculine looking female coworker at work - say she was into bodybuilding - and you keeping calling her “he” as a “joke”… persisting when you were asked not to, by your boss, by hr perhaps even. What kind of person are you being here?
You can not believe in gender identity, I don’t care. But be respectful to your colleagues at work. Is that so much to ask for? To literally not be as asshole? Is that what you’re defending - your right to be a flaming asshole to your coworkers without any consequence??
You've picked the worst interpretation of the above. Addressing people how they'd like to be addressed is basic decency. Demands for affirmation beyond this is how I read the comment you're replying to.
The poster perhaps should have noted how they intended on treating their coworkers. Instead we are left to infer that their intent was to lean into their ideology against basic decency.
And in the end this is what the “culture wars” are about: the right to not be decent to certain people.
I think the problem is more in people automatically assuming the worst possible interpretation of any remark as soon as it is about race/religion/gender.
what do you do when you are asked to respect someone else's choice of gender identity? do you go along with it, while quietly keeping your own opinion? or do you complain and purposefully ignore their request? or maybe do something else entirely? how do you keep a friendly work environment when the mere questioning of someones gender identity can be considered hostile?
you ask that your rejection of the idea is considered not hostile, yet you consider the enforcement of rules of interaction as something hostile.
Often you can see the religion, or at least the outward sign. This is the basis for laws about large-scale religious display such as head scarves, turbans, ... It seems that groups of people don't like seeing differences no matter what they are.
I know people who thinks like you, but they don't shut the fuck about these things, and take every possible the opportunity to proselytise about it.
I've seen it happening in workplaces, for example. But also parties, random people on the street.
Not shutting the fuck about it is fucking annoying and if it's in the workplace I'll be complaining the fuck about it until you stop and/or looking for another job.
Now, I'm a 100% neutral part on this, and even me don't wanna hear about your bullshit. Imagine now if you were to use this to actively hurt people.
> Here's one: I don't believe that gender identity is a valid concept
One funny thing I learned from studying high demand religions: you don't have to believe something for it to be true. It's existence is entirely orthogonal to a person's opinion.
I think Graham's essay conflates two phenomenon when he describes heresy as thought that people equate to a crime. In fairness to him, societies have conflated them also. But if we're talking about modern American society, they are fundamentally different but can smell the same to somebody who doesn't see the distinction.
A heresy is a position that damages trust. When someone publicly espouses a heretical position, they damage other people's trust in them to make good decisions and have good judgment. Now, you can also breach trust via committing a crime, so the overlap is clear. But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked. Somebody who says women don't belong in space is going to end up as unqualified to be director of NASA as somebody who fundamentally and with great conviction mis-states the tyranny of the rocket equation. Both mark the person as a poor fit for a high-trust job were there opinion on those topics matters.
And people who believe themselves against "canceling" seem to often be in agreement even if they don't realize it of themselves. A talk was famously pulled from a security conference several years back because after the talk, people concluded that the speaker didn't know what they were talking about. The difference in opinion is on what constitutes a breach of trust, not on whether people can respond to such breaches by routing around other people.
>> nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked.
That's because no trials are held in modern mob justice for heretics. The mob justice punishments are more like lynchings.
Medieval heretics could at least expect a "witch hunt"-style trial. The monarchy or church was the authority and there was a semblance of rule of law.
Modern heretics face mob justice by self-appointed vigilantes and mob justice punishments. The lack of due process is concerning.
“But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions.”
This is not true. You don’t have to look hard for examples of people being jailed in the US for holding unorthodox positions.
Defining heresy as “a position they damages trust,” implies that an accused heretic is at fault for believing something that “damages trust.” That is entirely subjective relative to the one whose trust was damaged.
Society has claimed heresy to suppress political and religious opponents since the beginning of human history. We have also shown a track record of being very wrong with regard to how we define heresy in the past.
Why should we believe that we are any better than our ancestors on this front?
>This is not true. You don’t have to look hard for examples of people being jailed in the US for holding unorthodox positions.
This rings alarm bells for me. Could you give an example of someone jailed in the US for the mere holding of an unorthodox position, rather than a concrete action, in the last, say, 30 years?
Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone? I see this expression often, but I'm genuinely puzzled by what it means in practice.
I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, how criminal transgenders should be incarcerated, or whether affirmative action is a good way to help disadvantaged people.
>I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that.
I do think the article is about that. I think it was purposefully left vague so he could take advantage of people giving the benefit of the doubt. I don't think people's pronouns should be up for debate, and I believe PG does.
In case anyone is genuinely confused: this is the kind of bigotry people expect to get away with sans consequence, and complain about “heresy” when they’re called out on it.
Somewhere in the last 10 years a norm emerged that transgender identity is sacrosanct and its doubters are bigots, but transracial identity is a lie and people like Rachel Dolezal are frauds.
GP's brusque language aside, can there be any amount of uncertainty on either of these points? Doesn't it seem a bit arbitrary that these two new norms are opposite to each other?
Even though gender and race are both social inventions, they’re not really interchangeable like that.
To cite one example: race is considered heritable, and there have historically been harsh consequences of that lineage. In the US, the one-drop rule ensured that anyone with even a single Black ancestor would be subject to the legal discrimination that status entailed (this is called “hypodescent”). So the idea of someone saying “I identify as Black” is… fraught, to say the least.
You're simply using a completely different concept of gender to this person. I'd argue that not only do you both have reasonable points of view, your assertions don't actually conflict! You can both be correct.
I don't think it is reasonable for you to hold that your definition of gender is the only correct one.
Society deems it so? If you were of the opinion you were a cat the diagnosis would be that you are delusional.
Still, if there is no other negative effects, then accepting them as a different gender seems like a simple way to ‘heal’ the condition. Certainly in the absence of a way to fix it in the other direction.
I don’t think a lot of people would be well served by accepting that someone is a cat.
It is not compassion to lie to people and pretend they are what they are not.
Gender dysphoria is real, social contagion is real, and we shouldn't accept or embrace a self-destructive ideology that radically derails the lives of teenagers and younger.
Adults can behave however they want, but it should be considered child abuse to foster transgenderism and transsexuality in minors.
If people don't perceive your actions as kind, can they actually be said to be kind?
We observe much worse acute and long term outcomes, across a variety of dimensions, when transgender people are not permitted to transition.
Homophobes insist that they are telling "the truth" when they insist that all gay people are going to hell and that marriage should not be allowed for gay people. Racists insist that they are telling "the truth" when they insist that black people are simply more violent than white people and that black people should be treated differently by the justice system. Sexists insist that they are telling "the truth' when they insist that women are not capable of holding positions of leadership in business or politics and that their role is only to raise children.
I see no reason why transphobia would be different.
I don't think any of those examples are good analogies. None of those involve 'pretending to believe obvious lies' or self-mutilation.
The harm of social transition is relatively minor and easily reversible. It's not as concerning, but it still perpetuates the phenomenon as 'tolerable'.
The harm of physical transition is permanent and devastating. We should consider the precautionary principle when engaging in irreversible actions.
Puberty blockers, sex hormones, mastectomies, and the rest are not compassionate treatments for dysphoric youths, but children are being fast-tracked into these decisions without much thought for how likely they'll be to regret it. Certainly many do, and it's an awful tragedy.
As all humans have before two seconds ago, we should let children grow into their bodies, and then they can make better-informed decisions as adults.
My main point being: this stuff is absolutely unacceptable for children, and adults are free to behave however they want, but I won't 'accept' it or go along with it.
And I do think they are perfect analogies. I see zero of your concerns as any more valid than the ones in my post. The same "social contagion" arguments were used against gay people, women, and black people, to the same harmful effects.
I'm asking you to be kind. I hope you understand why people perceive you as unkind.
Your argument sounds like 'these ideas are wrong so yours is wrong too' without contending with the content of my arguments and examples.
I'm totally willing to be kind and treat other people with respect. Never claimed otherwise.
But I also hope people see the errors of their ways, how harmful it can be, and to not try to indulge children and teenagers who get caught up in it. Leave the kids alone.
There are ample other spaces where people have contended with your precise arguments. I am not saying that you are wrong because these other people are wrong. I am saying that, after evaluating your viewpoint, I find it to be equally as wrong as these other viewpoints.
A large number of transgender people will find your viewpoint to be fundamentally disrespectful. It will not be possible for you to come across as respectful, no matter how much you insist on it. This is why I ask you to consider how the recipients of your words experience them as a better judge of whether you are behaving kindly.
You can believe that gender is irrelevant and only sex matters, but you should still make an effort to be polite and nice to your coworkers - for example call them by the name they go for even if it is different from the one on their ID, use the pronouns that they prefer, etc.
Of course, like all things related to politeness, there is no absolute rule - if I change my pronouns every week I shouldn't expect people to keep up. But it should not be surprising that you can be fired for not making a minimal effort to be nice to your colleagues.
> Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone?
Here's an example:
"There's no such thing as a trans person. Trans is not a real thing, it's a mental illness and a delusion that needs to be cured. "
If you hear that and you are trans, then you are bound to feel like someone is denying you actually exist. Its a strange feeling that someone whose existence has always been validated by society cannot really relate to. I imagine that's why you are puzzled by its meaning.
I mean that hypothetical argument doesn't really make sense. Are mental illnesses not real ? And shouldn't we try to cure these people, in the most extreme cases by sex change surgery + hormone therapy ? (Or what kind of cure would that be ?)
(Is it more about denying trans people's suffering perhaps ?)
I guess that this dismissal of mental illness (and here also of trans people) also comes from equating "anormal" with "bad". At least I can see where the conservatives are coming from with this, but I have much more trouble to understand it when progressives fall into this trap !
Just replace trans with gay. We've been through this whole thing before, and the only reason we are having this debate about trans people at all is because conservatives have so thoroughly lost the culture debate over gay rights, yet the animus that motivated the debate persists.
But back then we heard all the same things. "Oh, we can't have gay men teaching young boys because they are sexual predators and they are trying to recruit our young children to be gay." Or that "being gay is a mental disorder that needs to be cleansed through re-education".
It's just striking to me how similar the arguments are, right down to the legislating intimate space use like bathrooms and locker rooms, and the moral panic over children (who are yet again being used as moral shields). It used to be you couldn't even be gay in the military. Now they let gays in and it turned out to be not a big deal at all. But without missing a beat they've recycled the same baseless arguments but crossed out "gay" and filled in "trans", seemingly without any recognition or reflection about how badly their anti-gay arguments aged.
Yet the situation is radically different, since trans, in addition to having "social issues", also have "body issues" ?
(Then there's also the situation with (real) pedophiles, which, unlike for gays, we have decided to keep in the mental illness category - and understandably so, considering the danger for children.)
Interesting - I would never knowingly refer to someone by pronouns other than those which correspond with their birth sex, it would violate my conscience to do so. Obviously not a majority position in SV but also not an extremely rare position to hold in the world more largely. I suppose that means you would fire me and others of the same opinion if you had the chance.
I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.
Does the right have hold of corporate culture however?
I think the issue is the consequences of speech which are permissible themselves -- I think being shunned by a friendship group seems always permissible. Being marginalized in one's workplace, shunned by one's colleges, and so on -- this seems far less permissible.
I dont think this is a strictly left/right issue; and what today is called "left" is rather a kinda of corporate politics --- "corporate correctness" rather than "political correctness". This is about embracing "diversity and equality" of your workplace identities (vs., diversity of skills; and equality of treatment, for example).
I'd imagine if work/life were better seperated, and the workplace better managed, these issues would be felt less seriously.
The question of "free speech" is a massive red-hearing. Everyone accepts some concequences to some speech in some situtations. The only useful conversation to have is: what concequences are permissible, and when.
Presumably, likewise, no one believes abitary ones, whenever -- yet this seems to be the implied position of many who think you can just stop the argument at the point where some "anarchism of speech" is shown to fail. Nope.
I think it's ridiculous to think the left has hold of corporate culture. I think a lot of different companies have a lot of different cultures, and I think for the majority of companies the right holds power. I think that tech companies are a major exception to this, in part because it seems that a much larger percentage of queer people are in tech (both directly and indirectly, via companies that support tech)- but if you pick any random company in the US you're going to find a fairly conservative culture.
The only reason I brought up left versus right was because that's the reductionism PG resorted to here. I also think it's a bit more nuanced. I also think focusing on this being a free speech issue, as PG does, is a red herring for other cultural issues.
Yes, which is why i say "corporate correcntess" isnt actually leftwing. But I do think many self-describing "leftwing" people are actually, in this sense, just peddling a certain corporate respectability ideology. Their upper-middle class concerns of who's who in the elite culture, is more-or-less just using the trappings of leftwing thought to beat a path to the top. And corporations gladly play the same game as a branding exercise, today ran by the same upper-middle who delusionally think their use of "diversity" corresponds to something actually morally significant.
As far as where this culture is present, at least: tech, academia, etc. Ie., the places where we do see this counter-reaction. Though the counter-reaction is dressed in the language of free speech -- I think its more just about the capture of corporate policy, in these industries, by a certain descendent of political correctness.
People have to turn up to work in these industries, or otherwise participate in them, whilst holding their nose at this mawkish soapboxing display of which rich idiot is "changing the world" all the while those who are repulsed by this are ever-more seen as inherently immoral for not singing from the same hymm sheet.
If we recast this whole issue as one where previously political activity has spilled over into most areas of life, such that many now cannot espcae it --- then we see what the problem is.
It isnt free speech. Its the lack of quiet places. It's that if you want to work in these areas, you're bombarded with the loud noises of loud opinions that you can't escape.
> When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes.
There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.
See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.
> See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
Is this really a topic you needed to weigh in on? I’m assuming you weren’t concern trolling or playing devil’s advocate, but it’s very easy to imagine how a “gentle challenge” might get interpreted as such if your relationship with the other person doesn’t generally include similar discussion topics.
Right, I'm not claiming it's ~cancel culture~, it is however anti-heretic behavior. See other comment; she's a professor and aspiring public intellectual. This combination of "I'm an authority so you have to listen to me" and "you can't challenge my beliefs because it's oppression" is a recipe for bad thinking.
She's a professor and aims to be a public intellectual; she's written a book. I really think this in and of itself is invitation for dialogue. Also, our relationship was been fine talking about politics when I agreed with her, but any disagreement was treated as hostile/moral failure on my part. I'm really pretty good at listening and being respectful; these sorts of failure modes in communication in my life have come exclusively with dedicated self-identified activists.
I don't think you can't really blame someone for that when their activism is a core part of their identity. People wouldn't become activists if they weren't deeply affected by these things. It's not their prerogative to (in their view) waste time with people who are just going to argue and push in the other direction. That's my experience from talking to a lot of activists, anyway. They have to be very careful to pick their battles.
Someone can be affected by things and still end up with false beliefs. It’s possible to still be kind to someone and argue a belief they hold is wrong.
What’s true can be in conflict with deeply held beliefs (and often is). Part of the core issue is when one side won’t engage in actual discussion of the content and only argues at the meta level about identity.
I think roflc0ptic’s examples are good ones - thankfully it seems the discourse around this kind of stuff is shifting back to being more moderate.
You're absolutely correct, but that still isn't helpful to someone who is already committed to being a single-issue activist. You're taking completely the wrong angle. You have to address the why and not the belief itself.
Edit: It's not particularly important or relevant to what's been said here if you see the mainstream discourse as shifting to being "more moderate". This is a given with any single-issue activist, it's your business if you deal in organizing activists. The shift to being moderate only happens through this process, there's no other process.
If you don't concern yourself with organizing activists, then this isn't your wheelhouse, and I don't see why it was brought up.
