People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new.
And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it.
Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people.
Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
Was going to say the same thing. I guess some people are just firm in their beliefs. It's only data if it supports what you were otherwise going to say, or something like that.
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.
> We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.
No, it isn't. It's just a sentiment that shitty toxic tribalism masquerading as social justice (and whatever the equivalent is for the political right) has no place in legislature/schools/corporations.
It's actively detrimental to good policy/education/business if only by the virtue of drowning out people who are just going about their day to day responsibilities.
The past few years has shown us who the tech titans really are. We only had an inkling before, but now they don't have any reason to maintain a facade.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere.
A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
For your average voter, the current two party system is almost materially indistinguishable from one party pretending to be 2 parties, so the issues have already started, perhaps even for decades. Fixes for this include, but are not limited to: campaign finance reform and ranked choice voting.
> in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech...
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
Per the description provided above, the ban is on "classroom instruction... on sexual orientation or gender identity." It's doubtful that stating "Jim is married to Barbara" could be counted as "classroom instruction on sexual orientation" any more than stating "Jim works at the pentagon" could be counted as "classroom instruction on geometry." Nor would the statement "Jim is married to John" be considered "classroom instruction on sexual orientation". The point of the law is to encourage teachers, when fielding a question like "Why is Jim married to a boy?", to reply "Ask your mom". Parents are wary of these discussions for good reason[0].
It's truly hard to imagine allies more "dangerous" (per the parent) than those who obstruct the vital "freedom of expression" that is... teachers talking to children about sexuality.
> Is This a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
To be clear, the law that the person I am replying to is likely referring to is Florida House Bill 1557, which passed in 2022 and originally applied to kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 2023, it was expanded to apply to all grades, K-12. Here is a quote from the rule [0], this is the rule's self-summary:
"The amendment prohibits classroom instruction
to students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3 on sexual
orientation or gender identity. For grades 4 through 12,
instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited
unless such instruction is either expressly required by state
academic standards as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, F.A.C., or
is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which
a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not
attend"
According to DHH, the massive tech layoffs were motivated by a desire to rid companies of wokeness: "most major corporations have wound down the woke excesses while pretending it's all just a correction for "over hiring"." He goes so far as to say that's what Basecamp did and (in his opinion) it's a necessity to clean out those with the wrong political views in every tech company. Sure sounds like a politically-motivated purge to me.
Perhaps the more accurate term is "suppressing" - you can do this directly or by crowding out or deprioritizing specific content based on many attributes. Content is both literal and second-order (like paid vs. unpaid)
I wish twitter would use LLMs to automatically censor people who abuse apostrophes. As long as they're promoting and appealing to Nazis, throw the Grammar Nazis a bone!
Society, in its grand equality, gives rich and poor alike the ability to spend their money on billboards and full page ads.
This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.
I'm sorry, but "wokeness" until recently was on the agenda of multi-billion dollars companies such as Google, Meta, Apple and the rest of Fortune 500. Implying that left-leaning people can't afford to pay for their Twitter/X profiles is laughable.
Pretty much any billionaire I can name has taken an "anti-woke" stance: Musk, Trump, Thiel, Graham, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, Ramaswamy... Money is definitely not on the side of the "woke", whoever they may be.
A friend of mine pointed out that in societies like Russia and China, it is the oligarchs who are most directly under the thumb of the strongmen. They're visible and are the first to "fall" out a window, whereas if you're some nobody you might be able to get away with dissent.
Bezos's quashing of dissent at The Washington Post might not (just) be the solidarity of a real billionaire with a fake billionaire but rather the very real fear he won't get a permit for anything for the next four years. If Zuck plays along with Trump, Trump eliminates competition from a better alternative, etc.
A counterexample is Bloomberg Businessweek which trivializes racism with the mindlessly woke policy of always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B right next to reviews of $350 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
> always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B
Not really agreeing or disagreeing with your overall point, but I'm fine with this practice. I used to think it was weird, but I've come to realize some things:
1. "Black" is not acting as a descriptor of color. Black people do not have black skin. Black people with even the darkest of skin in the spectrum of "Black person" still do not have black skin. So the word is being used in a very different way than its common meaning.
2. "Black person" has become a proper noun of sorts, in parallel to "Asian person", etc. I also see most (all?) publications that capitalize "Black" to also capitalize "White" when talking about race, which seems reasonable through this lens.
Seems like the only billionaires you can name are the ones that made the news in the past week... How about the "silent majority" of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergiey Brinn, Lary Page, Warren Buffet, Steve Ballmer, etc? Are they all "anti-woke" as well?
I guess my point here is: until recently "wokeness" was the mainstream ideology, basically the default setting for all the rich and powerful. Yes, recently half a dozen of billionaries switched sides, but that does not mean that wokeness doesn't still have trillions of dollars behind it.
What was that agenda exactly? The only ones that come to mind are good, actually:
- Allowing more free speech internally and working towards providing a safe space for everyone to provide their ideas.
- Investing in under-served communities to try and build talent to hire from.
> The only ones that come to mind are good, actually
It's funny you say that, because my impression is that DEI allows companies to avoid criticism of their oppressive policies with token investments in a few diverse staff.
- Running sweatshops in SEA [1]? "NIKE, Inc. is building more equitable and inclusive practices to empower our employees and create the workforce of the future." [2]
- Repeated oil spills in Nigeria? [3][4] Shell's vision is to become "a place where everyone—from employees, to our customers, partners and suppliers—feels valued, respected and has a strong sense of belonging." [5]
- Exploiting unaccompanied, undocumented children in factories that make Cheerios? [6] General Mills is "committed to advancing our culture of inclusion, equity and belonging for our people, business and communities." [7] They are also happy to look the other way when their subcontractor Hearthside Food Solutions hires children to work in their factories, as long as they have plausible deniability.
I hope that's enough to reveal that a lot of these so-called DEI initiatives are only there to performatively assuage investors and activists, while the companies involved continue preying on the marginalized.
It's much more than that. If the government says, "only land owners can publish", regardless of content, that's still obviously censorship. In what world would "only Christians may publish" not be censorship?
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
But you have to mute each account when trolls probably create new accounts daily just to troll people and make fake engagement between their accounts to get boosted by the algorithms.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drivel, including those that are state-sponsored though I agree the latter will have more power to counter, but it will certainly act as a drag.
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
> The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drive
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.
Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.
I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.
If I go into for you instead of following it's extremely heavily skewed into conspiracy theory right. So to me it looks like they are boosting the reach of that content.
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.
So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
I remember having a conversation with someone around a decade ago about whether "social justice warrior" pointed at anything real. My contention was that every popular moral system has its prigs and its fanatics - social justice no less than Christianity, environmentalism, socialism, etc, etc, etc.
Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
I did not read till the end yet, but "woke" is also a very successfully weaponised word for anyone to help push their ideology to further extremes, both left, right, not center. Woke is also a very good detractor from rich and poor discussions.
Related: People wonder why English has so many weird spellings. It's a complicated answer. The Vikings seem to show up way too often (grin). One of the reasons, though, is that several hundred years ago we all thought that Latin was the bees knees. The Greeks and Romans were the model. So took words that were perfectly-well phonetically-spelled and "fixed" them, returning them to some kind of bastardized form that was "better".
For some words it didn't work -- people went back to the old ways. But for some it did.
This chaotic priggish churning in society is not new, as pg points out. I love how language, manners, idioms, and cultures interact. It can be a force for good. It can also be extremely destructive, usually in tiny ways and over centuries.
While I love these intricacies, I also always fall back on the definition of manners I was taught early on: good manners is how you act around people with poor manners. Add complexity as desired on top of that. The form of communication and behavior can never replace the actual meaning and effects of it. (There's a wonderful scene in "The Wire" where they only use the f-word. Would have worked just as well for their job to have used the n-word. 100 years ago, the n-word would have been fine and the f-word beyond the pale. Draw your lessons from that.)
ADD: I always try to be polite and abide whatever traditions are in place in any social group. One thing I've noticed, though: the more people express their politics, their priggishness, their wokeness, etc -- the crappier they seem to be in their jobs. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because this is such as easy social crutch to lean on and gain social advantage that it becomes kind of a "communications drug". Scratch a loud prude or moralizer, you find a dullard or slacker. Conversely, people who produce usable advances in mankind tend to be jerks. I suspect this relationship has held up over centuries. cf Socrates and the Sophists, etc. (A good book among many along these lines is "Galileo's Middle Finger")
They'll do what we allow them to get away with. The quote "the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy" applies here. Trump is revealing who these people really are.
Yes. What we're seeing here, and with Facebook and other platforms explicitly allowing racism and companies rolling back DEI, etc, is compliance in advance. It's a common fear response to authoritarianism. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.
As many of us here who came from less fortunate places can tell this kind of adversity is the ultimate character test. Nobody is surprised with opportunists. But even among generally nice people, those infirm will fold and prostrate even before they are asked to.
What? Paul Graham has been making statements that people found "too right wing" for at least 20 years. I have never seen him express pro-censorship or radical DEI views like the big U.S. corporations did.
We see now that all these corporations are A-grade hypocrites, which was already clear in 2020 but forbidden to say.
You cannot accuse Paul Graham for suddenly changing his views.
Timing is everything. There's been a procession of tech leaders prostrating themselves before Trump, and Trump hasn't even had his coronation. Now Paul Graham has joined the fray.
So excuse me if I see it as a pathetic capitulation. A "me too" moment following all the other so-called tech leaders.
Most of them have just been handing Trump one million bucks of protection money. There is really no need to go above and beyond and post an article like this, Trump isn't even going to read it.
It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed.