Ah I understand - you’re commenting more on strategy around being able to get through to someone when a core value is in conflict with what may be true.
Yeah, on that I agree - requires more deft communication skills. I think you can still “blame them” for holding false beliefs though (or phrased differently not give them a free pass on dogma) while still understanding it’s going to be an emotional thing for them, but this sounds like it might be us just disputing definitions over “blame” and we mostly agree.
> It's not their prerogative to (in their view) waste time with people who are just going to argue and push in the other direction
I think this is a good point. An issue that coexists with this is that activist circles here in the 20x0s, of which I have been both a part and adjacent to, are in general not open to evaluating the truth value of their beliefs under any circumstances, not even around questions like "is this tactically/rhetorically an effective strategy?". There's also a related issue where basically their only tool for communicating across difference is opprobrium. You can see this laid out persuasively in this (uncommonly good) quilette article: https://quillette.com/2021/01/17/three-plane-rides-and-the-q...
What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion. And sure, there was a combative element to the civil rights movement - we're on the bus, you can't fucking ignore us - but it was coupled with cogence and reason. I'm pretty sure microaggressions exist, and also think they're a toxic framework for evaluating the world.
>What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing a culture where people make their activism an immutable part of their identity because it's all they know and they have no reason to pursue outside perspectives; if you're in a marginalized group it can be very easy to end up in a situation where there's nobody to look out for you besides yourself. This is not a new happening in any way shape or form, from my knowledge it's been this way for as long as there's been free societies that allowed protesting. This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
Can there toxic social pressure in activist spaces? Absolutely, but that can be present in any social group where there are leaders and followers. That also isn't new in any way at all. I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
> I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
less of this please.
> This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
> >What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
>No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing
If you take the "don't listen to other people because you don't know who to trust" knob and turn it way up, you get to "listen only to people who agree with me", turn it farther "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy." I _don't_ think this was the dynamic in the mainstream civil rights movement, but even if it was it wasn't the rhetorical tactic outside of the black panther/WUG fringe. I _do_ think it's the dynamic/rhetorical strategy in the current activist milieu which has bled into the broader world.
You're right to say this, sorry I just legitimately can't understand how you could be extrapolating this if you had actually seen a lot of the high profile stuff that happened on e.g. facebook in the last decade. There's just so much unreasonable behavior and tribal "us vs them" attitudes coming from all sides at all times. I've seen lots of people do like you're doing now trying to blame this on "activists" for no real reason when to me it's every group doing it constantly all the time, even the ones that you would think would be relatively reserved. I honestly think you might be in a activist bubble and you need to get out from it, I can't understand why you would be otherwise focusing so much on the tactics of some "activist milieu".
I'm very confused as to why you're suggesting that people being disagreeable or unreasonable is a thing that is specific to "the current moment" or is specific to any one political identity. But please correct me if I misunderstood.
Edit: Another response brought up a good point. Your pushing back on body image issues seems pretty tone deaf. Those are pretty personal and the point there is that it doesn't help to shame people for being overweight. Nobody responds well to that, it usually just causes hurt feelings. You can still promote healthy lifestyles without making it about "anti-fatness".
I personally think I owe it to other people to object when they promote ideas that seem clearly false to me.
I could be mistaken about their idea's falsity, or they could be mistaken about its truth, but we'll never get closer to knowing if I don't engage.
Obviously I also owe them kindness and respect.
If they choose to interpret a kind, respectful disagreement as oppression or violence against them, they're hurting themselves.
In a mildly-related vein, it took me a long time to be able to recognize personal criticisms as a gift from the critic, and I'm still working on it, but the basics of that mindset shift seem to be settling in at this point. When someone tells me what they really think of me and my actions, they're engaging with me and giving me a chance to understand them a little better. I strive to be grateful for that even when the delivery is rude or hurts my feelings.
Genuine rejection and harm to others looks like physically injuring them, verbally abusing them, or barring them from societal spaces and services.
Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
>Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
Sure, same for combat vets. It still incumbent on them (and everyone else) to reality test their beliefs. Creating social conditions where people say unreasonable things and the only acceptable response is to say nothing and think to ourselves, "it's okay, she's a woman/black/whatever" seems bad to me. I don't think it helps anyone.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
You make interesting points but mix it in with shitpost stuff. Would be great if you chilled on that
I don't understand why you think that's a shitpost. Or rather, if it is, everything else is here so who cares? Look at the rest of the replies in this comment thread. It's true, isn't it? I actually can't read pg articles without looking at them through this lens, they otherwise make no sense to me and there is no other reason for them to be posted here and gain 800 replies when they're also filled with the same baseless posturing you would probably refer to as shitposty. He would just be another anonymous nobody with a blog and a chip on the shoulder. I'm only saying this because these sentiments ("You can't say everything you possibly could ever want to say around persons A and B because they'll get offended and mad and not want to talk to you anymore, isn't that terrible") are so old and tired at this point, but for some reason we seem to be giving them a pass here and I would guess it's only because pg said them and he is a Famous Person. I'm sorry if that seems blunt but is that not what you asked for? I'm saying what I really think.
To me it's like, look, do you really want to go to work with someone who says things like "you are ugly" and "you are stupid" and "your mother is a whore" to everyone every day? I know people who would do that even in professional settings, it's just as bad as you'd think. It's not declaring "heresy" when they get fired because nobody wants to deal with that every day. Pg is of course entitled to his own opinion of what he wants on his startup incubator and forum, which is why there's moderation on this site and why he has kicked people out of YC before for literally just saying things. It's not enacting "heresy" when you ban somebody from YC or hacker news for saying stupid and callous things! So why the double standard? That's why this whole comment thread and article is just absurd to me, I'm so saddened that so many people are actually commenting on this.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that.
I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respect you."
Obviously you can tell people when you think they're wrong without them trusting or respecting you, but you're clearly right that it may not have many useful results in that case.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here...
I have a slight bias against pg.
His earliest essays I enjoyed, but his writing in the past ten or fifteen years strikes me as suffering from the blindness induced by being rich and myopically focused on startups and technological advances, with the apparent assumption that those things must be inherently good.
If I happen to agree with him on this particular point, it's not because I'm inclined to like his stances by default.
> There are plenty of examples [...] e.g. David Schor
I think it's rather the opposite. There are, to be sure, tragedies and abuses of woke rhetoric that gets directed at the wrong people and/or implemented in outrageous ways. But they're pretty rare, and generally get a ton of media coverage for exactly that reason. Those are what PG is writing about.
But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people entering this kind of argument are actually just wanting more cover to say things they used to say that are... well, kinda off. Not "lose your job" off, but casually "x-ist" in a way that most of us would prefer not to engage with.
And really, that's the rub here, and the biggest problem with PG's essay here. Where are the examples? If there's something you want to say but feel you can't, then say it. This is a reasonably anonymous forum. PG is reasonably immune to that kind of criticism. But the problem is that when you say it the debate becomes a debate about your opinions and not your oppression, and that's ground these folks won't win on, like this one:
> I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric
You literally had a friend walk out of your life because you couldn't respect her boundaries about something as senselessly unobjective as body image, and the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one?
Want to note that you're putting words into my mouth:
> the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one
I never said I was oppressed. You've invented that whole cloth.
If you find yourself thinking "they're just using this for cover to say bad things", consider that in the context of you abjectly misreading/inventing details to what I'm saying here. If you fill in details that match your own negative biases and then say "wow, these people really live up to my negative biases," you're not evaluating evidence, you're just testing your own beliefs against your projections of your own beliefs. Certainly looks like what you're doing here.
I don’t think people want to say bad things without consequence. They want to be able to discuss a topic without the rabid tone police descending on it.
Like, I say I cannot understand trans people at all, and people will jump on me because I’m rejecting them and making them feel bad, when I’m just stating a fact.
“I don’t understand it but I’ll trust their feelings and the recommendations of their doctor” is very different from “I don’t understand it so I’ll call them mentally ill, misgender them, or insist that legislation prevent access to medical care”.
I've seen more than a few posts where people have said "I really don't get this whole issue, but live and let live" and haven't been descended upon, that's just anecdata though.
On one hand, you're right. The nuance is sometimes lost. On the other hand, think about what we're talking about: a political party is trying to erase the existence of a class of people, and they are wielding the power of the state to do so, especially in places where there's one party control and no hope of electing any opposing party.
When you say "I don't understand trans people", trans people have heard this many times before. Unfortunately for you, many people who have said this phrase before followed it up with "...and therefore I hate them. I will legislate against them; I will pass laws against their existence in public space; I will demonize them; I will jail them; I will murder them."
Those are the stakes, so the pushback is in proportional to the life and death nature of what's going on here. When you say "I don't understand trans people" they are expecting you to follow it up with more of the same. And I get that's not great for the general public's understanding of trans people. But understand that it's a reaction to years and year of abuse from other people who also proclaim that they "don't understand."
Your general confusion is being received in an environment where people are literally fighting for their lives. Maybe in a different time, when people aren't facing down the vast power of the state to dictate their existence, there would be more room to treat you gentler. But the pressure has been ratcheted up to 11 by powerful forces bent on a 21st century new moral panic, and that's not the fault of trans people and their defenders, but the people who are trying to make their lives hell for no reason other than intolerance.
I didn't say anything about genocide, I said they are facing down politicians in state legislatures who are passing laws that deny the rights of trans people to exist in public places and to participate in public life. These lawmakers use rhetoric that does indeed question the very existence of the concept of a transgendered person. They deny that these people exist, and claim they are in fact mentally ill and not trans at all. If republicans had their way it would be illegal to be trans. That's the erasure of a class of people, but it's not genocide, I wouldn't go that far.
Perhaps replacing "trans" with "black", "Jew", "Muslim" or any other marginalized minority group, would help you understand why such blanket "I cannot understand X at all" causes people to object?
I don't think that's fair. Nobody is debating what it means to be black, jewish or muslim. People's attitudes to people who are those things vary, but for the most part everybody is in agreement about which people are black, which people are Jewish, etc.
On the other hand, there is no such agreement around gender. People are using terms such as "gender", "man" and "woman" to refer to vastly different concepts ranging from "how someone subjectively feels inside" to "what physiological traits someone has" to "how someone is treated by society".
To the extent that not understanding someone comes from not understanding how they personally define gender and how that fits with how other people are using the same term, it seems quite reasonable to be confused.
No - there's very much active disagreement on which people are black (colorism in general in the black community is alive and well) and who thinks you are a jew might change a good bit if you ask the local white supremacist or a rabbi.
Just because "I know it when I see it" applies to your personal lens its an inarticulate way of viewing the world.
Right, but when we discuss racism we're not discussing who is black or not black with the proviso that "of course it's fine to treat them badly if they're actually black", whereas it is commonly accepted by people on all sides of the gender debate that people should be treated differently on the basis of their gender.
> Nobody is debating what it means to be black, jewish or muslim. People's attitudes to people who are those things vary, but for the most part everybody is in agreement about which people are black, which people are Jewish, etc.
If this is the case, it’s only the case in the most vanishingly contemporary moment of ours. Both the Holocaust and the American system of chattel slavery were fundamentally predicated on questions of identity (“one drop”). Both moments also fundamentally shifted how and when people consider themselves Black or Jewish, because they are aware that others might consider them so for the purposes of persecution.
What I see as different here is that people on both sides of the gender debate seem to see differential treatment of "men" and "women" as just. The primary argument is over which people belong in which group. This is different to at least a modern take on slavery where we're usually less concerned with people being mislabelled as black and more concerned with the mistreatment of those who were labelled as black.
Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
> What I see as different here is that people on both sides of the gender debate seem to see differential treatment of "men" and "women" as just.
I think this needs qualification: I don't think that treatment of individuals on the basis of gender (or sex) is just in the abstract, but I do think there are social policies that are inequal in scope that are justifiable on the basis of making all individuals more equal.
> Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think a lot of people agree with this! The tension is again in scope: the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
> I think this needs qualification: I don't think that treatment of individuals on the basis of gender (or sex) is just in the abstract, but I do think there are social policies that are inequal in scope that are justifiable on the basis of making all individuals more equal.
I pretty much agree with that. But I think that most people are thinking about rights being as assigned to gender in the abstract. It seems to me that the reason there's so much fuss about statements like "trans women are women" is because the assumption is that "women's rights" are assigned to women in the abstract, and that who gets them is therefore determined by who counts as a woman.
> the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
That's only true if you accept that cisgender men won't want to act in ways that we associate with trans or cis women (e.g. wearing dresses or make up (and if you define gender in terms of identity then you could even include making changes to their bodies here)). And IMO that assumption is pretty sexist. I also think that there is a tendency to assume that such men are trans women, but identity doesn't work like that, and if we want to talk about assigned-gender-non-conforming people in general then we should talk them instead of trans people. I guess I don't really accept that that trans women are under more pressure to behave in certain ways than cisgender men are. But if you have a good argument as to why you think they are, then I'd be interested to hear it.
XKCD386-- there is a LOT of dispute over who is White/Black, particularly as its become popular in some circles to define racism as something which can only happen to black people. And thus a discriminatory policy against asians isn't racist to those adopting that definition when they conclude that asians are "white".
The same kind of postmodernist thinking that is comfortable redefining well understood biological terms like "male" and "female" to be about "not doing the dishes" or "liking climbing trees" instead of generally unambiguous biological properties is just as comfortable deciding that you're "white" on the basis of not wanting to extend the protection of anti-discrimination laws and norms to you.
Seems like a weird thing to say. I don't understand FORTRAN at all and as such I stay away from people discussing it.
Why do you want to tell trans people that you don't understand them? Wouldn't it be easier to read some literature so you can gain a basic understanding?
Take this statement: "all trans people are misgendering themselves and _should_ conform to the gender assigned to them based on the sexual organs they had at birth".
This effectively denies the existence of people who believe or desire to be their non-assigned gender. The statement tells trans people that in the eyes of the speaker, their personal identity is a fabrication.
I've read comments on articles about LGBT issues (often trans topics these days), and there are a lot of people that say things like "Being gay is a choice".
If that's not denying the existence of a different kind of person to you, I don't know what is.
>This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence
People say horrible things all the time! In fact, I reckon that if you said anything, a non-negligible fraction of the world's 7.5 billion people would think you horrible for saying it. It is not possible to avoid saying horrible things, especially out of context.
Even if you limit yourself to racist and sexist speech, how do you deal the fact that roughly 100% of the people on this planet, of ALL races and sexes, are themselves racist and sexist, and say racist/sexist things all the time? What are the consequences for a homophobic black person? What are the consequences for the Japanese woman who hates the Chinese? What are the consequences for the Libyan mother who circumcised her 4 daughters, with the support of her government and community?
The culture war that the left has started is an intellectually bankrupt grab for cultural power, who's primary effect has been to piss off the good people of the left, and to inspire a once-in-a-century outbreak of insanity on the right. I get that you want to make the world a better place, and it makes sense that punishing people for wrong views could make it so, but you've done the experiment now. Tell me, how is it going?
* Heresy supporters give themselves a license thinking it is about issues of real racism, sexism, and other real bad problems, but...
* The tools of censorship are then used for normal speech. Proof: Ron Paul had a YouTube channel. He left politics before the covid and no videos had been posted since the pandemic started. But they censored his YouTube channel full of videos by censoring all of the videos and the channel.
* This censorship of the political right happens in a long list of cases that have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or false propaganda. Ron Paul's YouTube channel being censored is one example in a list of thousands just like it.
"This thing where people want to say horrible things without consequence is just so weird."
It's really easy to think/say horrible things. The main defense humans have against it is following orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.
If you think you are naturally good (whatever that means), you are wrong. If you think you are good because of your intellect, you're also wrong. It takes many generations to build up the kind of orthodoxy that keeps humans good. And the lessons behind it are too many to learn in a lifetime.
So, we need to mostly follow orthodoxy, at least in our actions. But that poses an intellectual problem: orthodoxy is imperfect, and to discuss and advance it, or even understand it well, you have to challenge it. If merely by challenging it you transgress, then it will never be understood very well and certainly not advanced.
Granted, there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
Remember: gay marriage was illegal almost everywhere 20 years ago. Imagine the surprise to, say, a 60 year old, that "misgendering" (by using pronouns associated with one's biological sex) might be a firable offense today.
>> orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.
One issue is that there are multiple orthodoxies. Each human culture has its own orthodoxy which is reflected in the culture's norms and practices.
>> there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
When and why is it right or just to judge one culture against another?
We can try to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, but it is very difficult to understand without having lived their lives and experienced it ourselves. Perhaps the best we can do is to be compassionate and tolerant of others who think or live differently than us. We can educate, persuade, and help, but condemning them and punishing them strikes me as unfair and perhaps unjust depending on the circumstances.
1) Whenever people call it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, I ask them if they've read the text of the bill. So far it's like 0-8.
2) I think you're conflating two different groups of people to make your argument sound better. I don't like cancel culture and I don't like the Florida bill either. People aren't just "ignoring" it.
3) > denying the existence of people who aren't like them
This is such a weird, vague statement and I have no idea what it means - which is great because it perfectly captures the mob mentality of the far-left cancel culture. The reason everyone is so afraid of it is because you never know exactly what you can say, and it changes by person by day.
In my professional experience, even "acknowledging the existence" of trans people is a minefield. The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive. Certain people think changes of pronouns should be handled differently and if you disagree with them you eventually get a meeting invite from your supervisor called "Discussion".
> The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive.
I understand the euphemism treadmill can be difficult, but understand why it exists: when people in a group use certain words to self identify, those words are then coopted by outsiders of the group to vilify insiders. Therefore the old self-identifying words are abandoned by insiders and left as markers of those outsiders who are attempting vilify them. Meanwhile new words of self identification are adopted by insiders that have no negative connotation.
Take for instance people with mental disabilities. The words lunatic, insane, retarded, disabled, mentally disabled, special etc. have all been used to describe the same mental state, and have all been at times the "correct" way to refer to such people, and also the "insensitive" way to refer to such people. Calling someone "retarded" used to be clinical. Now you say "retarded" and it's a grave insult.
This is just the price of diversity, and existing in a world where people want to use powerful words to shame and demean. Words have amazing power, and when they are wielded in evil ways you have no other choice but to abandon the word and move to a next one.
This is why the N-word is so forbidden to say; Black Americans took a stand and said: "No more. We are reclaiming the power of this word, and you just can't use it anymore, period." It took a huge movement to make that social change, and it'll take the same similar movement to stop the euphemism treadmill for trans people.
In the meantime, try to keep up. If you make a real effort people notice and they have tolerance for that. However if you make clear that you have no idea why you have to keep up with all these words in the first place, and it's really all just a bother to you that you'd rather not deal with, you're implicitly signaling you're more aligned with someone who may use those words in a harmful way, and that may be why you are met with hostilities.
> The bill would prevent teachers from keeping secrets about children from their parents. It enforces more speech, not less.
If teachers must disclose student confidences to parents, it discourages students in unsafe homes from letting on to their teachers that they’re questioning their sexuality. That’s a chilling effect on speech.
> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.
Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.
The problem is that there are heresies and heresies, and conflating everything together isn't helpful.
To give one extreme of a "heresy": It's reasonable to not want to associate with someone if they're (in your perspective) ideologically reprehensible. In that sense, it was a bit aberrant that in the past most people would look the other way at stuff like racism and antisemitism in academia or the workplace ("none of my business," "not related to their professional skills," etc.)
But when other people think of "heresies" they might be talking about approving of a right-wing policy in a left-wing environment, or (moreso in the past) being labelled "communist," or taking contrary stances on things like wage equality.
So to reiterate my point, the article is flawed and can only lead to noisy nuance-less arguments until it spends more time defining "heresy."
It is the infinite regress of orthodoxy that puts the essay’s rhetoric in jeopardy. I think the essay is internally consistent. American culture has built up an unsolvable Zeno’s paradox that no one seems interested in thinking through because barbarians prefer to live in a state of supernatural ignorance. “All conversation about this topic is flawed, therefore the original idea and the response is unable to influence my priors.”
If it’s a dog whistle it’s the loudest one I’ve ever heard.
Beginning of the actual framing of the issue:
> There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.
> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist,"
Is there any genuine confusion what he’s talking about here? How many commonly used words fit the “x-ist” framing?
I mean he’s a white pontificating boomer billionaire active on Twitter worried he’ll eventually say something dumb and get cancelled.
Which, indeed, is a concept that’s having a cultural moment right now. The problem is he’s adding literally nothing to the discussion.
I think most sane people can realize that the fringe “woke” elements of the discourse can veer into ridiculousness. Maybe that matters a lot maybe it matters a little I dunno.
To the extent there’s an actual problem here it’s really focused on those who are potentially at actual risk.
Examples of actual problems that could be created by excessive wokeness include the increasing degree to which HR is able to divide and control the most vulnerable elements of the labor force, or the highly cynical ways in which jargon laden intersectional language is used to obscure a hegemony of corporate and wealthy donor interests over leftist or activist organizations.
Would be interesting if he had opinions on that.
But instead we’re again talking about how the most powerful economic forces in our culture are being trolled on Twitter. That isn’t an actual fucking problem. Like really it isn’t.
PG is clearly a very smart guy. I’ve read his books I want to like him. Sure is a terrible pity he’s not spending his twilight years being introspective about the horrifying legacy of inequality and misery that’s been inflicted on society by the tech sector, where he has an actual ability to have a positive influence.
The article isn’t flawed; it perfectly shows PGs evolving right leaning viewpoints. I used to understand where he came from when he originally started to argue about women in tech, but the new things he says, can’t stay with them anymore.
You’re trying to divide two types of heresies because you don’t want to acknowledge the truth, there’s no two types just a sliding scale of offensiveness. You want there to be repercussions for some heresies (overt racism and homophobia?) while others should be let to slide by. But there’s no inherent difference between the two types. PG is smart and acknowledges that, but decides there should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be. As long as it’s not the government that’s doing the banning in public forums people need to shut up about their rights. What’s special about the government? As PGs friend Thiel eloquently put, government is a monopoly on violence, it stands to reason the only entity that shouldn’t have the authority to shut your opinions and voice is the entity with the monopoly on violence.
But I guess once you’ve stayed rich and influential for long enough you’re annoyed at this one remaining domain where you can’t just have everything you wanted yet so you want to change the rules to let you do the same. That’s what people like Thiel and now sadly PG are trying to do. They don’t care about any real issues, they just want to spend time blasting wokeness and actively sabotage all of humanity (in Thiels case) because I don’t know what their endgame is.
> There should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be.
So you're saying that there are factually correct statements that nobody should be able to utter without facing repercussions? Can you offer an example?
Saying things that are "true" isn't a guarantee that you will get the best possible reaction.
There are infinite true statements. We have to carefully pick the most useful and applicable truths to say in any given situation.
That's what wisdom and maturity are. Understanding a situation and choosing a good course of action. Including the truths we choose as the primary descriptors of the situation.
> Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.
I think this is actually the big problem in the debate, not "cancel culture" or "heresies". A lot of people seem gleefully enthusiastic about seeing the worst in other people. This is not isolated to just one ideological side: people on the right engage in it just as much as people on the left.
I've started to seriously dislike "dog-whistling". Often it's "yes, what they're saying is looks fine on the surface, but I know their actual secret motivations!" Yes, things like "14/88" and whatnot really are "dog-whistling" and it's fine to call it out as such, but 9 times out of 10 I see it used today it's weird assertion about someone's motivations. It's essentially a straw-man argument with extra steps (allude to a far more extreme position than what was stated, and then attack that).
Sometimes this goes so far I wonder if I somehow don't understand the English language correctly, or ... something. Many times I see people commit a "heresy" it's something fairly mild – or even completely benign – taken to far more extreme levels than what it seems to mean on the surface.
In this specific article it seems clear to me that Graham isn't defending tosspot Nazis or other overt "x-ists", yet here in the comments we have people who seemingly take this to mean that Graham is defending folks who say that "people with different skin colors are dumber" and similar things. You can read that in his essay, I suppose, but only if you come at it with a certain attitude.
Once you eliminate the "this person is x-ist, let's find arguments to support it"-attitude the whole "heresy" problem goes away, too. I haven't the foggiest how to actually do that though.
...one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves.
Remember, these are religious fanatics not scientific objectivists.
Sure, that might insulate him and put him in an echo chamber, but blocking is entirely his right, and he's the one who'll get the consequences from that.
I also tend to do a similar thing in spaces I curate, and it's honestly better for mental health. Someone comes out from nowhere with something completely 180 degrees from what I say? That's not reality TV, that's my private [social network page]. I'm not gonna be baited.
Saying someone "can't block" is an asshole move. Nobody should be forced to talk and see messages by anyone.
To take an example from my own experience, if I automatically tuned out anyone who said something bad about the requirement to make things accessible for blind people, I would deny myself the opportunity to learn how they think and become more effective in my advocacy or, possibly, revise my position.
Yes, I mention that in the second paragraph. That's his to decide.
If you're interested in hearing the other side in all cases, then of course blocking is counter-intuitive. Wether he wants or not, it's his choice.
However, even if you were to block everyone, you could still curate the experience of hearing from the other side in other situations: by consuming articles, by asking someone privately, by not blocking some of the replies.
I also would disagree 100% that social networks are a proper venue for this kind of exchange.
He still has 100% the right to block and saying this is akin to cancellation is bullshit.
The problem is that he has way more influence in the world than you or I due to his status, money, connections, etc. The amount of harm resulting from him being in an echo chamber is much larger, especially since he actively posts in order to influence large amounts of people.
People judging you for your blocking is one of the prices you're socially expected to pay in return for those privileges.
It's not his job to give anyone a larger venue to reply.
Someone popular being in an echo chamber causing problems for society is a larger issue that maybe we should address separately. It's not on him to solve problems created by social media at large. Maybe limit reach of Twitter accounts.
Even if it were kind of his responsibility, that doesn't preclude him from being fully in his right to block people when he doesn't want to interact directly in a social network. That should be an inalienable right.
You can criticise anything you want, and I'm not saying you're not in the right to do so. But saying this is a problem comparable to cancellation is making a gross exaggeration.
I took this essay's main thrust to be around a lack of nuance in the discourse. His own behavior indicates he's pretty unwilling to have any nuance himself; pot calling the kettle black, etc.
It kills your livelihood. It will make it hard for you to get a future job if they don't give you a good reference, especially if the industry is close-knit.
It puts your financial wellbeing of you and your family at risk.
You and others will probably think twice before dissenting otherwise you better dust off that resume and tap into those savings.
But I guess people aren't killing people so cancel culture is okay, is that your standard?
> The clearest evidence of this [that some x-ist statements may be true] is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).
It's a "truth vs. order" debate. PG is in highly stable environments where order isnt an issue, so he is more concerned about truth. Generally, when "x-isms" are accused, the issue is the break down of social order in the environment in which the accusations are made.
It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.
> Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.
You can not make progress in a land of fiction. Propaganda is a stop sign, not a tool for productivity.
> It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
I think this is pretty insightful.
There are two things at play here that I think are being conflated - one is challenging certain concepts, and the other is challenge the social order that is predicated upon them.
Let’s take racism as an example.
Arguing that racism doesn’t exist, in whole or in part, is challenging the concept. Rightly or wrongly, that is one of the “heresies” from the article. It’s also a very difficult thing to discuss respectfully and productively in the workplace, and in most every case I can think of off the top of my head, unproductive.
Arguing that the actions taken in response to that conclusion, in my opinion, is and should be a different thing entirely. We have a work environment today that seeks to offset historical/systemic racism through positive steps such as affirmative action. I believe that challenging the implementation, scope, or even the continued existence of affirmative action should be acceptable - because it is a specific action that is in the scope of the course of business and has a demonstrable impact on the work environment itself.
From my reading of the article, I think what PG is saying is that it should be much more acceptable than it is to openly and honestly discuss the system that we have built that creates our work environments. I don’t believe that someone who argues against affirmative action - or any similar workplace policy, explicit or implicit - should be anathema.
This example of racism/AA is only one example. There are others with similar stigma associated.
Personally, I feel a great deal of social pressure not to discuss anything related to COVID in the workplace. I work for a company based in SF, but live in a small town in the South - very different social environments. I have had COVID, have verified that I have demonstrable antibodies on par with what is expected from vaccination + boosters. I also have a history of systemic inflammation that I’ve struggled with my whole life, and both my GP and the specialist I see agree that vaccination poses at least a slightly higher risk for me than for the general population. As a result I’ve decided not to get the vaccine. I have absolutely zero desire to try to sway anyone to see things my way, and honestly don’t want to talk about it at work lest it turn into a political argument. With few exceptions, I avoid discussing politics with colleagues.
A while ago we were planning a team outing in California. I wasn’t going to be able to attend, but I absolutely didn’t want to discuss that the reason was that I wasn’t vaccinated and don’t want to be.
This is the kind of heresy that concerns me. I feel like it should be reasonable for me to say that I am not vaccinated and don’t intend to be. I shouldn’t have to justify that. I may be excluded from some activities, and that’s acceptable to me - but it’s a discussion that I don’t even feel like I can have. Instead I have to hide this decision, avoid discussion of it, and hope I’m not put into a position where I’m forced to. If I do have to reveal it to my employer I expect that at the very least I’ll be viewed negatively in their eyes and it will harm my social environment.
It shouldn’t be seen as heresy to hold a different opinion.
As an aside, I was in your precise situation, but I ended up telling my SF company the truth. I'm sure they do view me differently now, but it's worth the feeling of value congruence to tell the truth and normalize such things.
W/r/t your medical situation, I'm not advocating for just outright telling them, but I would say your trepidation, while understandable, may be a bit overwrought. I think most people understand that some people are medically ineligible for the vaccine.
Its intriguing that PG used the term “anti-vaxers”, in this article. Being interested in the truth about vaccines will get you fired and the term “anti-vaxers” is used by the aggressively conventional minded to shut down debate. So I wonder if there’s subtext and those parts are him not meaning what he’s saying on the surface?
Anyway, the truth is if you’ve had COVID-19 you are far more protected than someone who got one of these vaccines. It is heretical to say that, and I get called an “anti-vaxer”, but it’s true.
Came here to say the same thing. It is pretty ironic that in an essay that is basically criticizing people who can’t put up with heretics, he is doing the same thing with regards to "anti-vaxxers" without even realizing it. It doesn’t help that the term specifically (according to Merriam-Webster) is defined as:
> a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination
It is a loaded term that is used mostly as a means to vilify people. There must be a lot of people who are pro vaccine, but against government mandates, so where does that leave them? Also, it is possible to be generally pro vaccines, but also skeptical of new vaccine technologies rushed through development and regulatory approvals in record time where the companies leading the push have a history of putting profits ahead of public health.
The fact that your comment shows up in gray here is further proof of the exact dynamic that he is referring to in the essay:
> But occasionally, like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large number of aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideology all at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mob dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant is increased by the enthusiasm of the others.