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
> We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
It should be possible for vouch-capable users to un-vouch in order to demote obvious rage-bait like this article. I'm sorry, but no constructive or intellectually curious discussion is possible here.
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
This is great and the spiciest take buried within what you mention is the following (Christian) POV:
People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack.
Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society.
Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
Interesting. But that shouldn't surprise us. "Performative" means you're doing something to be seen, not because it's really "you". Well, when the power shifts, then who it's worth being performative for also shifts. I wonder if that's what we've been seeing in the shifts since November.
> How does he know that the scale of the problem is what he thinks it is and not what “woke” people think it is?
Broadly speaking, there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left. One can reasonably, trivially dismiss most infinities.
> The essay can be summed up in one sentence: There should be no meaningful consequences for men who engage is lewd behavior
There is something deeper here you’re missing. Women can generally define lewd behaviour however they want; there is no similar official mechanism in the balance. A one-way institution like that will predictably build righteous backlash against itself. That backlash is partly performative and partly justified.
> have absolutely no need to get anywhere near the line of what anyone would think of being lewd
How is that relevant?
The point is if one party can inconsequentially, to them, subjectively define lewdness and cause consequence to others through it, you will wind up with abuse and backlash. Whether it’s lewdness or moral uprightness or loyalty to a flag is besides the point.
When Apple announced cycle tracking for the Apple Watch. You would be surprised how many people on HN thought that was a useless niche feature when it literally is something that affects every woman of child bearing age
> Are you really not capable of knowing what could be considered “lewd” and not go into that territory in polite company?
I’m pretty sure I both am and am aware enough of the line and its ambiguity to weaponise it against someone else if I wanted to. Add to that cultural variance in where the line lies and you effectively wind up censoring cross-gender discussion of gender-relevant topics.
I don’t think Graham is advocating for lewd jokes in the workplace, or suggesting the womens’ rights movements of the 60s were misplaced. He’s arguing against universally institutionalising rules of politeness, and being particularly wary of doing it one way.
> in polite company
Graham is arguing against the expansion of polite company to virtually the entire discussion space. In that, I kind of agree.
> I’m pretty sure I both am and am aware enough of the line and its ambiguity to weaponise it against someone else if I wanted to.
I have been in customer facing roles since mid 2020 as a consultant. There really is no ambiguity. I don’t talk about anything that can hint at going in a sexual direction, or politics or religion. I just don’t get involved with those types of conversation at work.
Occasionally, I do have to talk about politics as it affects business especially since I spent a lot of time working in the Education/State and Local Government space.
> He’s arguing against universally institutionalising rules of politeness, and being particularly wary of doing it one way.
There has always been institutionalization of what one should and shouldn’t talk about in “polite company”. Those norms have changed through the years and rightfully so. Did your parents grow up in the Jim
crow south?
> Graham is arguing against the expansion of polite company to virtually the entire discussion space. In that, I kind of agree.
How is that any different than it has always been? I talk differently when I’m with my friends and family in private than I do when I’m in public spaces.
Society would look at me like I was crazy if I did the same amount of “cussing, drinking and telling lies” loudly like I do when I’m at home with my friends playing cards if I did it in public.
> There really is no ambiguity. I don’t talk about anything that can hint at going in a sexual direction, or politics or religion
One can absolutely impute all kinds of nonsense from inaction as much as action.
I’d also challenge the fact that I don’t need to make lewd jokes as extending to the premise that they need never be made. (Or that our refraining from making them doesn’t cover up something darker.)
> norms have changed through the years and rightfully so. Did your parents grow up in the Jim crow south?
And most of those shifts are reasonable. Some, however, are purely performative. Latinx is a frequent example, though I’ve never met anyone who seriously used it. As a gay non-white man, there is plenty of performative nonsense online that comes from people who I can’t imagine actually have any friends who are in the category they claim to be looking out for. (There are also jokes that, while off colour, speak to something true, even if they’re made at the expense of some of my immutable characteristics.)
> I’d also challenge the fact that I don’t need to make lewd jokes as extending to the premise that they need never be made. (Or that our refraining from making them doesn’t cover up something darker.)
They don’t ever need to be made in polite company. I don’t consider “polite company” to be comedy, what you do or say in the privacy of your own home, etc.
I’m a Black guy and the amount of times you will here the “n word” and “fuck” fly out of my mouth in private and with family of my generation rises to the level of Samuel Jackson.
And I know no Black person that says “African American” outside of some professional circumstances.
And yet, here you are, making the lewdest of remarks. You're making me uncomfortable and need to stop making hurtful accusations that could be damaging to people. We're trying to have a polite discussion here.
Correct, but if the point is "what is lewd can change out from under you without any consent on your part" ad contra scarface and in support of the OP, then this is a reasonable response (though I agree it would have been better to put it in quotes and then point out the issue in several follow-on paragraphs to better fit with the site. This isn't Reddit).
If anything, they provided an example of how the counter-argument is disingenuous: one person's opinion of what is and is not lewd did not dictate the community opinion on the topic in this context.
Many of these complaints about arbitrary rules changing, to my observation, come from people who were simply unaware of a decades-long conversation happening in spaces they don't care to be invested in: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, human behavior studies, etc. And when those conversations reach a well-reasoned consensus with convincing arguments that sway the hearts and minds of people with control over interaction spaces, it can be a little startling when rules change! But being upset about it is a little bit like being upset that the web APIs changed due to the publications of WHATWG while consistently ignoring the well-publicized discussions and work of WHATWG.
Graham in this essay seems to be laboring under the belief that because these norms didn't originate from the STEM education space, the STEM industry space doesn't need to adopt them or take them seriously... As if they weren't originating from the space of professional consideration of sociology and human behavior.
> If anything, they provided an example of how the counter-argument is disingenuous: one person's opinion of what is and is not lewd did not dictate the community opinion on the topic in this context [...]
... because someone who spoke for the community spoke up forcefully in favor of the current rules.
"According to your opinion, and it's your site so you can censor people who speak up. But I can see that you don't take sexual violence seriously. It's your choice to enable serial sexual harassment through lewd comments."
There I put it in quotes so you can see the point being made. Considering I can attribute lewdness to nothing, I am easily capable of doing so from any comment. Now, as an "individual of color experiencing comment censorship" (the phrase for someone who is downvoted), I demand action.
I understand, but in my view it's neither a good argument nor a helpful point.
You're right that the meaning of a word like "lewd" is disputed. But disputed is not the same as arbitrary, so your argument falls afoul of this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Whem you respond to people with opposite views (e.g. scarface_74 and gedpeck in this thread) in that way, you stand no change of persuading them or even of generating a curious response in them. It's guaranteed to be alienating. That's the opposite of the kind of conversation we're hoping for here.
What it will do is generate reinforced agreement among readers who already shared your view, but this is also the opposite of the kind of conversation we're hoping for—not just (or even at all) because it worsens polarization, but because repetition is bad for curiosity, and these are some of the most-hammered nails that exist.
Ah, but you believe repeated statements that it's easy to know what lewdness is are helpful and novel? They are mere assertions, not argument, and can only be met by direct contradiction.
Regardless, you are correct that this discussion is tiresome and besides, pg has pointed out that it's over: freedom is winning. It's gauche to fight after victory is declared.
I’m not the one who quantified things. Graham did. I take it then you agree with me that Graham’s statement was written without merit or justification.
EDIT: Graham wrote, “Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.”
He stated a limit on the level of racism. He gave a bound on it. He said it is less that what woke people think it is. CrissCross is being deliberately obtuse. This edit is for people who come across this thread. My comment pointed out that Graham didn’t justify this belief. I don’t know the level of racism and I’m not arrogant enough to try.
> I’m not the one who quantified things. Graham did
He quite literally didn’t. There are almost no numbers in the entire essay. The argument you object to is qualitative.
> take it then you agree with me that Graham’s statement was written without merit or justification
No. The exact limit is both irrelevant and not definable. Your comment demanded a “scale to the problem.”
EDIT: > EDIT: Graham wrote, “Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.”
He stated a limit on the level of racism. He gave a bound on it. He said it is less that what woke people think it is
One, still not quantitative. Two, nobody is debating whether there is a limit. (I said “there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left,” and you said “obviously there is a limit.” These statements can coëxist.)
The question is whether Americans’ subjective sense of our own racism is accurate. And I’m saying that someone who claims there is more racism than the average person thinks and then fails to define it (the burden being on them, after all, for rejecting the status quo), that said person is probably overestimating it. Not necessarily. And there are plenty of activists and academics who are quite precise about defining and measuring racism. But those folks aren’t usually the ones running around online calling others racist.
Can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style? Your comments are standing out as more flamey than anyone else's that I've seen, so far, in the thread.
In particular, it would be good if you would note and follow the following site guidelines:
"Don't be snarky."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your views are welcome, but we need you to express them in the intended spirit of the forum. The same, of course, is true for anyone with opposing views.
I’ve been on the site since the beginning under various usernames. I agree with your point overall but sometimes something said truly is “bad” (idiotic, foolish, whatever) and is deserving of being called so.
I believe writing “after the riots of 2020” and framing what happened as “wokeness” qualifies as idiotic.
I made my points and haven’t responded further. I don’t believe I’ve said anything else that can be considered flamewar style commentary. I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said.
The trouble is that all those labels do is rile up people who use opposite labels, or put the same labels on opposite things. Then we get into a label war, which is bad for everybody and invariably deterioriates into acrimony. We're trying to avoid that sort of internet here.
You got a lot on your hands and I’m writing what follows more for myself than for an attempt to change your mind. The Overton window has greatly shifted rightward the last 50 years. The sort of statements being made by people like Musk merit condemnation. It’s no longer a matter of let’s politely disagree and state our mutual positions. We are well into the realm of the Paradox of Tolerance. Normalizing abhorrent viewpoints is not a lofty goal.