The particularly uncharitable reading of that quote that jumped to my mind when I read it is "but why can't I, a white guy, say the n-word?" But this probably isn't what Graham actually had in mind.
I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.
There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"
This was also the example that came to my mind. It is perhaps one of the most iconic examples, and as such, absent a concrete example or further clarification, I don't see why you shouldn't assume that this is representative of what the author had in mind.
That is very far from 'the worst' I can imagine in someone. Further, it is hardly 'automatic' - it is a response to a hypothetical situation the author posited, for which multiple people considered that as the most prominent concrete example. If the author did not intend that, he did a poor job of making his argument clear.
Oh, I doubt he really wanted that. The sort of thing I suspect he was actually referencing is the "black people commit X% of all crimes" / "racial differences in IQ test scores show..." talking points. (Or their equivalents in other fields. Women-in-computer-science, etc.)
Why is possession of crack a more serious offense than possession of the same quantity of powder cocaine?
Is the single crime of selling a loose cigarette on the street equivalent to the single crime of defrauding tens of millions of dollars from investors?
How many officers are tasked with arresting people for "quality of life" offenses like loitering and disturbing the peace vs. tasked with arresting people for wage theft through unpaid overtime and time card fraud?
Are your statistics for "committing" crime in fact statistics for convictions? Are there systemic reasons those might be very different numbers?
If all of these are more useful subjects for discussion, what is the purpose of even making the original statement?
I feel like a pariah sometimes in those discussions.
I agree with PG in that I'm also not too happy with the "only X can be x-ist", but on the other hand I'm also not a conspiracy nut that talks non-stop about "critical race theory". I'm also not free speech absolutist, as I'm ok with things like European law criminalizing Nazism or glorification of genocide.
I feel like I'm constantly against three very radical groups, and there's nobody representing me.
I'm tired of radicalism coming from three different directions.
Perhaps people should read David Graeber and Cory Doctorow more?
The whole culture wars thing is a prime example of complementary schismogenesis in action, which was rather nicely presented in the Dawn of Everything from Graeber on couple thousand years old tribes.
> Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth
I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.
Is the reason it's sexist because it can be interpreted as "women are less capable than men"? You would say this other statement is false and sexist, correct?
I know you didn't ask me, but I just wanted to say that language is nothing without context. "Less capable" is very subjective and context-dependent, so without more specifics it can't really be "true" or "false" except very colloquially. As for "sexist" - in a void with no context, it's apparently sexist, but that doesn't mean the sentence can't exist in a non-sexist context.
"Women are less capable than men" is sexist; "The majority of women are physically and mentally incapable of running a Fortune 500 company" is a neutral hypothesis that can be asserted with anecdotal evidence, sociological studies, and if modern corporate leadership wasn't silent on the issue, there would also likely be firsthand testimony. <--- heresy
But on the other hand, you could likely present evidence to the contrary. The comparison of the opposing evidence, and the careful scrutiny of the facts that provide that evidence, is the most truthful approach to the question.
For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
Please try not to misquote people you disagree with. The GP did not say most women can't because most men can't - they said most women can't and most men can't. I.e. most women can't because most people can't, which seems uncontroversial. It's a very hard job.
Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
> For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
I think you read your biases into that, too:
> The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
You're giving too little attention to social context. The latter statement will rarely be interpreted neutrally when uttered in societies where statements denigrating females' capabilities has been (or continues to be) a cultural norm.
Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans.
When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says.
So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something.
And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different.
In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable.
But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success.
Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500.
So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
> Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans
Yay.
But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.
Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.
These kind of "x-ist" statements are fine for things that are overtly x-ist. The problems happen when things are more murky; for example when you start exploring the reasons why there are few women running Fortune-500 companies. If you start shutting down things with "it's x-ist!" then you may never find out the reasons (and by extension, how to do something about them!)
"It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.
Lots of people have studied the question of why women aren’t running Fortune 500 companies, and unsurprisingly the answers have a lot to do with sexism.
The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender.
My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.
Yeah, the quote is a very fundamental breakdown of logic. It's common among Facebook arguments, but very strange to see written by somebody at least ostensibly interested in rationality. I suppose he's playing a dishonest semantic game (I think he's smart enough to know that the world is more complex than that).
"13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational.
Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".
THIS is exactly what some are afraid of. People taking statements, interpreting them with their own mental models, and coming to the conclusion the person who made that statement is x-ist.
Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
"Implicitly sexist" does not mean "sexist by default". "Implicitly" is a reasonable qualifier here. You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. In English, "very few" implies "very much fewer than the alternative", but in strict logical construction, it does not, hence the parent's point and my remark about being a robot.
> You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company.
I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context:
A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top.
B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all.
If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's:
> Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
> You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company.
It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good.
What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?
I guess the original article didn't take misleading statements into account. Because your statement might indeed be factually true, but very misleading.
What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?
“Heresy” is not when you purposefully say things which make some other group a less human.
We as a society kinda decided that is wrong. But there some people who do not think that is wrong and they call it “heresy”.
The missing component not mentioned in PGs essay is the acceleration and amplification of cancel culture via the Internet.
Even a decade ago, tribes were geographically local. Today, your tribe is literally global. It knows no borders. Thus social media amplifies the effect of cancel culture and "same think".
The internet accelerated and amplifies many other things as well, including the free exchange of ideas and information.
I would argue this may dominate over the effect you assume and drive the same simply because if one wants to become outraged over an act, they need to know it occurred in the first place.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the overall effect of the internet is to drive cultural consensus.
What's worse is tribes also have strongarms inside corporations. If the Internet mob wants to get someone fired for saying something, they just reach out to the local chapter of strongarms and make demands/walkouts against the company until they get their way.
This essay would have been more useful had it included a treatment of actual Catholic heresy accusations and trials. I could give my own account of how I understand it, but I would have liked to have heard PGs characterization.
Instead we're stuck with an modernist take ungrounded in history.
Yeah, while I’m not a huge fan of modern radicalization (or perhaps just it’s resurgence) I still find “cancel culture” more tolerable than torture and murder.
what they ended up like, or how they got there? because I’d rather note and correct the trend /before/ we start torturing and killing people in public display.
The two eras and their initial conditions aren’t even comparable. We have strong state constitutions and the procedural rule of law now. We use science instead of religion to explain mysterious phenomena. Those aren’t being torn down any time soon over spite. We’re simply not going to end someone’s life over a differing opinion; our entire system of government would have to change first.
Your argument is basically a “slippery slope” argument, and this is a good example of why these types of arguments are so weak and problematic.
Of course we can learn from history. But deep and thoughtful analysis is important. The time to freak out would be when there’s a serious threat to our constitutions or laws that would enable criminal punishment for holding controversial opinions. And we just don’t see that on the horizon yet.
Can you elaborate? Are you talking about national territorial disputes (i.e., war), or a dispute over where two domestic neighbors’ land boundaries lie? In any event, this feels like an attempt to win an argument by stretching it to cover something out of scope.
I wasn’t really attempting to win the argument. Just wanted to point out that while we believe we are above such things, given the right motivations humans will happily kill each other over a belief.
You should probably go look at the current state of diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria before giving your hot take. If caught and treated early, gender reassignment surgery can work miracles on a child's quality of life. It really shouldn't be seen any differently than other treatable birth defects.
What is the liklihood of the child being confused, mistaken, or later changing their mind? TBH my concern is that liberal parents, excited at the prospect that their little white boy will avoid a lifetime of abuse by transitioning to being a little white girl, will not even preach caution, but will hasten the transition to a better, more protected, identity.
> What is the liklihood of the child being confused, mistaken, or later changing their mind?
Definitely not 100%, but regardless of that: definitely not something I, a neutral part, can answer, let alone groups with an anti-trans/anti-LGBT agenda. This is a case-by-case thing to be decided by professionals.
If you don't recognize that playing life as a middle class white, cis, male is still 'easy mode' compared to literally any other option... I don't know what to tell you.
Most people don't realize this either, but I think it's worth mentioning after Alabama passed their new legislation that the common treatment for trans teens is puberty blockers to delay puberty. These puberty blockers were specifically developed for CIS children entering puberty too early (or having other medical issues) and have been used for a long time. They basically help give the children more time to mature before making decisions in either direction.
Yeah, but there needs to be a point where you can trust that the child didn’t just make it all up and gets fucked for life. I think the age where you can reasonably be sure of that is probably pretty close to the age of adulthood already.
The notion that young kids necessarily have a completely formed and stabilized "gender identity" (which is necessary for "trans kids" to even be a meaningful concept) is entirely driven by ideology. It doesn't even pass the most cursory test of plausibility.
Of course it's not necessary for gender identity to be "completely formed and stabilized" to be able to talk about it. Do you think it's meaningless to describe a child as "short" or "tall" because their body is still growing?
Sorry, I don't really get the relevance of that objection.
In everyday life, most of us are happy to accept the "reality" (in whatever philosophical sense you choose to use) of all sorts of personality traits that exist only "in the mind": kindness, eloquence, sense of humor, willpower. If you likewise accept the reality of "gender identity" as a mental trait, then I don't understand why it makes sense to insist that trait is only meaningful when it's "fully formed" -- can we say that about any aspect of our personality?
I don't know if this exact question has ever been scientifically studied, but it seems pretty clear that if you offered people the choice to push a magic button and permanently change their body to the opposite sex, the vast majority of us would pretty confidently say, no, and a small minority of people would be equally confident in answering the opposite way. That's close enough to "objectively measurable" for me.
More to the point, we're talking about children. Should children be allowed to press the magic button?
We don't allow children to make other permanent changes to their bodies in general (and those tend to be stigmatized even with parental consent); and more to GP's point, the majority of children with a desire to be the opposite sex grow out of it.
It does not make sense to me that we question a child's judgment in all other matters except this one. This is important because gender affirming therapy is, medically speaking, nontrivial and not without severe risks.
There hasn’t been nearly enough time for longitudinal studies. We have no idea what treatment, if any, will lead to the greatest lifetime quality of life for children expressing symptoms of gender dysphoria. Nor for that matter do we have any idea why children are experiencing these symptoms are much higher rates.
Fetal development isn’t a perfect process. XXY embryos, testosterone insensitivity. There might be other manifestations of gender confusion as I’m not a biologist.
Psychiatry once regarded gayness as mental illness. The opinions of those who are employed in the industry of trans research should be regarded as potentially ephemeral, as was prescribing opiates for pain. Science makes mistakes. It’s part of the process. One should be wary of the new, if one cares about their patients.
If misdiagnosed, gender reassignment surgery is disasterous on a child's quality of life. So perhaps we should be looking at the number of false diagnoses for gender dysphoria?
But how accurate is that diagnosis, are there false positives and how much?
I know, anecdotally, that some homosexual men are gender dysphoric during prepubescent age but grew out of it during puberty, and feel it would have been a mistake to transition at that age.
But this isn't the point of the essay. The point is that asking questions like these would get you branded a heretic by the far left. And acknowledging gender dysphoria would get you branded a heretic by the far right.
The left’s current position is that puberty blockers should be available to all kids until they can decide what gender they want to be. They claim there are zero (0) irreversible side effects to puberty blockers.
No drug has no side effects, least of all one that inhibits puberty. Letting a kid make a choice like that - one they can’t possibly understand the consequences of - is worse. Saying we’re doing it so that they don’t commit suicide in the short-term with no regard to their long-term induced infertility? That’s just irresponsible not to talk about.
> The left’s current position is that puberty blockers should be available to all kids until they can decide what gender they want to be.
That couldn't be further from the truth as possible.
It is the right constantly saying they should be 100% banned, with the other side wants more nuance in the discussion.
You'll sure find some wackos with this position to use as a strawman, but that's definitely not "the left". I'm left, and I don't know anyone saying it.
Feel free to provide counterexamples of where you feel this not to be true. The link below details that not only are they wanting open access, but they want insurance coverage as well.
"Access to drugs and procedures" doesn't mean free unrestricted access to "all kids". This is not candy being sold in the supermarket to kids. This all goes trough parents, psychiatrists and other physicians and the healthcare system.
Yes, calling out a group of people an "insane concept" is a form of hostility. The existence of trans people (and children) both at the social and biological (even genetic) level is quite beyond doubt. One might disagree and discuss how to help and live alongside those people, but labeling them an "insane concept" is not a worthy contribution tho this discourse.
If any intelligent, caring discussion about this is possible on the open internet, it's certainly not going to happen through this sort of Molotov cocktail, so yeah, that's a problem. The HN guidelines are written specifically to ask people not to do this, regardless of which side of a conflict they're holding. Would you mind reviewing them and sticking to them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
p.s. since this kind of mod comment tends to elicit responses, I should probably add that I'm in a workshop today and unable to do as much as I normally would on HN. So if anyone notices something not being taken care of or not getting a reply, please don't be quick to draw large conclusions from that—it's more likely that I'm not as free.
Personally I flagged it because it’s conversational flame bait where two radicalized groups will argue past each other endlessly, which will serve only to reinforce their radicalization. (Yes, me too)
Woo boy. Generally liked the concept for the essay, but this piece jumps out as problematic (or just poorly written):
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?
Many (most?) statements embed some of the speakers attributes, either explicitly or implicitly. At a trivial level, saying “I am hungry” can be true when one person says it and false when another does.
Obviously “I” statements are not what Graham is talking about, but the idea that your lived experience cannot qualify or disqualify you for passing certain judgements seems suspect.
Maybe you chose your "hunger" example in haste, but it's not a great counterexample to the points in the article. Only the person making the statement about being hungry can know the truth. The focus of the article, as I read it, is on shared truths that must be evaluated in public sphere.
You are expressing a literally racist opinion. “Only race y can express idea x.”
Unlike others, I don’t want to cancel you for being racist, though you clearly are, by your own admission.
This tolerance I show towards others allows dialog and thus enables human progress. Cancelling racists does the opposite. I support your right to think out load and bless the sacredness of your inner spirit even though you think racistically about free speech which imo is not really “free” speech.
I think you’re injecting a lot into my comment that wasn’t there. I never talked about cancelling anyone. I talked about whether speakers are always equally qualified to make the same statement.
Here’s an example: There are words that have historically been used as slurs that have been reclaimed by the people they were used against.
If you are not a member of that group, your use of the word invokes the history of its use, and is likely x-ist. As a member, you are likely able to use it.
Yes, but it's in the context of someone already having said that an "x-ist" statement can't be true.
The quote in question is immediately after this paragraph:
> If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.
Which the quote about the variation of a statement is given as an obvious counter argument once someone has already said that x-ist statements cannot be true.
Yes, but it's also very much not the kind of statement PG is talking about. It's not generally something someone would be concerned about the truth value of.
I suppose you have to unpack pronouns when you are evaluating truth or falsity of a statement and maybe add some additional context. If you say "I am hungry" when we evaluate that sentence we have to unpack it to something like "Yojo is hungry at time X" so that way your statement would be equally true or false if I said "it" (the unpacked version) or an hour after you said it and had eaten a full meal.
I read that as "Truths can be stated by anyone, and are still true". If you are saying some truths can only be said or are only true for some groups... We'll have to agree to disagree.
I take issue with the speaker not influencing whether a statement is or is not “x-ist”
There are truths that are empirical (math, physics, etc), but most controversy that includes “x-ism” is about things that are subjective and don’t bucket neatly into a true/false dichotomy.
Consider looking at piece of art and saying "I think this part is badly done". This is a very different statement depending whether it is the author saying it, the author's mentor saying it, unrelated person saying it to their friends, or the same unrelated person writing it on twitter. And it doesn't matter whether it is true - it might not even be possible to say, objectively, whether that part is actually badly done.