I appreciate the reply and it generates at least half a dozen interesting (at least to me!) responses in me, but it would probably take all afternoon to figure out what they are and write them down, so I guess I'd better not :(
(especially because getting my wording wrong on topics like this leads to painful reactions - I don't mean from you, but the format here feels like intimate conversation when in fact it's public broadcasting)
In Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement, he notes that articulate forms of name-calling are still name-calling.
When Graham opens his essay by providing a definition of 'prig' but then using that pejorative over and over again to refer to his conceptual opposition in this essay, how are those who are responding to the essay to respond? It seems we put ourselves on a field disadvantage if we are to argue a point with an author who is immediately resorting to name-calling with one arm tied behind our backs.
I respect this site tries to be something else than other online fora. But it is a site still inextricably tied to Graham and his legacy, so when he drops an essay like this it's reasonable to either expect people responding to it will take the same tone as the founder of this site, or that we should be very, very clear that this site has become something not at all associated with its founding.
We ask commenters to stick to the guidelines regardless of what someone else is doing or you feel they're doing (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us). It's the only way this place even has a chance, because it always feels like the other person started it and also did worse.
But I think you'd be wise to drop this idea of a "field disadvantage". HN threads aren't supposed to be a football game, a tank battle, or anything else where that image would fit. It's not about defeating opponents or, as I used to say, smiting enemies. It's about maximizing interestingness, to put it clumsily.
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
> the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years
I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since [1]. (It’s currently in a generational peak. I don’t know if that’s a last gasp of their boomers or something deeper.)
> The entire crusade against ‘woke’ is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a ‘minority majority’ country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out
I think it’s about as unfair to paint the rejection of “wokeness” like this as it is to paint every progressive policy as woke.
> I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since
Unfortunately between the way that Electoral College, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state works, the religious right has far more influence than their population would call for.
I’m not saying that last years election was caused by that. It was mostly because of the ineptitude of the Democrat party
Puritans predate "Fundamentalists" in the American Christian sense of the term, and if we're just following _this_ line of thought (and no others) the Romans were busy setting Christians on fire for garden parties because they were not willing to conform to what the Empire demanded (worship of the Emperor and acknowledgement of many gods).
The behaviors and reactions to benign, relative ideas and thinking from anyone they disagree with are uncannily identical. There is no shoehorn to be found here.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.
Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
I think you're probably right wrt flattery of southern accent, but for white people imitated black accents I have to disagree. Growing up one of my friend idolized Will Smith and thought he was the most badass dude on the planet. He would often quote movie lines from him with the accent, and it was 100% a form of flattery. It is also very common for white people to rap along with black artists using the same accent, and it's because they love the song and the style. Nowadays most parents will immediately try to silence their kids for doing that in public, and anyone older than about 12 is now terrified of doing that, so it's quite possible things have changed.
That said, I would agree that the majority of people doing accents are likely to be mocking. I'm not sure how to prevent throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
Will Smith has never had a stereotypical “black accent”. (I’m Black by the way). But do you notice that no matter how accepted an actor is in the Black community or even the Black hip hop community - ie Eminem - that they never say “the N word” in public or in their lyrics? Of course in movies you will hear it.
As an aside, I do think Robert Downey Jr. may be the last White guy who can wear Black face in a movie without getting canceled.
Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
"Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
Over the past couple of weeks there have been two heavy virtue signalers in my social circle that have turned out to be complete assholes to people around them, and I had that thought exactly. Maybe the very reason they feel the need to get approval from "virtuous" people is because they themselves are so awful.
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
The flipslide is trolls will spew out the lies faster than you can rebut them. Much faster. Orders of magnitude faster. The lie is short, pithy, and requires little thought. The truth require context and effort. After a lie has been rebutted several times there is little value in allowing it to be repeated constantly. Eventually the truth tellers get worn down and the lie is allowed to live on in perpetuity, allowing more and more people to believe it over time.
That is a view which is entirely opposed to my own. I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
If you don't act against disinformation, you get a world that is spammed with so many statements that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess the truth of any of them.
> I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
I read this as "it is impossible to determine truth". If there exists a well resourced entity who's entire purpose in life is to determine objective truth and they are unable to do so what chance do I have?
That's the problem though. Your judgement gets warped by the constant stream of lies. That's the fundamental concept behind propaganda. If you repeat a lie enough times it will be believed. Everybody thinks they're too smart to be taken in by propaganda, that's one of the reasons it works so well.
Having the power to determine truth does not seem like a great way to run a society even if it gets you some easy wins on other fronts.
It might work at first and be effective for some time in the same way that a dictator can "get things done" but there is no free lunch.
Eventually you will get evil dictators, power hungry arbitrators of truth. It will bite you. It is only a question of when. It might be years or generations. The only winning move is not to play. Don't concentrate the power in the first place.
That's great until it convinces them to make real-world decisions that affect the rest of us. For instance, vaccine misinformation talked a lot of people against getting safe (or at least safer than the illness), effective (not perfect, but effective) immunity shots for COVID. Those people are dead from being wrong.
I think someone's an idiot for denying the moon landings, but their ignorance doesn't directly affect my ability to stay alive and health. Some misinformation is worse than others.
Well said. It surprises me so many people don't see the danger inherent in anointing 'fact checkers' who are supposed to adjudicate some objective "truth" around complex culture war issues along with the power to suppress other viewpoints.
Free speech isn't free. We pay for it by tolerating speech that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, wrong, insulting, offensive or hateful.
I agree that the government should not censor statements that don't violated specific laws.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."
I would generally agree, but in many cases 1) people don't read the comments/replies, 2) interesting responses get drowned out by low-quality responses, 3) the criteria by which useful responses get highlighted can be skewed by a variety of factors, including vote brigading and algorithmic bias or sometimes just a bias towards the earliest comments (which get upvotes, which then get more views, which get more upvotes).
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
It also lets the liar try to trap rebuttals with gotchas. In this case, “so you’re saying there aren’t a higher percentage of black people in prison? A-ha! Facts, not feelings!”, or something stupid like that. Then you have to waste time with that, to which they’ll reply, “so you admit they’re more likely, a-ha!”
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
My point is that "cannot say" is pure hyperbole. Your freedom to say whatever you want is not impinged, and my equivalent freedom to shun you based on what you say is similarly unimpinged.
Usually when people complain about what you "can't say", what they actually mean is they can't say whatever they like and still have people still employ / socialise / be nice to them.
Expressing opinions that others find disagreeable is not a protected class.
If you want to shun me for not loudly enough pronouncing how great some sort of special privileges for certain ostensibly oppressed classes is, or for not jumping enthusiastically enough though hoops referencing people with exactly the most woke-community prescribed terminology, then chances are I don't particularly to associate with you either. That's fine.
If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions), or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Of course that would still not literally make me unable to pronounce my woke-taboo opinion, but it should nonetheless be obvious that trying to wreck my life is a disproportionate response merely to me not toeing the line you took it upon yourself to draw. What you "can't say" is almost always graded rather than absolute, but active hostility destroying months or years of a person's life is well into the territory that constitutes a real hindrance for freely expressing an opinion.
> If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions),
Both of these things are already well-litigated limits on speech. I.e. - it's already illegal.
> or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Either your views are so taboo that most of society doesn't want anything to do with you if you express them, or they're mainstream enough that only some people don't want to associate with you. If it's the former, then yes, you might struggle to find a sympathetic employer and that warrants some introspection. If it's the latter, then you're hardly at risk of having your livelihood taken away.
The alternative is that I should be forced to employ someone who fundamentally disagrees with my right to exist (and perhaps owns lots of guns).
If you KEEP saying it, despite being told that it's making your coworkers uncomfortable, then you're just being an asshole, and sorry, people don't like working with assholes.
I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
> I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
Everyone agrees with this. Obviously, the problem is determining what is true. There is significant disagreement. This is the root of the problem, not that people are preventing other people from saying things that they themselves believe are true.
> it’s now “woke” to say that multiple police officers shouldn’t kill someone by sitting on their neck for 9 minutes
He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
That doesn’t exactly help. Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality since at least as far back as NWA’s “Fuck the Police” when Tipper Gore was clutching her pearls about the affect such music had on society.
It was just not until social media where minorities could get around the press and media filter.
> Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality
And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it.
That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.
The right has been pro police since day one. There is no world where the right was going to be in favor of criminal justice or police reform until it started affecting them.
This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences.
That we agree with. There is a huge difference between “we need to allocate funds for mental health and other societal ills that cause people to be incarcerated and we need to have more accountable for police misconduct” and “defund the police”.
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
> wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Maybe I could refine it to, what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things. I do think good comes out of it, along with bad. But we can set that aside and refine the point that I don't think the majority of people who initially went along with wokeness were aggressively conventionally minded nor prigs. I think his essay would be more persuasive if he acknowledged that there is an earnest desire to do good mixed in with it, which makes it a thornier issue. Otherwise, people who were or are into wokeness who are not prigs, or merely afraid of running afoul of etiquette, will probably dismiss the essay.
> what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
Some people compare wokeness to a religion, and I think this is somewhat of an apt description. There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me, and this is how I feel about most social justice stuff.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
> There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I know quite a few people who are not religious (agnostic or atheist), one of whom is myself, who still believe that abortion is, if not actual murder, at least tantamount to it, and should not be done except in extreme cases (what exactly counts as an "extreme case" can vary, but the point is that "getting pregnant because of consensual sex that unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy, and having an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy and then putting the child up for adoption" is not an extreme case). I can't speak to other people's detailed grounds for this belief, but in my own case, I believe that, at some point fairly early in the development of an embryo/fetus (in an online discussion on another forum some years ago I argued that that point was implantation; another such point that was argued by, IIRC, Carl Sagan, is when the fetus first shows brain activity), the embryo/fetus has interests that deserve protection in much the same way that the interests of a very young child who can't yet recognize their own interests or take action to protect them on their own deserve protection.
In other words, I don't buy the argument made by at least a fair number of pro-abortion people that it's all about the woman's control over her own body and no other interest deserves to be weighed. I think there are reasons that even a rationalist humanist should accept, or at least give strong consideration to, for rejecting such an argument.
I'm not trying to argue for such a point of view here; I'm simply describing it to illustrate that I don't think all such disagreements can be boiled down to religious belief. There can be arguments based on considerations that are much more general, to the point where they at least have a claim to be considered by anyone who wants to be a good member of a civil society.
I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
How do we take murder or robbery seriously? We say we do that by making and enforcing laws against murder and robbery. But do we actually do what we say?
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
> "How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously"
will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing.
But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite
Well, there are plenty of countries that take murder extremely seriously and have vanishingly low murder rates (Japan comes to mind) so I'm not sure we can really say that taking it too seriously is counterproductive to the goal of reducing murder.
I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.
(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)
But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of
this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment
I definitely agree that you can take something like sexual harassment seriously in extremely harmful and counterproductive ways.
For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.
I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.
Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.
Yes. All analogies suck to various extents, but, "murder" and "robbery" are pretty apt analogies.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
Politicians' claims don't do anything about anything because they're words. But actually taking murder more seriously through action - allocating money to investigations, prosecutions, social services, better jobs - I'd be surprised if that had no effect.
The comment I replied to said "taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless, not "talking about taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless. I agree with the latter, not the former.
The problem is how to reduce how often actual
sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more
seriously" is a very vague and ineffective
way to do that.
Why do you perceive some sort of conflict or paradox between "taking it more seriously" and coming up with an effective way to prevent it?
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.
I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
I agree, but I think in the context of pre-twentyfirst-century religiosity, "prig" had the connotation of a person who was, yes, a huffy moral scold, but essentially harmless. In the context of current wokeness, there is a very real intent and ability to destroy lives. (As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously, though certainly Elon's investment in Twitter has taken quite a hit.)
> As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously
The new right tech bros are doing their own cancellations. Silicon Valley traffics in old tweets critical of Musk or Trump like the Victorian courtesans Graham ironically criticises.
well, people who use it to self-identify often use it in terms of being aware, a positive attribution, and I assume people who use it to identify others use it in terms of being judgmental, a negative attribution. So yeah, it's a highly charged term.
I have never seen anyone in a social network self-identifying as "woke".
I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.
Precisely. One commenter above got close to the point but then completely missed it: they suggested that people get into “wokeism” with good intentions, such as wanting to reduce things like sexual harassment. Then, they ponder whether there is a way to reduce sexual harassment without becoming “woke.” They fail to realize that you don’t simply declare yourself “woke.” It is a label others assign to you once you decide you are no longer going to tolerate things like sexual harassment.
Same with SJWs. Lots of people wore that label until their actions caused it to become negative, at which point everyone who proudly wore it pretended to never have ever heard of it before their ideological enemies started using it. No doubt some new label will replace woke, be worn proudly, get tarnished by the people who wear that label, and once again they'll try fleeing from the associations they created.
False, people with an axe to grind decided to accuse everything they don't like of being woke or SJW the same way that Americans scream "communism" at everything they don't like.
It's the lowest form of public discourse, spewed by ignoramuses who have nothing of value to contribute to conversations.
From the article’s first couple sentences:
> The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
Reliably yes, but not necessarily. Especially within the context of the parent question and the article. It was a self referential question about why the forum users would flag a blog post by the very forum’s founder. I suppose it answered itself and if anything my comment was redundant.
It's my impression that geeks are prigs at a higher rate than society as a whole, but their priggishness is generally directed in random directions which makes it harmless and even quaint or endearing.
Surely you've experienced the one person on the team who will lecture endlessly on why robertson screw drive are so much better than torx, yadda yadda... or something similar. it's not a question of having a point or not-- they might or might not-- it's the haughty air of superiority, the perspective that countering perspectives don't exist or at least couldn't have any merit, that their pet issue couldn't ever be too irrelevant to worry about.
"System of rules that you can use to bludgeon people with instead of considering and empathizing? Sign me up!"
Maybe before you didn't notice it because more of them agreed with you or because enough of their priggishness was uncorrelated. Like a ferromagnetic material, if the domains are pointed in random directions you get no net field.
It's probably even just an effect of online forums in general. If you are of the view that many ideas are valid and that your preferences aren't so important, you tend to not comment at all.
In any case, if you're bothered by the net-prig-field there is a remark in PG's essay which might provide some advice: The priggishness is amplified when membership can be self selected by ideology rather than geography. If you just mix a diverse collection of people together their prig field will tends to cancel out, views will be normalized, extreme positions suppressed. So seek out venues where the structure of participation doesn't lend itself to polarization, or at least polarization incompatible with yours.
Maybe. I think in this case (woke mind virus) most geeks are cowards at heart, or at best want to avoid conflict, and are easily bullied into something. They end up becoming true believers soon after they come to realize they’re with the popular group for a change.
This sort of thing makes me nervous. When the owner of a forum finds the masses don't unflaggingly support his take on something, what's the reaction?
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles".
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
Imagine that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate for some reason consistently uses the term "colored people".
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
It's the same with the performative moral posturing. Woke used to mean being cognizant of systemic injustice - stuff like police brutality. It came from 1970s harlem.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
I think I once read on reddit that the first few votes a comment gets pretty much determines whether it will score sky-high, or get downvoted into oblivion.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. [...]
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
>In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination
Such is claimed. Which are the false accusations, which are the legitimate accusations, and which are merely the mistaken accusations? And how are each of those quantified? If someone actually tells me the numbers, how do I know that those are the correct numbers? And why should I believe them? Is there a reason to believe those, other than trying to qualify for the world championship "I am not a racist" games? If my skepticism is also racism, I then lack the means to be and remain rational about the subject, and if I can't be rational about it then I am with 100% certainty being manipulated with regards to the subject.
Are you allowed to be skeptical? Do you feel as if you're allowed to be skeptical? If you do feel as if you are allowed to be skeptical, why are you not?
I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
I think it's called "from first principles", which is the laundered term for "disregarding context and previous work, because I don't feel other people's work is worth anything".
These are my favorite to read since it contains a full, traceable, logical path to get to a conclusion. It's much easier to understand why they think something.
On this flip side, my least favorite are when someone name drops thinkers as a way to reference an ideology. It's very hard to actually know if someone understands the ideas behind that name, so it's usually impossible to understand why they think something.
And, the names they drop often were the types to present their thoughts as the first, rarely, if ever, dropping names themselves, which I always find an amusing "they were allowed be free thinkers, but you can't!"
I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
From a (potentially made up [1]) letter from Freud:
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
Someone could say something similar about the large number of people who apparently reviewed this essay, who were supposed to critique it in order for him to make it stronger. It's possible he just ignored their criticism, but it's also possible they already agree with Graham and didn't think about the flawed premises, so their feedback didn't address what might be "blatantly obvious" to you or I.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
It's regulated in such a way that it's absolutely allowed to use it to criticize the political opposition, which is why Der Spiegel can not only use it but show it combined with the German flag:
Yes but that's irrelevant to my point. If it were universally offensive it'd be just banned entirely, but in fact it's allowed to be plastered everywhere as long as you're using it in ways those in power approve of (to criticise their political opposition).
The symbol itself, therefore, isn't offensive. Otherwise Germans would be up in arms at their government for allowing it.
Books are special cases, because they can be considered discussions. And, often, they're nonthreatening discussions. Pick up the book if you'd like, read it, think about it, respond by talking to others or writing letters. Great way to advance knowledge.
But here's a different context: I see somebody spray painting a wall in an alley. If they're painting a flower or a portrait, I might hang around or come back later to see the result. If they're painting a swastika, I'm more likely to avoid that alley from then on.
Symbols mean something. If they didn't, nobody would bother using them.
Books aren't considered special cases, as the prosecutions in Germany for using one on the cover of a book about politics show.
Your hypothetical spray painter could be using the symbol in many different ways and contexts, of course, including criticism or analogy. Whether you'd avoid it or not would probably depend on what the rest of the painting meant.
A symbol or word carries no inherent meaning. We give it subjective meaning. That meaning is constructed socially through a shared understanding of what that symbol means through context and intention.
The same symbol or word can have multiple, and sometimes opposite, meanings, in different contexts.
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
Is that how you justify a swastika tattoo? You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling, I don't see why it has to be "cultural".
Signaling is bad because anyone can signal anything they want. Everyone should be judging either other based on actions not superfluous signals. And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Obviously its a gradient, but we can agree that "dedicate time and money" is on the action side and "typing online" being superfluous signaling. And yes, if you knew me in real life, you probably shouldn't weight my hacker news comments over what I spend time and money on.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's so much a gradient. It's that everything is always both an action and a signal. Since signals can affect the behavior of others, all signals are actions. If an action is visible, it may convey something, so all (visible) actions are signals.
> And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Tattoos can change, too. If I had a tattoo like that, but had come to see the error of my ways, I would have it removed, or if that was too costly and time-consuming (it takes a year or so of painful, expensive, periodic laser treatments to remove a tattoo), I'd have a tattoo artist cover it up with something else.
There's no excuse for keeping a neo-Nazi tattoo if you stop being a neo-Nazi and realize that neo-Nazis are disgusting people.