Same goes for talking about groups of people. Criticising a movement as a member internally, as a member on twitter and as a member of opposing movement is very different, no matter whether it is true or not. And movements are (usually) voluntary - it matters even more when talking about groups of people by categories they can't chose, like cultures, sexual orientations, skin color, etc.
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As somebody else said in this thread, it's really rich to see Paul write about "implicitly ending the discussion" when he instablocks anybody on Twitter so easily.
Misquote. He said "implicitly ending the discussion by calling someone a x-ist", which is not the same at blocking someone who is annoying - blocking someone is just shutting your door, not making them lose their livelihood by defaming them.
If you know of any instance where someone has lost their livelihood due _only_ to being called an x-ist, please share.
This is hardly implicit.
Also, you want to write software without “being canceled?” Well, dust off your oscilloscope skills, in the unglamorous embedded world I hear toned down right wing rants about Putin being canceled and Covid testing as a mass surveillance program and all that happens is sometimes someone’s like, alright, let’s move the meeting along.
Does PG live in the Bay Area? That’s probably why. Most mainstream American opinions would get a person fired there.
Holding a view that tens of millions of Americans have and you get fired.
It's not even particularly controversial.
It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
Exactly like you're doing here when you rode on in to "both sides!" this argument.
If you think there’s some large group of people that all wear white hats and aren’t being shitty or ruining anyone’s life, you are being willfully blind.
Furthermore, when you engage in this whataboutism garbage (“what’s always interesting to me”, yeah I’m sure it’s fascinating) when someone tries to point out something your “team” is doing wrong, you are part of the problem.
Yes, Trumpists suck—-that means everyone else should get a free pass? By that token shouldn’t Trumpists get a free pass because Putin is out there committing atrocities?
Aren't most people in the majority, in whatever metric is under consideration, by definition? Which tends to be the in-group in democracies?
As far as I can see, the explicit wording of the bill is just to delay "social sex education" till c. 8/9 years old -- right?
One of the requirement clauses states that the bill is "prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner". That quote is the whole clause. It doesn't ban instruction, it bans discussion. It is explicit. Those exact words. Anyone who says otherwise either did not actually read the bill, or they didn't read it very well.
Likewise here, how I read this is straightforward: explicit discussion of sexual orientation, ie., which genders/sexes people are sexually attracted to; must only occur from c. 8/9yo+.
Ditto for gender identity. That a person's born physical sex may deviate from their perceived sexual identity -- discussions about that don't seem all that urgent below 9yo.
The issue the bill seems to be addressing isn't mentioning that people are gay, are married as gay etc -- the issue is in having discussions about anyone's sexual preference "too early" with children. I think even saying "X person is trans" in classroom isn't forbidden -- rather just making "trans" or "gay" (or "straight") a topic of discussion.
The bill is a direct response to rare, but noted occurrences of teachers giving very young children lessons from highly controversial books on gender and sexuality at ages where those children are not being taught these subjects -- but necessarily, rather, being encouraged to accept (controversial) conclusions about them.
We arent talking about educating 5yos on the nature of sexuality. They don't have enough experiences and development to discuss this.
Same with CRT banning. The existence of a law, even an ineffective one, on the books provides opportunity for abuse.
(Said as someone who thinks the parts of both parties who are loudest over these issues are childish demagogues who ignore historical peril)
I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.
There is some controversy though about whether the concept of due process as per law should be extended to a general principle that guides the operation of privately-owned websites. That isn't how the internet used to work so the jury's still out.
>>Man guilty of hate crime for filming pug's 'Nazi salutes'
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
Turns out they are and will.
I’m not saying it should be unlimited or anyone should be legally or morally obligated to refrain from social consequences for any and all speech, but I do think a society where tolerance is extended to a majority of the other people by a majority of people is healthier than one where that isn’t the case.
There can be no discourse when one side wants just to be left alone and the other wants to exterminate them.
You might want to rethink that 20th century lesson.
Counterexample: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
> His efforts to fight racism, in which, as an African American, he has engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), have convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
In fact, bringing people of different minds together is the only way to have free discourse, and the only way to change minds.
Main relevant bit copied below.
###
“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.
This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.
Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.
> “Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”
> “He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.
If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.
I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed ...
> In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US universities
I don't think this was new. Liberality tends to go hand in hand with seeking reality, as discovering something and then adopting it requires intellectual big-tentism. Perhaps the author bemoans the rise of bureaucracy within the university, which has demonstrably increased?
My concern is that these arguments about moral puritanicalism aren't without merit, but that they are often ignore the cancerous alt-right, which is bereft of morality beyond racial nationalism. Perhaps the cancel culture creedal concern is considered to be salvageable.
It's a nicer form of the term fascist.
Here is more information to start with, as well as several linked sources, compiled by people for your benefit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right
The ambiguity in the law is there as a feature to hush normal conversations that might otherwise happen.
It's somewhat unfortunate that misinformational memes of this sort travel much faster than reasonable understandings of its problems (this is but one example.) I believe it impairs the resolution of the nation's problems. Yeah, it galvanizes some support, but also hardens the opposition, and impairs the ability to make any sort of incremental progress, leaving achievable reforms stalled for years or even decades.
Moreover, as a matter of principle, I don't really want to be part of a political movement which values spinning a story to its advantage more than it cares about informing the public. Build your movement on something solid.
And for what real benefit, exactly? How is this improving our society in any real way?
It's "you're going to jail if you dare to talk about it".
That's the obvious violation of First Amendment: government cannot use force to dictate what you say.
And this topic is not on the short list of exceptions (threats of violence etc.).
And stepping back: realize you're being played by politicians.
Republicans know well this bill is unconstitutional.
They know there are topics way more important to spend their very limited legislative time on.
But DeSantis is going to run for the president so Republicans are picking fights with stupid bills to whip up their base to vote for them.
Those stupid fights are also distracting you from things that actually matter i.e. how to maintain and increase prosperity of the people.
Laws around hate speech and defamation seem to contradict you.
Who even came up with the phrase cancel culture to begin with? When? Why does it rhyme and is a just a few syllables? Why doesn't anyone who creates and pushes these slogan/memes and what their motivation is?
You can have a problem with cancel culture and not be anti CRT. Who would have thought, right?
It seemed to me that the firing of Timnit Gebru at Google was superficially the political reverse of the firing of Antonio García Martínez at Apple. And yet the latter case is considered cancel culture, while the former is not.
*Politicians don't start from "I believe X/Y, let's do something about it." They start from "How do I get my voters agitated and eager to vote for me, and what position should I take on controversial issues X/Y during an election year to achieve this goal?" Politics/electioneering is showmanship first. Silly things like real personal political beliefs only get in the way of politicians' end goal of power.
The idea that you could introduce homosexuality or anything else without the same basic check seems backwards.
Granted, the DSG bill has some badly-written foibles but the general idea is on the mark.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.
E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.
(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)
To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted):
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Which is fair. If someone is going to respond to you by beating and shooting you, you shouldn't have to tolerate them. The justification for the intolerance of the intolerant is that the intolerant use violence to get their way.
But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.
Neither was I. Nor do I think Paul should be "rounded up" either. Just that I believe his mode of thinking is flawed. I expressed an opinion just as he did.
Then I may have misinterpreted your statement. Would you mind elaborating on exactly which part of the essay confuses the paradox of intolerance with heresy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCBhKs4faI
Is a clip from a BBC show (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, worth a watch if you enjoy British comedy) so copyright block not too surprising depending on where you're located.
He basically takes the piss out of a taxi driver. The stereotype goes that a taxi driver will share their "bloody immigrants" opinions with their fares whether the fares care about hearing it or not.
Cabbie says: "These days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you."
Stewart "wears him down" in the bit by repeating the question back with increasing incredulity and after about 3 minutes the cabbie character eventually just says, "no, you don't actually get arrested."
It's fckin hilarious.
"What you can't say" [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html] is one of the first of his essays I ever read. It eventually directed me to this site.
At the time, I thought it was brilliant. 18 years on, I think it's a good piece of writing but he's only got half the story. Sadly, today's essay suggest to me he hasn't found the other half in the intervening nearly two decades.
Taboo is a powerful tool. Some taboos, to be sure, outlive their usefulness. But some compress lifetimes of experience into easily remembered lessons for people who have not yet had that experience so that we can ever progress... If every generation has to keep relearning the same lessons over and over, there's no time for more.
The counterweight to the philosophy Graham is espousing here is this one (https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...). A taboo is a social analogy to a fence. Someone built it at some point for a reason. That reason might be gone, in which case the fence is unnecessary. But if you're going to tear down a fence, understand why it's there.
18 years on, I don't think Paul is wrong, but the repeated mistake I see people in my field make is assuming that they're the smartest person in the room when they encounter a heresy or taboo and falling right into the consequence that taboo was intended to protect against.
I've read both essays and it seems that Graham's opinion on the topic hasn't changed much over the last 18 years. We can probably all guess which "recent" event prompted him to revisit the topic, whether we agree with him or not.
"If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head."
I think you've made an interesting argument, but isn't this evidence that the taboo mechanism is failing at its job and needs to be replaced with something better?
The advantage to the taboo system is that if it's the smart folk who are getting themselves into sticky situations jumping fences, at least they're smart enough to have a fair shot at getting out.
Anything we replace it with needs to maintain the feature of protecting the most vulnerable... Taboos have the advantage of being simple, so you don't have to be smart to adhere to them.
Depends on whether you get put to the stake for this socially unacceptable thing.
At some point it was socially unacceptable/heresy for a woman to float when thrown in a pond.
> belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.
Religion is just a belief system. So is Marxism. Libertarianism. Etc.
Hard disagree. I see this idea a lot, and it drives me nuts. This is how you get to silly takes like "atheism is just another religion", "science is just another religion", and all that. I get that religion can be hard to nail down (belief without evidence maybe?), but it's no use just giving up and defining it so broadly that it means nothing.
This does not broaden the concept of religion, but narrows the idea of science as something sacrosanct (ironically).
There is a belief that the scientific methodology will lead to truth. This is the same as any other religion who is steeped in ceremonial practices. The issue of how practically applicable and successful at producing models, science has been, is incidental. As a religion, the concepts fit together nicely.
Except scientists themselves do not espouse such belief. They know what they know, and also they know what they don't know; the scientific methology, too, is also based on knowledge; there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
When a scientist puts forward a hypothesis, which is not, strictly speaking, knowledge (yet), it does not mean that they "believe" in it, either; it's remains just that - a hypothesis, which gets thrown away as soon as it is disproven.
One could argue that knowledge requires some kind of faith - you have to believe that you know something (while in reality you may or may not); but much of the knowlege we possess is "hard knowledge" - the kind that prevents us from taking actions that would definitely hurt us, for example; scientific knowledge is just as "hard," and so is the scientific method.
Every religion has members who know what they know.
> there is no place for "belief" in scientific research.
There is a belief that the scientific method is optimal for discovering truth. How well it works, is not relevant to the fact that it's a practice. This isn't complicated or doublespeak.
Huh, "religious" people also like give plenty of evidence before they burn/shun/deplatform anyone. Evidence can be a thing whatever mob tries to enforce. Main thing is people look evidence in support and not contrary to their beliefs.
When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes. People aren't getting fired for picking nomad over kubernetes. People are getting called out for denying the existence of people who aren't like them. When someone gets fired for, as an example, purposefully misgendering their colleagues- that isn't getting fired for having a bad opinion, that's being fired for making a hostile work environment.
What's always interesting to me is that these "free speech absolutists" are explicitly calling out the left here, when the right is the one passing "don't say gay" legislation and refusing to allow trans children the healthcare needed to save their lives. The right is also kicking everyone out of their party who doesn't bow before Trump. To say that the left is creating heresies while ignoring that the right is literally creating new dogma is just delusional to me.
Here's the question:
Are you tolerant of people who do? Or do you make the lives of those people (who viscerally feel their gender identity to be true) more difficult than those who share your belief?
The line is crossed with the latter.
Has GP crossed the line merely by expressing his/her/their opinion? This probably depends on his/her/their social status as well. The CEO of a company saying something in an official meeting carries a different weight for all employees than some random employee saying the same thing.
Or does GP need to say or do something personal to someone in order to be considered to have crossed the line? Be careful there: add too many constraints and we will end up giving a free pass to people who genuinely offend and cause serious discomfort to those around them.
These are the kinds of issues about which we as a society need to have reasonable discussions and make consensus-building efforts, but it all descends into name-calling too soon.
why do you consider it beyond reasonable accommodation for some people? do you think you know some deeper truth about these other people than they know about themselves? why do you think you can reliably identify that case? couldn't you simply leave them alone, and not make a big deal out of it?
if you think it doesn't matter, prove it. refuse to recognize anyone's identity. start misgendering and misnaming people you wouldn't do that to before. see how far that gets you.
I think the debate is less about what someone's inner life is like, and more about whether gender words (like man, woman etc) refer to inner feelings or to someone's physical sex. Historically they have been used to refer to both, and many people. use their own gender label to refer to their physical sex rather than any inner feelings.
Yeah, but neither do they. There is such a thing as objective truth. I have no right to be treated as four-legged, because I do not have four legs. Neither can I claim a right to be treated as the Queen of Englang, because I am not the queen of England. Nor do I have a right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex because I am not in fact a member of the opposite sex.
1. Whether people of different sexes ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
2. Whether people of different gender identities ever ought to be treated differently (and if so, in which circumstances).
My own view is that in the vast majority of cases we shouldn't be treating people differently on the basis of either sex or gender identity, and that identity-based gender and sex-based gender are about as bad as each other!
Does this change when it legally changes? Or does the gender you were born with forever stay the same?
Someone might think they're charming, and I might find them a great bore.
It's obvious in this example that equivocating that with deciding for that person, anything at all, is asinine.
Most social settings, and all professional ones, require that I be more polite to this "charming" person than I would otherwise be inclined to, given my own feelings on that subject.
There is something to be learned here.
What you can't do is harass people, deny them service, or make their lives a misery.
No one is forcing you to believe in something. They're asking you not to be an arsehole about something which doesn't affect your life.
But they are forcing you to pretend to believe in something by dictating what you are allowed to say about it.
The norms are not as straightforward as you claim.
But there are people out there that tell me it is bothersome. Out of respect, I modify how I speak and write. Why shouldn’t I get the same courtesy?
What is the point of specifying pronouns then? Isn't this just a lazy form of misgendering?
Instead of using someone's name you could just refer to everyone as "Hey You", but that seems discourteous and disrespectful. Why not just use their preferred name and pronouns?
No, because "they" isn't gender-specific. It's not referring to someone by the wrong gender, it's not referring to them by their gender at all.
> What is the point of specifying pronouns then?
I'd argue that there probably isn't much point. Why do we refer to people by their gender? No idea. It doesn't make any sense to me.
When used as a singular it’s the pronoun for people that identify as non binary. You are absolutely misgendering people but you get a free pass because contra fosefx this whole pronoun thing is about power and who has it, rather than universal respect.
It can be used for this, but it's also used for someone of indeterminate gender or if you simply don't want to mention their gender. For example:
"Oooh, that's such a beautiful baby, are they a boy or a girl"
"Does your friend want to buy my phone? You said they were interested?"
I think it's more analogous to referring to a transwoman as "they", which I also do. "They" does not gender you at all, so it can't misgender you. I don't think you (or anyone else be they cisgender or transgender) have a right be referred to by your gender, whether you prefer it or not. I think that's different to be referred to by a gender you consider worng. In that case someone is actively labelling you as a gender. By calling you "they" I'm saying I think you're genderless, whereas by calling someone "he" I think you are saying you think they're male.