I don't think a swastika tattoo would be problematic if the person doesn't impute Nazi symbolism to theirs. Even in the West, swastikas and associated symbology is used pretty heavily in neo-pagan circles, and while some of those folk are racist, most aren't.
But OPs point is broader: if you allow the bad people to just appropriate the symbol as their own, they're going to gradually take over everything. Never mind swastikas; we're at the point where making an okay sign can be misconstrued as a white nationalist gesture, and people self-censor themselves accordingly.
There's also the reverse problem here, where, if you tie such things so strongly to symbols in popular opinion, then loud condemnation of such symbols is used to "prove" that one is not a bad person. For a major ongoing example of this look at Russia with its cult of "we defeated the Nazis therefore we're definitely the good guys".
At the end of the day, it's really just a lazy shortcut. The bad people are bad because of their ideas and actions, not because of their symbols. If we always look at the ideas and actions, the symbols are irrelevant, and we don't have to surrender them to the bad guys' claims.
That doesn't really fly. The Nazis are so bad that unless you're south Asian a swastika is assumed to be a pro Nazi sign. Does it sort of suck? Yeah but it is the way it is. Plenty of slurs don't have any inherent negative meaning and are slurs because of how they tend to be used. Occasionally some minority groups partially reclaim them like with Queer but mostly polite people stop using them
>You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling
No, you are just giving them the power to actually do stuff without looking like they are doing stuff.
As long as they talk the talk, they don't have to walk the walk. You don''t have to actually care about issues, that's what the DEI department is for.
When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
Is there a specific other word you'd suggest? I was watching an event last week where the promoters:
* had everyone declare their pronouns
* advertised their segregated black-only event next month
* repeatedly interrupted to chant "trans rights!"
This is a very common cluster of behavior, and I'm not sure what I would call it other than "woke". If there's another word that would be better, I'm all ears. But my experience has been that proponents don't find any word acceptable, because what they object to is the very idea that this is a distinct cluster of behavior. They feel, as the source article says, that each of my bullet points is just an independent matter of respect.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
Truthfully I think that it is a dialectic process that counterintuitively perpetuates a mentality of victimhood and otherness. The neverending process of being othered//feeling othered//trying to empower oneself in one's otherness is entirely futile. To assimilate, you must assimilate.
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
Personally, I took the comment to imply that we are not really solving the root issue behind what is driving the change in terminology and thus we are doomed to continue to apply the same (ineffective) solution.
> Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped?
It does not. If we were merely talking about the current young person slang word for something good (e.g. rad, sick, amazeballs, etc. (don't ask me for the current one)) no one cares that the terminology changes.
But in this case each change comes with the same reasoning behind it. This indicates that the change has been ineffective and people ought to consider why that is and if there is something else that could be done instead or in addition to be more effective.
I don't think that one was ever "acceptable". That being said, literally every term after/including "African-American" in that list is socially acceptable. Not sure what they're going on about.
I'm not so sure. It sure gets used a lot in "Huckleberry Finn", even by people who aren't being malicious. (From my recollection, anyway. It's been ages since I read it.)
Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
I thought the underlining thing had more to do with practical limitations of (most people's) handwriting and of common typewriters. Italics, when available, have been preferred for titles as far back as I'm aware.
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.
What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
I'm wary of the concepts of "fact-checking" and "mis-information," but there really is a lot of bullshit being said without any corresponding check on "yeah, but is that true?"
Of course, if your worldview is sufficiently different from mine, we will disagree on what is true. But lying is lying.
> The document explains to employees that epithets like "gays are freaks" and "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" are now allowed under the new policy.
but yeah, its definitely the fact checking that people are most upset about
> Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you
Or perhaps the GP liked the fact checkers because they were on the whole doing a good job of actually checking facts.
I don't know if that's true or not; I haven't been on social media in years. But it's an incredibly weak argument to assume that someone only likes something because it aligns with their politics.
> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
> Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
I am not “right wing” by any definition but this is naive and bubbled to the point of ridiculousness. Very little political discourse on social media is grounded in fact regardless of the ideologies involved. Layman discussion based on headlines and vibes has no place in serious politics and the real danger of these platforms is that they’ve elevated that to the standard
Who deserves a voice then? The high priests of the media annointed by billions of dollars in funding? There has to be middle ground. If I have the right to print and sell a book about any political or technical topic, why can I not post on social media? Is the threat of people being heard and finding consensus really that bad? Unless these "laymen" are calling for lynchings or something, they have every right to be heard.
Who do you think was employed as "fact checkers" and who paid them? If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else. It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
> Who do you think was employed as "fact checkers" and who paid them?
Legitimacy, or at least a thin veneer of it, so that the Biden administration wouldn’t force it upon them.
Because that was always in the cards - legislation that would legally force these companies to fact-check, or worse, for an outside bipartisan agency to do the fact-checking with no way for these companies to control the process.
>If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else.
Again, it had to look authentic. But Meta did the absolute minimum amount of fact-checking as possible. Just enough to appear like they were actually doing something constructive, to keep the administration from looking too deeply.
But now? Zuck is doing exactly that with AI accounts.
>It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
Checking to see if something is truthful is “antithetical to the USA and is oppression”??? That statement is misinformation _in of itself._
America is not built upon a foundation of lies and misinformation, but without fact-checking, that is exactly what Americans will get -- lies and misinformation. Because there is nothing to counteract lies and misinformation except concerted efforts to check them for factual accuracy. As in, fact-checking.
Maybe one day you will come to understand just how important facts are, and how critical it is to ALWAYS have them checked.
Because the only people afraid of fact checking are those who are threatened by facts. Just like how countries who fear the truth target journalists for elimination. There is no difference.
And the left loves facts. Because facts are a manifestation of reality, and the truth. Which is why checking for objective reality and truthfulness is so important for the left, and why the left is invariably unhurt by fact-checking.
He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.
its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.
Interesting point to consider. I recently questioned the validity of a statement made by a newsletter publisher related to a repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theory that he used to attempt to bolster his point. It reeked of irony.
I politely asked for a fact-check on it in the comments section, as I otherwise enjoyed and agreed with the substance of the post. He both removed the claim in question and my comment.
I was unsure of how to feel about this. Those who had already read the post online or still had the original in their inbox were left with the misinformation from what they may consider a trusted source.
I believed it would have been better to edit out the false information, leave my comment, and reply with clarification on the editing and why.
Likewise, this practice of dynamically-edited online content is actually relevant to the topic of PG's post and the role it plays in replacing the traditional constraints on printed media.
While there is room for quibbling about whether or not silently removing false information from a piece you've written is dishonest, it most certainly is not honest.
In addition to those who received an older version with the misinformation, a critical aspect of determining what is true is determining who to trust, since there is far too much to be known for any one person to determine it themselves. Silently editing your own writing to respond to good criticism of it leaves future readers less informed about your own trustworthiness.
There are numerous changes over the first two days, Exercise to the reader to find which HN comments inspired them.
To note: I really have no problem with him updating his piece to reflect accurate criticism, I do find issue with doing it silently, and with not reflecting on how it should influence his thoroughness in the future.
I was thinking about Stewart Lee as I attempted to read the article. It resonated especially strongly as I got to the part about how this awful "political correctness" is the reason that women are now able to report sexual harassment on campus. I wasn't able to make it much further. Hats off to those brave adventurers who made it through the whole thing.
The point he is making is that it's ultimately absurd to make moral judgements based on word usage.
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
> A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
I read Future Shock for the first time a few years ago, on about the 50th anniversary of its publication.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
Yeah, I generally really liked this blog post, and I was very much steeped in "woke" culture at one point. But this part struck me as an analogy that could be improved. Lots of things about human culture and language are strange if you try to understand exactly why they came to be what they are. Think of various ways of saying Christmas: Xmas, Noel. Or Santa Claus, he is also Saint Nicholas, but Christmas is not Saint Nicholas's Day, like Saint Patrick's Day or Saint Valentine's Day, etc.
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
>So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American"
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
There's a difference between respect and compel. And it's not a fine line neither. Most people are fine with respecting people's pronouns, especially when it is someone they already respect.
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
Have you ever worked at a large organization that markets themselves as progressive? If you have and don't have any experience with being pressured or outright told to comply with performative measures like email signature changes, your experience would appear to be an anomaly.
And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Fired for accidentally misgendering someone, or fired for intentionally misgendering someone repeatedly, often for extended periods of time? The first is the situation being discussed, the second is the situation that actually happens.
This distinction seems to be an untraversable chasm for the prigs PG is talking about.
Anyone (whether I already respect them or not) comes to me and asks me to refer to them by a specific name or term, I'll gladly do it.
Someone comes and accuses me of being an -ist or -phobe because I didn't put my pronouns or link to the latest iteration of a corporate-speak diversity policy in my email signature or just tells me to do it without explanation or discussion, and I'll tell them to pound sand.
If that person cared to ask why I don't put them in my email signature, I'd gladly tell them that I might have if anyone bothered to ask nicely and/or explain the merit of their request but ultimately I don't care one whit what pronouns someone uses to describe me and am well aware the corporation I work for doesn't actually stand for anything in the aforementioned statement. But the prigs won't ask.
No, my position is: stop policing the well-intentioned language of others based on a treadmill of acceptable terminology.
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
The battle over the term "tranny" in the 2010s was very eye opening. Some celebrities were being skewered for using the term, though they and a huge % of LGBT folks saw it in a positive light.
>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
The stigmatization is imagined at best. Its similar to how words to describe individuals with learning disabilities also gain a negative connotation. Its not the word its the fact that the word refers to a subset of people that a comparison to is an insult. Hence, Mongoloid -> Retard -> Special -> <whatever the new one is>
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
I think _Mongoloid_ doesn't fit with the rest of your examples, as it was never originally an impartial term. There's never a time when _Mongoloid_ wasn't an offensive term to some group, whereas _retard_ & _special_ were originally impartial.