If you had a strong preference to be referred to by your gender then I probably would make an effort to do that, but I don't think you are owed that (to be honest I wish trans people weren't so hung up on pronouns too - I think it's silly to be so fussy about language - but I have seen cases where they're used maliciously so I can somewhat understand why they are).
Right. As it turns out, I identify as male not genderless. But this is not something you are obligated to honor under threat of being fired for some reason.
That is my point.
If I provide my name and preferred pronouns, if you respect me and my wishes, why not use my name and preferred pronouns when addressing me or referring to me?
Using "they" when I don't want it as a pronoun is misgendering.
In Tagalog, it/she/he is a simple word, "siya" (pronounced "sha" if said quickly).
Furthermore, generic he has also been around for hundreds of years. So we should keep using that too, right?
This seems less like a material distinction and more like something that transphobic people would bring up to support their ideology.
> Furthermore, generic he has also been around for hundreds of years. So we should keep using that too, right?
My point was that it isn't new or somehow "a gen Z thing", not "all old things are good"
No one has said anything about trans people, we were talking Gen z butchering the English language. Also, is it a disorder (“phobic”) or an ideology? Or do you not understand that distinction either?
Even if there is no harm in calling them ‘your majesty’ it doesn’t feel right.
I dont care if you are male or female or whatever you want to be. I just want everyone to be happy to the extent they can be, but be tolerant of those who remember you as you were to them as well. It isnt just a switch you can turn off instantly.
This seems to be a common fear, but it’s not rooted in reality. As long as you make a good faith effort, no one is going to get mad at you for messing up their pronouns. You might get corrected; just apologize and move on. It’s not a big deal.
If someone suspects you’re messing up in bad faith, they might be harsher with you. Which is, I think, entirely reasonable.
Maybe you have friends who wrongly assume bad faith when you mess up. I’ve never seen that happen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t! You could have some shitty friends who don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. But comments like that “your highness” hypothetical really aren’t doing you any favors.
(People on Twitter probably assume drive-by repliers are speaking in bad faith by default; that is, unfortunately, just a feature of the Internet)
Pronouns aren’t any different - if you had a masculine looking female coworker at work - say she was into bodybuilding - and you keeping calling her “he” as a “joke”… persisting when you were asked not to, by your boss, by hr perhaps even. What kind of person are you being here?
You can not believe in gender identity, I don’t care. But be respectful to your colleagues at work. Is that so much to ask for? To literally not be as asshole? Is that what you’re defending - your right to be a flaming asshole to your coworkers without any consequence??
And in the end this is what the “culture wars” are about: the right to not be decent to certain people.
what do you do when you are asked to respect someone else's choice of gender identity? do you go along with it, while quietly keeping your own opinion? or do you complain and purposefully ignore their request? or maybe do something else entirely? how do you keep a friendly work environment when the mere questioning of someones gender identity can be considered hostile?
you ask that your rejection of the idea is considered not hostile, yet you consider the enforcement of rules of interaction as something hostile.
I know people who thinks like you, but they don't shut the fuck about these things, and take every possible the opportunity to proselytise about it.
I've seen it happening in workplaces, for example. But also parties, random people on the street.
Not shutting the fuck about it is fucking annoying and if it's in the workplace I'll be complaining the fuck about it until you stop and/or looking for another job.
Now, I'm a 100% neutral part on this, and even me don't wanna hear about your bullshit. Imagine now if you were to use this to actively hurt people.
One funny thing I learned from studying high demand religions: you don't have to believe something for it to be true. It's existence is entirely orthogonal to a person's opinion.
A heresy is a position that damages trust. When someone publicly espouses a heretical position, they damage other people's trust in them to make good decisions and have good judgment. Now, you can also breach trust via committing a crime, so the overlap is clear. But nobody is going to jail for their heretical opinions. They can have privileges revoked or be passed over for promotion or advancement, but that's how organizing people to do hard things has always worked. Somebody who says women don't belong in space is going to end up as unqualified to be director of NASA as somebody who fundamentally and with great conviction mis-states the tyranny of the rocket equation. Both mark the person as a poor fit for a high-trust job were there opinion on those topics matters.
And people who believe themselves against "canceling" seem to often be in agreement even if they don't realize it of themselves. A talk was famously pulled from a security conference several years back because after the talk, people concluded that the speaker didn't know what they were talking about. The difference in opinion is on what constitutes a breach of trust, not on whether people can respond to such breaches by routing around other people.
That's because no trials are held in modern mob justice for heretics. The mob justice punishments are more like lynchings.
Medieval heretics could at least expect a "witch hunt"-style trial. The monarchy or church was the authority and there was a semblance of rule of law.
Modern heretics face mob justice by self-appointed vigilantes and mob justice punishments. The lack of due process is concerning.
This is not true. You don’t have to look hard for examples of people being jailed in the US for holding unorthodox positions.
Defining heresy as “a position they damages trust,” implies that an accused heretic is at fault for believing something that “damages trust.” That is entirely subjective relative to the one whose trust was damaged.
Society has claimed heresy to suppress political and religious opponents since the beginning of human history. We have also shown a track record of being very wrong with regard to how we define heresy in the past.
Why should we believe that we are any better than our ancestors on this front?
This rings alarm bells for me. Could you give an example of someone jailed in the US for the mere holding of an unorthodox position, rather than a concrete action, in the last, say, 30 years?
I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, how criminal transgenders should be incarcerated, or whether affirmative action is a good way to help disadvantaged people.
I do think the article is about that. I think it was purposefully left vague so he could take advantage of people giving the benefit of the doubt. I don't think people's pronouns should be up for debate, and I believe PG does.
Anyway, maybe GP is talking about other “heresies”.
GP's brusque language aside, can there be any amount of uncertainty on either of these points? Doesn't it seem a bit arbitrary that these two new norms are opposite to each other?
To cite one example: race is considered heritable, and there have historically been harsh consequences of that lineage. In the US, the one-drop rule ensured that anyone with even a single Black ancestor would be subject to the legal discrimination that status entailed (this is called “hypodescent”). So the idea of someone saying “I identify as Black” is… fraught, to say the least.
I don't think it is reasonable for you to hold that your definition of gender is the only correct one.
Still, if there is no other negative effects, then accepting them as a different gender seems like a simple way to ‘heal’ the condition. Certainly in the absence of a way to fix it in the other direction.
I don’t think a lot of people would be well served by accepting that someone is a cat.
Gender dysphoria is real, social contagion is real, and we shouldn't accept or embrace a self-destructive ideology that radically derails the lives of teenagers and younger.
Adults can behave however they want, but it should be considered child abuse to foster transgenderism and transsexuality in minors.
The best outcome is when people overcome the dysphoria, not when we all pretend it's ok.
We observe much worse acute and long term outcomes, across a variety of dimensions, when transgender people are not permitted to transition.
Homophobes insist that they are telling "the truth" when they insist that all gay people are going to hell and that marriage should not be allowed for gay people. Racists insist that they are telling "the truth" when they insist that black people are simply more violent than white people and that black people should be treated differently by the justice system. Sexists insist that they are telling "the truth' when they insist that women are not capable of holding positions of leadership in business or politics and that their role is only to raise children.
I see no reason why transphobia would be different.
The harm of social transition is relatively minor and easily reversible. It's not as concerning, but it still perpetuates the phenomenon as 'tolerable'.
The harm of physical transition is permanent and devastating. We should consider the precautionary principle when engaging in irreversible actions.
Puberty blockers, sex hormones, mastectomies, and the rest are not compassionate treatments for dysphoric youths, but children are being fast-tracked into these decisions without much thought for how likely they'll be to regret it. Certainly many do, and it's an awful tragedy.
As all humans have before two seconds ago, we should let children grow into their bodies, and then they can make better-informed decisions as adults.
My main point being: this stuff is absolutely unacceptable for children, and adults are free to behave however they want, but I won't 'accept' it or go along with it.
I'm asking you to be kind. I hope you understand why people perceive you as unkind.
I'm totally willing to be kind and treat other people with respect. Never claimed otherwise.
But I also hope people see the errors of their ways, how harmful it can be, and to not try to indulge children and teenagers who get caught up in it. Leave the kids alone.
A large number of transgender people will find your viewpoint to be fundamentally disrespectful. It will not be possible for you to come across as respectful, no matter how much you insist on it. This is why I ask you to consider how the recipients of your words experience them as a better judge of whether you are behaving kindly.
Of course, like all things related to politeness, there is no absolute rule - if I change my pronouns every week I shouldn't expect people to keep up. But it should not be surprising that you can be fired for not making a minimal effort to be nice to your colleagues.
Here's an example:
"There's no such thing as a trans person. Trans is not a real thing, it's a mental illness and a delusion that needs to be cured. "
If you hear that and you are trans, then you are bound to feel like someone is denying you actually exist. Its a strange feeling that someone whose existence has always been validated by society cannot really relate to. I imagine that's why you are puzzled by its meaning.
(Is it more about denying trans people's suffering perhaps ?)
I guess that this dismissal of mental illness (and here also of trans people) also comes from equating "anormal" with "bad". At least I can see where the conservatives are coming from with this, but I have much more trouble to understand it when progressives fall into this trap !
But back then we heard all the same things. "Oh, we can't have gay men teaching young boys because they are sexual predators and they are trying to recruit our young children to be gay." Or that "being gay is a mental disorder that needs to be cleansed through re-education".
It's just striking to me how similar the arguments are, right down to the legislating intimate space use like bathrooms and locker rooms, and the moral panic over children (who are yet again being used as moral shields). It used to be you couldn't even be gay in the military. Now they let gays in and it turned out to be not a big deal at all. But without missing a beat they've recycled the same baseless arguments but crossed out "gay" and filled in "trans", seemingly without any recognition or reflection about how badly their anti-gay arguments aged.
Yet the situation is radically different, since trans, in addition to having "social issues", also have "body issues" ?
(Then there's also the situation with (real) pedophiles, which, unlike for gays, we have decided to keep in the mental illness category - and understandably so, considering the danger for children.)
I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.
I think the issue is the consequences of speech which are permissible themselves -- I think being shunned by a friendship group seems always permissible. Being marginalized in one's workplace, shunned by one's colleges, and so on -- this seems far less permissible.
I dont think this is a strictly left/right issue; and what today is called "left" is rather a kinda of corporate politics --- "corporate correctness" rather than "political correctness". This is about embracing "diversity and equality" of your workplace identities (vs., diversity of skills; and equality of treatment, for example).
I'd imagine if work/life were better seperated, and the workplace better managed, these issues would be felt less seriously.
The question of "free speech" is a massive red-hearing. Everyone accepts some concequences to some speech in some situtations. The only useful conversation to have is: what concequences are permissible, and when.
Presumably, likewise, no one believes abitary ones, whenever -- yet this seems to be the implied position of many who think you can just stop the argument at the point where some "anarchism of speech" is shown to fail. Nope.
The only reason I brought up left versus right was because that's the reductionism PG resorted to here. I also think it's a bit more nuanced. I also think focusing on this being a free speech issue, as PG does, is a red herring for other cultural issues.
As far as where this culture is present, at least: tech, academia, etc. Ie., the places where we do see this counter-reaction. Though the counter-reaction is dressed in the language of free speech -- I think its more just about the capture of corporate policy, in these industries, by a certain descendent of political correctness.
People have to turn up to work in these industries, or otherwise participate in them, whilst holding their nose at this mawkish soapboxing display of which rich idiot is "changing the world" all the while those who are repulsed by this are ever-more seen as inherently immoral for not singing from the same hymm sheet.
If we recast this whole issue as one where previously political activity has spilled over into most areas of life, such that many now cannot espcae it --- then we see what the problem is.
It isnt free speech. Its the lack of quiet places. It's that if you want to work in these areas, you're bombarded with the loud noises of loud opinions that you can't escape.
There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.
See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.
Is this really a topic you needed to weigh in on? I’m assuming you weren’t concern trolling or playing devil’s advocate, but it’s very easy to imagine how a “gentle challenge” might get interpreted as such if your relationship with the other person doesn’t generally include similar discussion topics.
Certainly I wouldn't hang around with someone constantly reminding me which of my views they currently think aren't falsifiable.
You have literally provided it as an example of canceling:
> > When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes.
> There are plenty of examples... e.g. a friend ending our friendship
Someone can be affected by things and still end up with false beliefs. It’s possible to still be kind to someone and argue a belief they hold is wrong.
What’s true can be in conflict with deeply held beliefs (and often is). Part of the core issue is when one side won’t engage in actual discussion of the content and only argues at the meta level about identity.
I think roflc0ptic’s examples are good ones - thankfully it seems the discourse around this kind of stuff is shifting back to being more moderate.
Edit: It's not particularly important or relevant to what's been said here if you see the mainstream discourse as shifting to being "more moderate". This is a given with any single-issue activist, it's your business if you deal in organizing activists. The shift to being moderate only happens through this process, there's no other process.
If you don't concern yourself with organizing activists, then this isn't your wheelhouse, and I don't see why it was brought up.
Yeah, on that I agree - requires more deft communication skills. I think you can still “blame them” for holding false beliefs though (or phrased differently not give them a free pass on dogma) while still understanding it’s going to be an emotional thing for them, but this sounds like it might be us just disputing definitions over “blame” and we mostly agree.
I think this is a good point. An issue that coexists with this is that activist circles here in the 20x0s, of which I have been both a part and adjacent to, are in general not open to evaluating the truth value of their beliefs under any circumstances, not even around questions like "is this tactically/rhetorically an effective strategy?". There's also a related issue where basically their only tool for communicating across difference is opprobrium. You can see this laid out persuasively in this (uncommonly good) quilette article: https://quillette.com/2021/01/17/three-plane-rides-and-the-q...
What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion. And sure, there was a combative element to the civil rights movement - we're on the bus, you can't fucking ignore us - but it was coupled with cogence and reason. I'm pretty sure microaggressions exist, and also think they're a toxic framework for evaluating the world.
No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing a culture where people make their activism an immutable part of their identity because it's all they know and they have no reason to pursue outside perspectives; if you're in a marginalized group it can be very easy to end up in a situation where there's nobody to look out for you besides yourself. This is not a new happening in any way shape or form, from my knowledge it's been this way for as long as there's been free societies that allowed protesting. This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
Can there toxic social pressure in activist spaces? Absolutely, but that can be present in any social group where there are leaders and followers. That also isn't new in any way at all. I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
less of this please.
> This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
> >What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
>No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing
If you take the "don't listen to other people because you don't know who to trust" knob and turn it way up, you get to "listen only to people who agree with me", turn it farther "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy." I _don't_ think this was the dynamic in the mainstream civil rights movement, but even if it was it wasn't the rhetorical tactic outside of the black panther/WUG fringe. I _do_ think it's the dynamic/rhetorical strategy in the current activist milieu which has bled into the broader world.
You're right to say this, sorry I just legitimately can't understand how you could be extrapolating this if you had actually seen a lot of the high profile stuff that happened on e.g. facebook in the last decade. There's just so much unreasonable behavior and tribal "us vs them" attitudes coming from all sides at all times. I've seen lots of people do like you're doing now trying to blame this on "activists" for no real reason when to me it's every group doing it constantly all the time, even the ones that you would think would be relatively reserved. I honestly think you might be in a activist bubble and you need to get out from it, I can't understand why you would be otherwise focusing so much on the tactics of some "activist milieu".