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
That is what most people avoid. Ramaswamy said it outright in his book but is now pro H1B. I have never heard Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray mention any economic issues ever.
There seems to be a secret penalty for bringing up that subject, unless you are running for MAGA like Ramaswamy and then possibly reverse opinion once people voted for you.
> Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 531 ms ] threadAnd it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it.
Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people.
Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
It seems that his opposition is with SJW Puritanisms and I agree with him on that point.
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
as an endorsement of the social conservative elements of "antiwoke".
Is that not anti-woke?
It's actively detrimental to good policy/education/business if only by the virtue of drowning out people who are just going about their day to day responsibilities.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere. A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
- Julius Nyerere
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=L1300
It's truly hard to imagine allies more "dangerous" (per the parent) than those who obstruct the vital "freedom of expression" that is... teachers talking to children about sexuality.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/719685/american-adults-w...
To be clear, the law that the person I am replying to is likely referring to is Florida House Bill 1557, which passed in 2022 and originally applied to kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 2023, it was expanded to apply to all grades, K-12. Here is a quote from the rule [0], this is the rule's self-summary:
"The amendment prohibits classroom instruction to students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3 on sexual orientation or gender identity. For grades 4 through 12, instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, F.A.C., or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend"
[0] https://flrules.org/Faw/FAWDocuments/FAWVOLUMEFOLDERS2023/49...
https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-s-sad-ideological-capture-w...
This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.
Bezos's quashing of dissent at The Washington Post might not (just) be the solidarity of a real billionaire with a fake billionaire but rather the very real fear he won't get a permit for anything for the next four years. If Zuck plays along with Trump, Trump eliminates competition from a better alternative, etc.
A counterexample is Bloomberg Businessweek which trivializes racism with the mindlessly woke policy of always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B right next to reviews of $350 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
Not really agreeing or disagreeing with your overall point, but I'm fine with this practice. I used to think it was weird, but I've come to realize some things:
1. "Black" is not acting as a descriptor of color. Black people do not have black skin. Black people with even the darkest of skin in the spectrum of "Black person" still do not have black skin. So the word is being used in a very different way than its common meaning.
2. "Black person" has become a proper noun of sorts, in parallel to "Asian person", etc. I also see most (all?) publications that capitalize "Black" to also capitalize "White" when talking about race, which seems reasonable through this lens.
I guess my point here is: until recently "wokeness" was the mainstream ideology, basically the default setting for all the rich and powerful. Yes, recently half a dozen of billionaries switched sides, but that does not mean that wokeness doesn't still have trillions of dollars behind it.
It's funny you say that, because my impression is that DEI allows companies to avoid criticism of their oppressive policies with token investments in a few diverse staff.
- Running sweatshops in SEA [1]? "NIKE, Inc. is building more equitable and inclusive practices to empower our employees and create the workforce of the future." [2]
- Repeated oil spills in Nigeria? [3][4] Shell's vision is to become "a place where everyone—from employees, to our customers, partners and suppliers—feels valued, respected and has a strong sense of belonging." [5]
- Exploiting unaccompanied, undocumented children in factories that make Cheerios? [6] General Mills is "committed to advancing our culture of inclusion, equity and belonging for our people, business and communities." [7] They are also happy to look the other way when their subcontractor Hearthside Food Solutions hires children to work in their factories, as long as they have plausible deniability.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops [2] https://about.nike.com/en/impact/focus-areas/diversity-equit... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/25/africa/shell-oil-spills-niger... [4] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/21/timeline-oil-s... [5] https://www.shell.com/who-we-are/diversity-equity-and-inclus... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-... https://archive.is/1sDWO [7] https://www.generalmills.com/how-we-make-it/putting-people-f...
I hope that's enough to reveal that a lot of these so-called DEI initiatives are only there to performatively assuage investors and activists, while the companies involved continue preying on the marginalized.
As long as your ideas conform with the rest of the group. Don't you start thinking of making this an unsafe space bucko!
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
There is definitely censorship on Twitter these days. A local strip club has its account suspended for "hate speech"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-penthous...
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
PG should try using the term "cis" in a post.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
For some words it didn't work -- people went back to the old ways. But for some it did.
This chaotic priggish churning in society is not new, as pg points out. I love how language, manners, idioms, and cultures interact. It can be a force for good. It can also be extremely destructive, usually in tiny ways and over centuries.
While I love these intricacies, I also always fall back on the definition of manners I was taught early on: good manners is how you act around people with poor manners. Add complexity as desired on top of that. The form of communication and behavior can never replace the actual meaning and effects of it. (There's a wonderful scene in "The Wire" where they only use the f-word. Would have worked just as well for their job to have used the n-word. 100 years ago, the n-word would have been fine and the f-word beyond the pale. Draw your lessons from that.)
ADD: I always try to be polite and abide whatever traditions are in place in any social group. One thing I've noticed, though: the more people express their politics, their priggishness, their wokeness, etc -- the crappier they seem to be in their jobs. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because this is such as easy social crutch to lean on and gain social advantage that it becomes kind of a "communications drug". Scratch a loud prude or moralizer, you find a dullard or slacker. Conversely, people who produce usable advances in mankind tend to be jerks. I suspect this relationship has held up over centuries. cf Socrates and the Sophists, etc. (A good book among many along these lines is "Galileo's Middle Finger")
Considering how dumb "Hackers and Painters" was, that's a pretty hard fall.
We see now that all these corporations are A-grade hypocrites, which was already clear in 2020 but forbidden to say.
You cannot accuse Paul Graham for suddenly changing his views.
So excuse me if I see it as a pathetic capitulation. A "me too" moment following all the other so-called tech leaders.
OP is basically an update of that after 20 years
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack.
Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society.
Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-flags...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-still-t-trump-lost-17...
"Social justice" is inherently problematic, as explained in "Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals" https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-un....
Broadly speaking, there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left. One can reasonably, trivially dismiss most infinities.
> The essay can be summed up in one sentence: There should be no meaningful consequences for men who engage is lewd behavior
There is something deeper here you’re missing. Women can generally define lewd behaviour however they want; there is no similar official mechanism in the balance. A one-way institution like that will predictably build righteous backlash against itself. That backlash is partly performative and partly justified.
How is that relevant?
The point is if one party can inconsequentially, to them, subjectively define lewdness and cause consequence to others through it, you will wind up with abuse and backlash. Whether it’s lewdness or moral uprightness or loyalty to a flag is besides the point.
I’m pretty sure I both am and am aware enough of the line and its ambiguity to weaponise it against someone else if I wanted to. Add to that cultural variance in where the line lies and you effectively wind up censoring cross-gender discussion of gender-relevant topics.
I don’t think Graham is advocating for lewd jokes in the workplace, or suggesting the womens’ rights movements of the 60s were misplaced. He’s arguing against universally institutionalising rules of politeness, and being particularly wary of doing it one way.
> in polite company
Graham is arguing against the expansion of polite company to virtually the entire discussion space. In that, I kind of agree.
I have been in customer facing roles since mid 2020 as a consultant. There really is no ambiguity. I don’t talk about anything that can hint at going in a sexual direction, or politics or religion. I just don’t get involved with those types of conversation at work.
Occasionally, I do have to talk about politics as it affects business especially since I spent a lot of time working in the Education/State and Local Government space.
> He’s arguing against universally institutionalising rules of politeness, and being particularly wary of doing it one way.
There has always been institutionalization of what one should and shouldn’t talk about in “polite company”. Those norms have changed through the years and rightfully so. Did your parents grow up in the Jim crow south?
> Graham is arguing against the expansion of polite company to virtually the entire discussion space. In that, I kind of agree.
How is that any different than it has always been? I talk differently when I’m with my friends and family in private than I do when I’m in public spaces.
Society would look at me like I was crazy if I did the same amount of “cussing, drinking and telling lies” loudly like I do when I’m at home with my friends playing cards if I did it in public.
We all “code switch” to an extent.
One can absolutely impute all kinds of nonsense from inaction as much as action.
I’d also challenge the fact that I don’t need to make lewd jokes as extending to the premise that they need never be made. (Or that our refraining from making them doesn’t cover up something darker.)
> norms have changed through the years and rightfully so. Did your parents grow up in the Jim crow south?
And most of those shifts are reasonable. Some, however, are purely performative. Latinx is a frequent example, though I’ve never met anyone who seriously used it. As a gay non-white man, there is plenty of performative nonsense online that comes from people who I can’t imagine actually have any friends who are in the category they claim to be looking out for. (There are also jokes that, while off colour, speak to something true, even if they’re made at the expense of some of my immutable characteristics.)
They don’t ever need to be made in polite company. I don’t consider “polite company” to be comedy, what you do or say in the privacy of your own home, etc.
I’m a Black guy and the amount of times you will here the “n word” and “fuck” fly out of my mouth in private and with family of my generation rises to the level of Samuel Jackson.
And I know no Black person that says “African American” outside of some professional circumstances.
Many of these complaints about arbitrary rules changing, to my observation, come from people who were simply unaware of a decades-long conversation happening in spaces they don't care to be invested in: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, human behavior studies, etc. And when those conversations reach a well-reasoned consensus with convincing arguments that sway the hearts and minds of people with control over interaction spaces, it can be a little startling when rules change! But being upset about it is a little bit like being upset that the web APIs changed due to the publications of WHATWG while consistently ignoring the well-publicized discussions and work of WHATWG.