Edit: Another response brought up a good point. Your pushing back on body image issues seems pretty tone deaf. Those are pretty personal and the point there is that it doesn't help to shame people for being overweight. Nobody responds well to that, it usually just causes hurt feelings. You can still promote healthy lifestyles without making it about "anti-fatness".
I could be mistaken about their idea's falsity, or they could be mistaken about its truth, but we'll never get closer to knowing if I don't engage.
Obviously I also owe them kindness and respect.
If they choose to interpret a kind, respectful disagreement as oppression or violence against them, they're hurting themselves.
In a mildly-related vein, it took me a long time to be able to recognize personal criticisms as a gift from the critic, and I'm still working on it, but the basics of that mindset shift seem to be settling in at this point. When someone tells me what they really think of me and my actions, they're engaging with me and giving me a chance to understand them a little better. I strive to be grateful for that even when the delivery is rude or hurts my feelings.
Genuine rejection and harm to others looks like physically injuring them, verbally abusing them, or barring them from societal spaces and services.
Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
Sure, same for combat vets. It still incumbent on them (and everyone else) to reality test their beliefs. Creating social conditions where people say unreasonable things and the only acceptable response is to say nothing and think to ourselves, "it's okay, she's a woman/black/whatever" seems bad to me. I don't think it helps anyone.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
You make interesting points but mix it in with shitpost stuff. Would be great if you chilled on that
To me it's like, look, do you really want to go to work with someone who says things like "you are ugly" and "you are stupid" and "your mother is a whore" to everyone every day? I know people who would do that even in professional settings, it's just as bad as you'd think. It's not declaring "heresy" when they get fired because nobody wants to deal with that every day. Pg is of course entitled to his own opinion of what he wants on his startup incubator and forum, which is why there's moderation on this site and why he has kicked people out of YC before for literally just saying things. It's not enacting "heresy" when you ban somebody from YC or hacker news for saying stupid and callous things! So why the double standard? That's why this whole comment thread and article is just absurd to me, I'm so saddened that so many people are actually commenting on this.
I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respect you."
Obviously you can tell people when you think they're wrong without them trusting or respecting you, but you're clearly right that it may not have many useful results in that case.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here...
I have a slight bias against pg.
His earliest essays I enjoyed, but his writing in the past ten or fifteen years strikes me as suffering from the blindness induced by being rich and myopically focused on startups and technological advances, with the apparent assumption that those things must be inherently good.
If I happen to agree with him on this particular point, it's not because I'm inclined to like his stances by default.
I think it's rather the opposite. There are, to be sure, tragedies and abuses of woke rhetoric that gets directed at the wrong people and/or implemented in outrageous ways. But they're pretty rare, and generally get a ton of media coverage for exactly that reason. Those are what PG is writing about.
But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people entering this kind of argument are actually just wanting more cover to say things they used to say that are... well, kinda off. Not "lose your job" off, but casually "x-ist" in a way that most of us would prefer not to engage with.
And really, that's the rub here, and the biggest problem with PG's essay here. Where are the examples? If there's something you want to say but feel you can't, then say it. This is a reasonably anonymous forum. PG is reasonably immune to that kind of criticism. But the problem is that when you say it the debate becomes a debate about your opinions and not your oppression, and that's ground these folks won't win on, like this one:
> I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric
You literally had a friend walk out of your life because you couldn't respect her boundaries about something as senselessly unobjective as body image, and the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one?
> the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one
I never said I was oppressed. You've invented that whole cloth.
If you find yourself thinking "they're just using this for cover to say bad things", consider that in the context of you abjectly misreading/inventing details to what I'm saying here. If you fill in details that match your own negative biases and then say "wow, these people really live up to my negative biases," you're not evaluating evidence, you're just testing your own beliefs against your projections of your own beliefs. Certainly looks like what you're doing here.
You are making stuff up. The person already said that they discussed politics together all the time.
If you are discussing politics with someone all the time, it is absurd to claim that a boundary has been crossed.
Like, I say I cannot understand trans people at all, and people will jump on me because I’m rejecting them and making them feel bad, when I’m just stating a fact.
There’s a lot of this stuff.
When you say "I don't understand trans people", trans people have heard this many times before. Unfortunately for you, many people who have said this phrase before followed it up with "...and therefore I hate them. I will legislate against them; I will pass laws against their existence in public space; I will demonize them; I will jail them; I will murder them."
Those are the stakes, so the pushback is in proportional to the life and death nature of what's going on here. When you say "I don't understand trans people" they are expecting you to follow it up with more of the same. And I get that's not great for the general public's understanding of trans people. But understand that it's a reaction to years and year of abuse from other people who also proclaim that they "don't understand."
Your general confusion is being received in an environment where people are literally fighting for their lives. Maybe in a different time, when people aren't facing down the vast power of the state to dictate their existence, there would be more room to treat you gentler. But the pressure has been ratcheted up to 11 by powerful forces bent on a 21st century new moral panic, and that's not the fault of trans people and their defenders, but the people who are trying to make their lives hell for no reason other than intolerance.
On the other hand, there is no such agreement around gender. People are using terms such as "gender", "man" and "woman" to refer to vastly different concepts ranging from "how someone subjectively feels inside" to "what physiological traits someone has" to "how someone is treated by society".
To the extent that not understanding someone comes from not understanding how they personally define gender and how that fits with how other people are using the same term, it seems quite reasonable to be confused.
Just because "I know it when I see it" applies to your personal lens its an inarticulate way of viewing the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
If this is the case, it’s only the case in the most vanishingly contemporary moment of ours. Both the Holocaust and the American system of chattel slavery were fundamentally predicated on questions of identity (“one drop”). Both moments also fundamentally shifted how and when people consider themselves Black or Jewish, because they are aware that others might consider them so for the purposes of persecution.
Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think this needs qualification: I don't think that treatment of individuals on the basis of gender (or sex) is just in the abstract, but I do think there are social policies that are inequal in scope that are justifiable on the basis of making all individuals more equal.
> Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think a lot of people agree with this! The tension is again in scope: the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
I pretty much agree with that. But I think that most people are thinking about rights being as assigned to gender in the abstract. It seems to me that the reason there's so much fuss about statements like "trans women are women" is because the assumption is that "women's rights" are assigned to women in the abstract, and that who gets them is therefore determined by who counts as a woman.
> the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
That's only true if you accept that cisgender men won't want to act in ways that we associate with trans or cis women (e.g. wearing dresses or make up (and if you define gender in terms of identity then you could even include making changes to their bodies here)). And IMO that assumption is pretty sexist. I also think that there is a tendency to assume that such men are trans women, but identity doesn't work like that, and if we want to talk about assigned-gender-non-conforming people in general then we should talk them instead of trans people. I guess I don't really accept that that trans women are under more pressure to behave in certain ways than cisgender men are. But if you have a good argument as to why you think they are, then I'd be interested to hear it.
Or see this op-end regarding the ADL changing their definition of racism to require it be against "people of color" and Whoopi Goldberg claiming the Holocaust was not about race: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/03/whoopi-go...
The same kind of postmodernist thinking that is comfortable redefining well understood biological terms like "male" and "female" to be about "not doing the dishes" or "liking climbing trees" instead of generally unambiguous biological properties is just as comfortable deciding that you're "white" on the basis of not wanting to extend the protection of anti-discrimination laws and norms to you.
Seems like a weird thing to say. I don't understand FORTRAN at all and as such I stay away from people discussing it.
Why do you want to tell trans people that you don't understand them? Wouldn't it be easier to read some literature so you can gain a basic understanding?
I see this a lot and it makes no sense to me. What does it mean to deny the existence of someone? To pretend they do not exist?
People who make that comment usually seem to be falling into a trap of viewing a disagreement or difference in opinion as something much more extreme.
This effectively denies the existence of people who believe or desire to be their non-assigned gender. The statement tells trans people that in the eyes of the speaker, their personal identity is a fabrication.
If that's not denying the existence of a different kind of person to you, I don't know what is.
Define horrible.
But a lot of these heresies are about behavior/speech outside the workplace, or behavior/speech that you need to actively look for.
So I don't buy the "hostile work environment" justification.
Looks like someone didnt understand the article, because PG directly addressed that point.
People say horrible things all the time! In fact, I reckon that if you said anything, a non-negligible fraction of the world's 7.5 billion people would think you horrible for saying it. It is not possible to avoid saying horrible things, especially out of context.
Even if you limit yourself to racist and sexist speech, how do you deal the fact that roughly 100% of the people on this planet, of ALL races and sexes, are themselves racist and sexist, and say racist/sexist things all the time? What are the consequences for a homophobic black person? What are the consequences for the Japanese woman who hates the Chinese? What are the consequences for the Libyan mother who circumcised her 4 daughters, with the support of her government and community?
The culture war that the left has started is an intellectually bankrupt grab for cultural power, who's primary effect has been to piss off the good people of the left, and to inspire a once-in-a-century outbreak of insanity on the right. I get that you want to make the world a better place, and it makes sense that punishing people for wrong views could make it so, but you've done the experiment now. Tell me, how is it going?
* The tools of censorship are then used for normal speech. Proof: Ron Paul had a YouTube channel. He left politics before the covid and no videos had been posted since the pandemic started. But they censored his YouTube channel full of videos by censoring all of the videos and the channel.
* Proof here: https://twitter.com/ronpaul/status/1308849979730071554
* This censorship of the political right happens in a long list of cases that have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or false propaganda. Ron Paul's YouTube channel being censored is one example in a list of thousands just like it.
It's really easy to think/say horrible things. The main defense humans have against it is following orthodoxy, which is a social construct that imperfectly represents historical knowledge about good and bad.
If you think you are naturally good (whatever that means), you are wrong. If you think you are good because of your intellect, you're also wrong. It takes many generations to build up the kind of orthodoxy that keeps humans good. And the lessons behind it are too many to learn in a lifetime.
So, we need to mostly follow orthodoxy, at least in our actions. But that poses an intellectual problem: orthodoxy is imperfect, and to discuss and advance it, or even understand it well, you have to challenge it. If merely by challenging it you transgress, then it will never be understood very well and certainly not advanced.
Granted, there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
Remember: gay marriage was illegal almost everywhere 20 years ago. Imagine the surprise to, say, a 60 year old, that "misgendering" (by using pronouns associated with one's biological sex) might be a firable offense today.
One issue is that there are multiple orthodoxies. Each human culture has its own orthodoxy which is reflected in the culture's norms and practices.
>> there are good and bad places to challenge orthodoxy, and the workplace is usually a bad one. But sometimes orthodoxy changes very rapidly in certain areas, to the point where something orthodox ten years ago is firable today. That's not a good situation.
When and why is it right or just to judge one culture against another?
We can try to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, but it is very difficult to understand without having lived their lives and experienced it ourselves. Perhaps the best we can do is to be compassionate and tolerant of others who think or live differently than us. We can educate, persuade, and help, but condemning them and punishing them strikes me as unfair and perhaps unjust depending on the circumstances.
2) I think you're conflating two different groups of people to make your argument sound better. I don't like cancel culture and I don't like the Florida bill either. People aren't just "ignoring" it.
3) > denying the existence of people who aren't like them
This is such a weird, vague statement and I have no idea what it means - which is great because it perfectly captures the mob mentality of the far-left cancel culture. The reason everyone is so afraid of it is because you never know exactly what you can say, and it changes by person by day.
In my professional experience, even "acknowledging the existence" of trans people is a minefield. The term to describe someone who is transitioning has changed like four times in the past five years and using the outdated term is considered wildly offensive. Certain people think changes of pronouns should be handled differently and if you disagree with them you eventually get a meeting invite from your supervisor called "Discussion".
Speaking of hostile work environments...
I understand the euphemism treadmill can be difficult, but understand why it exists: when people in a group use certain words to self identify, those words are then coopted by outsiders of the group to vilify insiders. Therefore the old self-identifying words are abandoned by insiders and left as markers of those outsiders who are attempting vilify them. Meanwhile new words of self identification are adopted by insiders that have no negative connotation.
Take for instance people with mental disabilities. The words lunatic, insane, retarded, disabled, mentally disabled, special etc. have all been used to describe the same mental state, and have all been at times the "correct" way to refer to such people, and also the "insensitive" way to refer to such people. Calling someone "retarded" used to be clinical. Now you say "retarded" and it's a grave insult.
This is just the price of diversity, and existing in a world where people want to use powerful words to shame and demean. Words have amazing power, and when they are wielded in evil ways you have no other choice but to abandon the word and move to a next one.
This is why the N-word is so forbidden to say; Black Americans took a stand and said: "No more. We are reclaiming the power of this word, and you just can't use it anymore, period." It took a huge movement to make that social change, and it'll take the same similar movement to stop the euphemism treadmill for trans people.
In the meantime, try to keep up. If you make a real effort people notice and they have tolerance for that. However if you make clear that you have no idea why you have to keep up with all these words in the first place, and it's really all just a bother to you that you'd rather not deal with, you're implicitly signaling you're more aligned with someone who may use those words in a harmful way, and that may be why you are met with hostilities.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill
If teachers must disclose student confidences to parents, it discourages students in unsafe homes from letting on to their teachers that they’re questioning their sexuality. That’s a chilling effect on speech.
Which, looking at the replies, is a mistake, because everyone projects the least charitable interpretation and/or assumes the article is dog-whistling.
The problem is that there are heresies and heresies, and conflating everything together isn't helpful.
To give one extreme of a "heresy": It's reasonable to not want to associate with someone if they're (in your perspective) ideologically reprehensible. In that sense, it was a bit aberrant that in the past most people would look the other way at stuff like racism and antisemitism in academia or the workplace ("none of my business," "not related to their professional skills," etc.)
But when other people think of "heresies" they might be talking about approving of a right-wing policy in a left-wing environment, or (moreso in the past) being labelled "communist," or taking contrary stances on things like wage equality.
So to reiterate my point, the article is flawed and can only lead to noisy nuance-less arguments until it spends more time defining "heresy."
Beginning of the actual framing of the issue:
> There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.
> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist,"
Is there any genuine confusion what he’s talking about here? How many commonly used words fit the “x-ist” framing?
I mean he’s a white pontificating boomer billionaire active on Twitter worried he’ll eventually say something dumb and get cancelled.
Which, indeed, is a concept that’s having a cultural moment right now. The problem is he’s adding literally nothing to the discussion.
I think most sane people can realize that the fringe “woke” elements of the discourse can veer into ridiculousness. Maybe that matters a lot maybe it matters a little I dunno.
To the extent there’s an actual problem here it’s really focused on those who are potentially at actual risk.
Examples of actual problems that could be created by excessive wokeness include the increasing degree to which HR is able to divide and control the most vulnerable elements of the labor force, or the highly cynical ways in which jargon laden intersectional language is used to obscure a hegemony of corporate and wealthy donor interests over leftist or activist organizations.
Would be interesting if he had opinions on that.
But instead we’re again talking about how the most powerful economic forces in our culture are being trolled on Twitter. That isn’t an actual fucking problem. Like really it isn’t.
PG is clearly a very smart guy. I’ve read his books I want to like him. Sure is a terrible pity he’s not spending his twilight years being introspective about the horrifying legacy of inequality and misery that’s been inflicted on society by the tech sector, where he has an actual ability to have a positive influence.
You’re trying to divide two types of heresies because you don’t want to acknowledge the truth, there’s no two types just a sliding scale of offensiveness. You want there to be repercussions for some heresies (overt racism and homophobia?) while others should be let to slide by. But there’s no inherent difference between the two types. PG is smart and acknowledges that, but decides there should be no repercussions as long as you state facts. I and I suppose many on the left would say there should be. As long as it’s not the government that’s doing the banning in public forums people need to shut up about their rights. What’s special about the government? As PGs friend Thiel eloquently put, government is a monopoly on violence, it stands to reason the only entity that shouldn’t have the authority to shut your opinions and voice is the entity with the monopoly on violence.
But I guess once you’ve stayed rich and influential for long enough you’re annoyed at this one remaining domain where you can’t just have everything you wanted yet so you want to change the rules to let you do the same. That’s what people like Thiel and now sadly PG are trying to do. They don’t care about any real issues, they just want to spend time blasting wokeness and actively sabotage all of humanity (in Thiels case) because I don’t know what their endgame is.
So you're saying that there are factually correct statements that nobody should be able to utter without facing repercussions? Can you offer an example?
There are infinite true statements. We have to carefully pick the most useful and applicable truths to say in any given situation.
That's what wisdom and maturity are. Understanding a situation and choosing a good course of action. Including the truths we choose as the primary descriptors of the situation.
I think this is actually the big problem in the debate, not "cancel culture" or "heresies". A lot of people seem gleefully enthusiastic about seeing the worst in other people. This is not isolated to just one ideological side: people on the right engage in it just as much as people on the left.
I've started to seriously dislike "dog-whistling". Often it's "yes, what they're saying is looks fine on the surface, but I know their actual secret motivations!" Yes, things like "14/88" and whatnot really are "dog-whistling" and it's fine to call it out as such, but 9 times out of 10 I see it used today it's weird assertion about someone's motivations. It's essentially a straw-man argument with extra steps (allude to a far more extreme position than what was stated, and then attack that).
Sometimes this goes so far I wonder if I somehow don't understand the English language correctly, or ... something. Many times I see people commit a "heresy" it's something fairly mild – or even completely benign – taken to far more extreme levels than what it seems to mean on the surface.
In this specific article it seems clear to me that Graham isn't defending tosspot Nazis or other overt "x-ists", yet here in the comments we have people who seemingly take this to mean that Graham is defending folks who say that "people with different skin colors are dumber" and similar things. You can read that in his essay, I suppose, but only if you come at it with a certain attitude.
Once you eliminate the "this person is x-ist, let's find arguments to support it"-attitude the whole "heresy" problem goes away, too. I haven't the foggiest how to actually do that though.
...one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves.
Remember, these are religious fanatics not scientific objectivists.
Sure, that might insulate him and put him in an echo chamber, but blocking is entirely his right, and he's the one who'll get the consequences from that.
I also tend to do a similar thing in spaces I curate, and it's honestly better for mental health. Someone comes out from nowhere with something completely 180 degrees from what I say? That's not reality TV, that's my private [social network page]. I'm not gonna be baited.
Saying someone "can't block" is an asshole move. Nobody should be forced to talk and see messages by anyone.
To take an example from my own experience, if I automatically tuned out anyone who said something bad about the requirement to make things accessible for blind people, I would deny myself the opportunity to learn how they think and become more effective in my advocacy or, possibly, revise my position.
If you're interested in hearing the other side in all cases, then of course blocking is counter-intuitive. Wether he wants or not, it's his choice.
However, even if you were to block everyone, you could still curate the experience of hearing from the other side in other situations: by consuming articles, by asking someone privately, by not blocking some of the replies.
I also would disagree 100% that social networks are a proper venue for this kind of exchange.
He still has 100% the right to block and saying this is akin to cancellation is bullshit.
People judging you for your blocking is one of the prices you're socially expected to pay in return for those privileges.
Someone popular being in an echo chamber causing problems for society is a larger issue that maybe we should address separately. It's not on him to solve problems created by social media at large. Maybe limit reach of Twitter accounts.
Even if it were kind of his responsibility, that doesn't preclude him from being fully in his right to block people when he doesn't want to interact directly in a social network. That should be an inalienable right.
You can criticise anything you want, and I'm not saying you're not in the right to do so. But saying this is a problem comparable to cancellation is making a gross exaggeration.
Does his block makes you lose your job? If not, you are missing the point.
It puts your financial wellbeing of you and your family at risk.
You and others will probably think twice before dissenting otherwise you better dust off that resume and tap into those savings.
But I guess people aren't killing people so cancel culture is okay, is that your standard?
I have disagreed with PG on Twitter, and also pointed out errors in his logic and facts a bunch of times, and haven't been blocked.
The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).
[that such x-ist labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity]
Your conclusion is roughly his point, but his point holds independently of the "truth" of the underlying statement.
It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
Most spaces aren't for discussing what's true, they're for getting-things-done. Stating truths in those spaces may, seemingly quite rightly, be prohibited.
You can not make progress in a land of fiction. Propaganda is a stop sign, not a tool for productivity.
> It really doesnt matter if your x-ist point is true, if saying it, is an action which destabilizes (eg.,) the workplace.
I think this is pretty insightful.
There are two things at play here that I think are being conflated - one is challenging certain concepts, and the other is challenge the social order that is predicated upon them.
Let’s take racism as an example.
Arguing that racism doesn’t exist, in whole or in part, is challenging the concept. Rightly or wrongly, that is one of the “heresies” from the article. It’s also a very difficult thing to discuss respectfully and productively in the workplace, and in most every case I can think of off the top of my head, unproductive.
Arguing that the actions taken in response to that conclusion, in my opinion, is and should be a different thing entirely. We have a work environment today that seeks to offset historical/systemic racism through positive steps such as affirmative action. I believe that challenging the implementation, scope, or even the continued existence of affirmative action should be acceptable - because it is a specific action that is in the scope of the course of business and has a demonstrable impact on the work environment itself.
From my reading of the article, I think what PG is saying is that it should be much more acceptable than it is to openly and honestly discuss the system that we have built that creates our work environments. I don’t believe that someone who argues against affirmative action - or any similar workplace policy, explicit or implicit - should be anathema.
This example of racism/AA is only one example. There are others with similar stigma associated.
Personally, I feel a great deal of social pressure not to discuss anything related to COVID in the workplace. I work for a company based in SF, but live in a small town in the South - very different social environments. I have had COVID, have verified that I have demonstrable antibodies on par with what is expected from vaccination + boosters. I also have a history of systemic inflammation that I’ve struggled with my whole life, and both my GP and the specialist I see agree that vaccination poses at least a slightly higher risk for me than for the general population. As a result I’ve decided not to get the vaccine. I have absolutely zero desire to try to sway anyone to see things my way, and honestly don’t want to talk about it at work lest it turn into a political argument. With few exceptions, I avoid discussing politics with colleagues.
A while ago we were planning a team outing in California. I wasn’t going to be able to attend, but I absolutely didn’t want to discuss that the reason was that I wasn’t vaccinated and don’t want to be.
This is the kind of heresy that concerns me. I feel like it should be reasonable for me to say that I am not vaccinated and don’t intend to be. I shouldn’t have to justify that. I may be excluded from some activities, and that’s acceptable to me - but it’s a discussion that I don’t even feel like I can have. Instead I have to hide this decision, avoid discussion of it, and hope I’m not put into a position where I’m forced to. If I do have to reveal it to my employer I expect that at the very least I’ll be viewed negatively in their eyes and it will harm my social environment.
It shouldn’t be seen as heresy to hold a different opinion.
Anyway, the truth is if you’ve had COVID-19 you are far more protected than someone who got one of these vaccines. It is heretical to say that, and I get called an “anti-vaxer”, but it’s true.
> a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination
It is a loaded term that is used mostly as a means to vilify people. There must be a lot of people who are pro vaccine, but against government mandates, so where does that leave them? Also, it is possible to be generally pro vaccines, but also skeptical of new vaccine technologies rushed through development and regulatory approvals in record time where the companies leading the push have a history of putting profits ahead of public health.
The fact that your comment shows up in gray here is further proof of the exact dynamic that he is referring to in the essay:
> But occasionally, like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large number of aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideology all at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mob dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant is increased by the enthusiasm of the others.
Choosing to make a particular statement at a particular time, in a particular context, in order to promote an "x-ist" agenda is "x-ist".
That's the same whether or not the statement is true.
I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.
There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"
Because we shouldn't automatically assume the worst in each other?
This is your example of a "truth", correct?
Who defined "crime"?
Why is possession of crack a more serious offense than possession of the same quantity of powder cocaine?
Is the single crime of selling a loose cigarette on the street equivalent to the single crime of defrauding tens of millions of dollars from investors?
How many officers are tasked with arresting people for "quality of life" offenses like loitering and disturbing the peace vs. tasked with arresting people for wage theft through unpaid overtime and time card fraud?
Are your statistics for "committing" crime in fact statistics for convictions? Are there systemic reasons those might be very different numbers?
If all of these are more useful subjects for discussion, what is the purpose of even making the original statement?
I agree with PG in that I'm also not too happy with the "only X can be x-ist", but on the other hand I'm also not a conspiracy nut that talks non-stop about "critical race theory". I'm also not free speech absolutist, as I'm ok with things like European law criminalizing Nazism or glorification of genocide.
I feel like I'm constantly against three very radical groups, and there's nobody representing me.
I'm tired of radicalism coming from three different directions.
Perhaps people should read David Graeber and Cory Doctorow more?
The whole culture wars thing is a prime example of complementary schismogenesis in action, which was rather nicely presented in the Dawn of Everything from Graeber on couple thousand years old tribes.
Have you noticed how the discussion here is fairly civil? It's very similar to most Reddit places, lobste.rs and other *moderated* fora as well.
Most of these extremes only arise in unmoderated spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. Or the original /b/.
Similar things are happening in the news comment sections wherever they don't care to moderate.
It radicalizes people long-term. I am no fan of censorship, but EU will probably step in eventually.
’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’
Nobody heard him.
— https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...
I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.
For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
I think you read your biases into that, too:
> The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says.
So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something.
And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different.
In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable.
But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success.
Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500.
So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
Yay.
But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.
Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.
"It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.
The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender.
My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.
"13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational.
Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".
Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context:
A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top.
B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all.
If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's:
> Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good.
What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?
What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?
Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.
Even a decade ago, tribes were geographically local. Today, your tribe is literally global. It knows no borders. Thus social media amplifies the effect of cancel culture and "same think".
I would argue this may dominate over the effect you assume and drive the same simply because if one wants to become outraged over an act, they need to know it occurred in the first place.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the overall effect of the internet is to drive cultural consensus.
What's worse is tribes also have strongarms inside corporations. If the Internet mob wants to get someone fired for saying something, they just reach out to the local chapter of strongarms and make demands/walkouts against the company until they get their way.
Instead we're stuck with an modernist take ungrounded in history.
Your argument is basically a “slippery slope” argument, and this is a good example of why these types of arguments are so weak and problematic.
But good point, no two times in history are completely identical so we shouldn’t bother.
Unless that opinion is about who owns a specific piece of land.
Sorry, I mean 'intolerant people'.
Definitely not 100%, but regardless of that: definitely not something I, a neutral part, can answer, let alone groups with an anti-trans/anti-LGBT agenda. This is a case-by-case thing to be decided by professionals.
If you don't recognize that playing life as a middle class white, cis, male is still 'easy mode' compared to literally any other option... I don't know what to tell you.
In everyday life, most of us are happy to accept the "reality" (in whatever philosophical sense you choose to use) of all sorts of personality traits that exist only "in the mind": kindness, eloquence, sense of humor, willpower. If you likewise accept the reality of "gender identity" as a mental trait, then I don't understand why it makes sense to insist that trait is only meaningful when it's "fully formed" -- can we say that about any aspect of our personality?
I don't know if this exact question has ever been scientifically studied, but it seems pretty clear that if you offered people the choice to push a magic button and permanently change their body to the opposite sex, the vast majority of us would pretty confidently say, no, and a small minority of people would be equally confident in answering the opposite way. That's close enough to "objectively measurable" for me.
We don't allow children to make other permanent changes to their bodies in general (and those tend to be stigmatized even with parental consent); and more to GP's point, the majority of children with a desire to be the opposite sex grow out of it.
It does not make sense to me that we question a child's judgment in all other matters except this one. This is important because gender affirming therapy is, medically speaking, nontrivial and not without severe risks.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/104/3/686/5198654?logi...
I know, anecdotally, that some homosexual men are gender dysphoric during prepubescent age but grew out of it during puberty, and feel it would have been a mistake to transition at that age.
But this isn't the point of the essay. The point is that asking questions like these would get you branded a heretic by the far left. And acknowledging gender dysphoria would get you branded a heretic by the far right.
No drug has no side effects, least of all one that inhibits puberty. Letting a kid make a choice like that - one they can’t possibly understand the consequences of - is worse. Saying we’re doing it so that they don’t commit suicide in the short-term with no regard to their long-term induced infertility? That’s just irresponsible not to talk about.
That couldn't be further from the truth as possible.
It is the right constantly saying they should be 100% banned, with the other side wants more nuance in the discussion.
You'll sure find some wackos with this position to use as a strawman, but that's definitely not "the left". I'm left, and I don't know anyone saying it.
TL;DR: You're projecting.
I’m running off of https://aleteia.org/2022/04/06/biden-administration-promotes...
And that’s that.
Or is it?
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977299 and marked it off topic.
p.s. since this kind of mod comment tends to elicit responses, I should probably add that I'm in a workshop today and unable to do as much as I normally would on HN. So if anyone notices something not being taken care of or not getting a reply, please don't be quick to draw large conclusions from that—it's more likely that I'm not as free.
Is this a matter of heated discussion or what…
That’s usually all there is to it.
Personally I flagged it because it’s conversational flame bait where two radicalized groups will argue past each other endlessly, which will serve only to reinforce their radicalization. (Yes, me too)
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?
Many (most?) statements embed some of the speakers attributes, either explicitly or implicitly. At a trivial level, saying “I am hungry” can be true when one person says it and false when another does.
Obviously “I” statements are not what Graham is talking about, but the idea that your lived experience cannot qualify or disqualify you for passing certain judgements seems suspect.
Unlike others, I don’t want to cancel you for being racist, though you clearly are, by your own admission.
This tolerance I show towards others allows dialog and thus enables human progress. Cancelling racists does the opposite. I support your right to think out load and bless the sacredness of your inner spirit even though you think racistically about free speech which imo is not really “free” speech.
Here’s an example: There are words that have historically been used as slurs that have been reclaimed by the people they were used against.
If you are not a member of that group, your use of the word invokes the history of its use, and is likely x-ist. As a member, you are likely able to use it.
He can't think of a statement that is false when a white person says it and true when a black person says it (or vice versa).
The quote in question is immediately after this paragraph:
> If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.
Which the quote about the variation of a statement is given as an obvious counter argument once someone has already said that x-ist statements cannot be true.
Are they really the same statement if they have two different meanings?
There are truths that are empirical (math, physics, etc), but most controversy that includes “x-ism” is about things that are subjective and don’t bucket neatly into a true/false dichotomy.
Consider looking at piece of art and saying "I think this part is badly done". This is a very different statement depending whether it is the author saying it, the author's mentor saying it, unrelated person saying it to their friends, or the same unrelated person writing it on twitter. And it doesn't matter whether it is true - it might not even be possible to say, objectively, whether that part is actually badly done.
Same goes for talking about groups of people. Criticising a movement as a member internally, as a member on twitter and as a member of opposing movement is very different, no matter whether it is true or not. And movements are (usually) voluntary - it matters even more when talking about groups of people by categories they can't chose, like cultures, sexual orientations, skin color, etc.
"grouping people by categories they can't choose" is "x-ism". people are more than their skin color, sexuality, or anything else.