Graham in this essay seems to be laboring under the belief that because these norms didn't originate from the STEM education space, the STEM industry space doesn't need to adopt them or take them seriously... As if they weren't originating from the space of professional consideration of sociology and human behavior.
... because someone who spoke for the community spoke up forcefully in favor of the current rules.
There I put it in quotes so you can see the point being made. Considering I can attribute lewdness to nothing, I am easily capable of doing so from any comment. Now, as an "individual of color experiencing comment censorship" (the phrase for someone who is downvoted), I demand action.
You're right that the meaning of a word like "lewd" is disputed. But disputed is not the same as arbitrary, so your argument falls afoul of this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Whem you respond to people with opposite views (e.g. scarface_74 and gedpeck in this thread) in that way, you stand no change of persuading them or even of generating a curious response in them. It's guaranteed to be alienating. That's the opposite of the kind of conversation we're hoping for here.
What it will do is generate reinforced agreement among readers who already shared your view, but this is also the opposite of the kind of conversation we're hoping for—not just (or even at all) because it worsens polarization, but because repetition is bad for curiosity, and these are some of the most-hammered nails that exist.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Regardless, you are correct that this discussion is tiresome and besides, pg has pointed out that it's over: freedom is winning. It's gauche to fight after victory is declared.
Whether there is or isn’t is irrelevant. The fact that when asked “how much,” the answer seems to have no defined limit is what I’m criticising.
EDIT: Graham wrote, “Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.”
He stated a limit on the level of racism. He gave a bound on it. He said it is less that what woke people think it is. CrissCross is being deliberately obtuse. This edit is for people who come across this thread. My comment pointed out that Graham didn’t justify this belief. I don’t know the level of racism and I’m not arrogant enough to try.
He quite literally didn’t. There are almost no numbers in the entire essay. The argument you object to is qualitative.
> take it then you agree with me that Graham’s statement was written without merit or justification
No. The exact limit is both irrelevant and not definable. Your comment demanded a “scale to the problem.”
EDIT: > EDIT: Graham wrote, “Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.” He stated a limit on the level of racism. He gave a bound on it. He said it is less that what woke people think it is
One, still not quantitative. Two, nobody is debating whether there is a limit. (I said “there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left,” and you said “obviously there is a limit.” These statements can coëxist.)
The question is whether Americans’ subjective sense of our own racism is accurate. And I’m saying that someone who claims there is more racism than the average person thinks and then fails to define it (the burden being on them, after all, for rejecting the status quo), that said person is probably overestimating it. Not necessarily. And there are plenty of activists and academics who are quite precise about defining and measuring racism. But those folks aren’t usually the ones running around online calling others racist.
In particular, it would be good if you would note and follow the following site guidelines:
"Don't be snarky."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your views are welcome, but we need you to express them in the intended spirit of the forum. The same, of course, is true for anyone with opposing views.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I believe writing “after the riots of 2020” and framing what happened as “wokeness” qualifies as idiotic.
I made my points and haven’t responded further. I don’t believe I’ve said anything else that can be considered flamewar style commentary. I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said.
(especially because getting my wording wrong on topics like this leads to painful reactions - I don't mean from you, but the format here feels like intimate conversation when in fact it's public broadcasting)
When Graham opens his essay by providing a definition of 'prig' but then using that pejorative over and over again to refer to his conceptual opposition in this essay, how are those who are responding to the essay to respond? It seems we put ourselves on a field disadvantage if we are to argue a point with an author who is immediately resorting to name-calling with one arm tied behind our backs.
I respect this site tries to be something else than other online fora. But it is a site still inextricably tied to Graham and his legacy, so when he drops an essay like this it's reasonable to either expect people responding to it will take the same tone as the founder of this site, or that we should be very, very clear that this site has become something not at all associated with its founding.
Has it?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But I think you'd be wise to drop this idea of a "field disadvantage". HN threads aren't supposed to be a football game, a tank battle, or anything else where that image would fit. It's not about defeating opponents or, as I used to say, smiting enemies. It's about maximizing interestingness, to put it clumsily.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
That idea gets very close to
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since [1]. (It’s currently in a generational peak. I don’t know if that’s a last gasp of their boomers or something deeper.)
> The entire crusade against ‘woke’ is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a ‘minority majority’ country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out
I think it’s about as unfair to paint the rejection of “wokeness” like this as it is to paint every progressive policy as woke.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
Unfortunately between the way that Electoral College, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state works, the religious right has far more influence than their population would call for.
I’m not saying that last years election was caused by that. It was mostly because of the ineptitude of the Democrat party
Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
That said, I would agree that the majority of people doing accents are likely to be mocking. I'm not sure how to prevent throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
As an aside, I do think Robert Downey Jr. may be the last White guy who can wear Black face in a movie without getting canceled.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
Word.
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
Is that what you want?
If yes, why? If not, what's your approach?
I ain't doing all that work. I'm picking whatever I already believe in.
/s but only kind of. That's how most people think. They aren't enlightened like you.
I read this as "it is impossible to determine truth". If there exists a well resourced entity who's entire purpose in life is to determine objective truth and they are unable to do so what chance do I have?
It might work at first and be effective for some time in the same way that a dictator can "get things done" but there is no free lunch.
Eventually you will get evil dictators, power hungry arbitrators of truth. It will bite you. It is only a question of when. It might be years or generations. The only winning move is not to play. Don't concentrate the power in the first place.
Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, then what's the plan for the bottom 50% here?
If we were still living in the time of thirteen channels and Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
I think someone's an idiot for denying the moon landings, but their ignorance doesn't directly affect my ability to stay alive and health. Some misinformation is worse than others.
Free speech isn't free. We pay for it by tolerating speech that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, wrong, insulting, offensive or hateful.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
Freedom of association is a thing.
There are very few situations where speech leads to incarceration, and I don't think PG is talking about those, is he?
Usually when people complain about what you "can't say", what they actually mean is they can't say whatever they like and still have people still employ / socialise / be nice to them.
Expressing opinions that others find disagreeable is not a protected class.
If you want to shun me for not loudly enough pronouncing how great some sort of special privileges for certain ostensibly oppressed classes is, or for not jumping enthusiastically enough though hoops referencing people with exactly the most woke-community prescribed terminology, then chances are I don't particularly to associate with you either. That's fine.
If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions), or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Of course that would still not literally make me unable to pronounce my woke-taboo opinion, but it should nonetheless be obvious that trying to wreck my life is a disproportionate response merely to me not toeing the line you took it upon yourself to draw. What you "can't say" is almost always graded rather than absolute, but active hostility destroying months or years of a person's life is well into the territory that constitutes a real hindrance for freely expressing an opinion.
Both of these things are already well-litigated limits on speech. I.e. - it's already illegal.
> or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Either your views are so taboo that most of society doesn't want anything to do with you if you express them, or they're mainstream enough that only some people don't want to associate with you. If it's the former, then yes, you might struggle to find a sympathetic employer and that warrants some introspection. If it's the latter, then you're hardly at risk of having your livelihood taken away.
The alternative is that I should be forced to employ someone who fundamentally disagrees with my right to exist (and perhaps owns lots of guns).
If you KEEP saying it, despite being told that it's making your coworkers uncomfortable, then you're just being an asshole, and sorry, people don't like working with assholes.
Can the people demanding more censorship ever be wrong?
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
pg getting flagged on the forum he founded really holds up this analogy. Even though I don’t understand either.
"anything I don't like is a shallow fad"
I don’t see that quote anywhere in the article, or even that sentiment.
He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
It was just not until social media where minorities could get around the press and media filter.
And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it.
That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.
This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Sure. That doesn’t mean it’s a given that the disinterested middle will be swayed by them.
I think a key tenant to wokeness in this framework is the emphasis on awareness/alertness relative to solutions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I know quite a few people who are not religious (agnostic or atheist), one of whom is myself, who still believe that abortion is, if not actual murder, at least tantamount to it, and should not be done except in extreme cases (what exactly counts as an "extreme case" can vary, but the point is that "getting pregnant because of consensual sex that unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy, and having an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy and then putting the child up for adoption" is not an extreme case). I can't speak to other people's detailed grounds for this belief, but in my own case, I believe that, at some point fairly early in the development of an embryo/fetus (in an online discussion on another forum some years ago I argued that that point was implantation; another such point that was argued by, IIRC, Carl Sagan, is when the fetus first shows brain activity), the embryo/fetus has interests that deserve protection in much the same way that the interests of a very young child who can't yet recognize their own interests or take action to protect them on their own deserve protection.
In other words, I don't buy the argument made by at least a fair number of pro-abortion people that it's all about the woman's control over her own body and no other interest deserves to be weighed. I think there are reasons that even a rationalist humanist should accept, or at least give strong consideration to, for rejecting such an argument.
I'm not trying to argue for such a point of view here; I'm simply describing it to illustrate that I don't think all such disagreements can be boiled down to religious belief. There can be arguments based on considerations that are much more general, to the point where they at least have a claim to be considered by anyone who wants to be a good member of a civil society.
Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.
You might be overindexing on the loud voices.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.
(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)
I definitely agree that you can take something like sexual harassment seriously in extremely harmful and counterproductive ways.For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.
I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.
Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
The comment I replied to said "taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless, not "talking about taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless. I agree with the latter, not the former.
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
I appreciate having the word “prig” to replace criticism of both wokeness and the new right Silicon Valley’s Musk-Trump worship.
The new right tech bros are doing their own cancellations. Silicon Valley traffics in old tweets critical of Musk or Trump like the Victorian courtesans Graham ironically criticises.
I assume it's because the term "woke" will almost always derail a thread.
I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.
It's the lowest form of public discourse, spewed by ignoramuses who have nothing of value to contribute to conversations.
> The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
>> A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Surely you've experienced the one person on the team who will lecture endlessly on why robertson screw drive are so much better than torx, yadda yadda... or something similar. it's not a question of having a point or not-- they might or might not-- it's the haughty air of superiority, the perspective that countering perspectives don't exist or at least couldn't have any merit, that their pet issue couldn't ever be too irrelevant to worry about.
"System of rules that you can use to bludgeon people with instead of considering and empathizing? Sign me up!"
Maybe before you didn't notice it because more of them agreed with you or because enough of their priggishness was uncorrelated. Like a ferromagnetic material, if the domains are pointed in random directions you get no net field.
It's probably even just an effect of online forums in general. If you are of the view that many ideas are valid and that your preferences aren't so important, you tend to not comment at all.
In any case, if you're bothered by the net-prig-field there is a remark in PG's essay which might provide some advice: The priggishness is amplified when membership can be self selected by ideology rather than geography. If you just mix a diverse collection of people together their prig field will tends to cancel out, views will be normalized, extreme positions suppressed. So seek out venues where the structure of participation doesn't lend itself to polarization, or at least polarization incompatible with yours.
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
Phil Ochs
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
Such is claimed. Which are the false accusations, which are the legitimate accusations, and which are merely the mistaken accusations? And how are each of those quantified? If someone actually tells me the numbers, how do I know that those are the correct numbers? And why should I believe them? Is there a reason to believe those, other than trying to qualify for the world championship "I am not a racist" games? If my skepticism is also racism, I then lack the means to be and remain rational about the subject, and if I can't be rational about it then I am with 100% certainty being manipulated with regards to the subject.
Are you allowed to be skeptical? Do you feel as if you're allowed to be skeptical? If you do feel as if you are allowed to be skeptical, why are you not?
Wild quote though. Does PG self censor when using the N word? Or does he say it, with the hard r?
If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
I don't get the comparison. Hard "R" or not makes little difference. You're eligible to be canceled for using either form. So not like PoC/CP.
Should have told that to that teacher from decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9Zy2-C_lY
Such a wild interview that Boondocks outright sampled it for an episode.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
On this flip side, my least favorite are when someone name drops thinkers as a way to reference an ideology. It's very hard to actually know if someone understands the ideas behind that name, so it's usually impossible to understand why they think something.
And, the names they drop often were the types to present their thoughts as the first, rarely, if ever, dropping names themselves, which I always find an amusing "they were allowed be free thinkers, but you can't!"
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/sigmund-freud-i-ascribe-to-th...
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
Of course the humanities are all usurped by the woke elites and you should look only to PG and his friends for guidance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
... but CJ Hopkins is prosecuted repeatedly for using it on the cover of a book that criticized COVID policies (no double jeopardy rule there!)
The symbol itself, therefore, isn't offensive. Otherwise Germans would be up in arms at their government for allowing it.
But here's a different context: I see somebody spray painting a wall in an alley. If they're painting a flower or a portrait, I might hang around or come back later to see the result. If they're painting a swastika, I'm more likely to avoid that alley from then on.
Symbols mean something. If they didn't, nobody would bother using them.
Your hypothetical spray painter could be using the symbol in many different ways and contexts, of course, including criticism or analogy. Whether you'd avoid it or not would probably depend on what the rest of the painting meant.
A symbol or word carries no inherent meaning. We give it subjective meaning. That meaning is constructed socially through a shared understanding of what that symbol means through context and intention.
The same symbol or word can have multiple, and sometimes opposite, meanings, in different contexts.
Do you have a coherent principle that separates one from the other?
Tattoos can change, too. If I had a tattoo like that, but had come to see the error of my ways, I would have it removed, or if that was too costly and time-consuming (it takes a year or so of painful, expensive, periodic laser treatments to remove a tattoo), I'd have a tattoo artist cover it up with something else.
There's no excuse for keeping a neo-Nazi tattoo if you stop being a neo-Nazi and realize that neo-Nazis are disgusting people.
But OPs point is broader: if you allow the bad people to just appropriate the symbol as their own, they're going to gradually take over everything. Never mind swastikas; we're at the point where making an okay sign can be misconstrued as a white nationalist gesture, and people self-censor themselves accordingly.
There's also the reverse problem here, where, if you tie such things so strongly to symbols in popular opinion, then loud condemnation of such symbols is used to "prove" that one is not a bad person. For a major ongoing example of this look at Russia with its cult of "we defeated the Nazis therefore we're definitely the good guys".
At the end of the day, it's really just a lazy shortcut. The bad people are bad because of their ideas and actions, not because of their symbols. If we always look at the ideas and actions, the symbols are irrelevant, and we don't have to surrender them to the bad guys' claims.
No, you are just giving them the power to actually do stuff without looking like they are doing stuff.
As long as they talk the talk, they don't have to walk the walk. You don''t have to actually care about issues, that's what the DEI department is for.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
* had everyone declare their pronouns
* advertised their segregated black-only event next month
* repeatedly interrupted to chant "trans rights!"
This is a very common cluster of behavior, and I'm not sure what I would call it other than "woke". If there's another word that would be better, I'm all ears. But my experience has been that proponents don't find any word acceptable, because what they object to is the very idea that this is a distinct cluster of behavior. They feel, as the source article says, that each of my bullet points is just an independent matter of respect.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
It does not. If we were merely talking about the current young person slang word for something good (e.g. rad, sick, amazeballs, etc. (don't ask me for the current one)) no one cares that the terminology changes.
But in this case each change comes with the same reasoning behind it. This indicates that the change has been ineffective and people ought to consider why that is and if there is something else that could be done instead or in addition to be more effective.
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
Of course, if your worldview is sufficiently different from mine, we will disagree on what is true. But lying is lying.
but yeah, its definitely the fact checking that people are most upset about
Or perhaps the GP liked the fact checkers because they were on the whole doing a good job of actually checking facts.
I don't know if that's true or not; I haven't been on social media in years. But it's an incredibly weak argument to assume that someone only likes something because it aligns with their politics.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
I am not “right wing” by any definition but this is naive and bubbled to the point of ridiculousness. Very little political discourse on social media is grounded in fact regardless of the ideologies involved. Layman discussion based on headlines and vibes has no place in serious politics and the real danger of these platforms is that they’ve elevated that to the standard
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Legitimacy, or at least a thin veneer of it, so that the Biden administration wouldn’t force it upon them.
Because that was always in the cards - legislation that would legally force these companies to fact-check, or worse, for an outside bipartisan agency to do the fact-checking with no way for these companies to control the process.
>If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else.
Again, it had to look authentic. But Meta did the absolute minimum amount of fact-checking as possible. Just enough to appear like they were actually doing something constructive, to keep the administration from looking too deeply.
But now? Zuck is doing exactly that with AI accounts.
>It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
Checking to see if something is truthful is “antithetical to the USA and is oppression”??? That statement is misinformation _in of itself._
America is not built upon a foundation of lies and misinformation, but without fact-checking, that is exactly what Americans will get -- lies and misinformation. Because there is nothing to counteract lies and misinformation except concerted efforts to check them for factual accuracy. As in, fact-checking.
Maybe one day you will come to understand just how important facts are, and how critical it is to ALWAYS have them checked.
Because the only people afraid of fact checking are those who are threatened by facts. Just like how countries who fear the truth target journalists for elimination. There is no difference.
And the left loves facts. Because facts are a manifestation of reality, and the truth. Which is why checking for objective reality and truthfulness is so important for the left, and why the left is invariably unhurt by fact-checking.
I politely asked for a fact-check on it in the comments section, as I otherwise enjoyed and agreed with the substance of the post. He both removed the claim in question and my comment.
I was unsure of how to feel about this. Those who had already read the post online or still had the original in their inbox were left with the misinformation from what they may consider a trusted source.
I believed it would have been better to edit out the false information, leave my comment, and reply with clarification on the editing and why.
Likewise, this practice of dynamically-edited online content is actually relevant to the topic of PG's post and the role it plays in replacing the traditional constraints on printed media.
In addition to those who received an older version with the misinformation, a critical aspect of determining what is true is determining who to trust, since there is far too much to be known for any one person to determine it themselves. Silently editing your own writing to respond to good criticism of it leaves future readers less informed about your own trustworthiness.
There are numerous changes over the first two days, Exercise to the reader to find which HN comments inspired them.
To note: I really have no problem with him updating his piece to reflect accurate criticism, I do find issue with doing it silently, and with not reflecting on how it should influence his thoroughness in the future.
(some strong language and racist words used so maybe not safe for work or around kids)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_JCBmY9NGM
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
What in the world are you talking about?
A report comes out, turns out that a certain HR person in company A hasn't hired a single black applicant since they got there.
At the same time, a video comes out showing the equivalent person in company B saying the n word in passing.
In this situation, it's maybe considered that the person in A might be racist, while it's completely assumed the person in B is.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Easy enough to link some then, I take it?
Anyone (whether I already respect them or not) comes to me and asks me to refer to them by a specific name or term, I'll gladly do it.
Someone comes and accuses me of being an -ist or -phobe because I didn't put my pronouns or link to the latest iteration of a corporate-speak diversity policy in my email signature or just tells me to do it without explanation or discussion, and I'll tell them to pound sand.
If that person cared to ask why I don't put them in my email signature, I'd gladly tell them that I might have if anyone bothered to ask nicely and/or explain the merit of their request but ultimately I don't care one whit what pronouns someone uses to describe me and am well aware the corporation I work for doesn't actually stand for anything in the aforementioned statement. But the prigs won't ask.
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache#Difficulties_in_naming
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
Mongoloid, Retard, Special, individuals with learning disabilities are not entirely interchangeable (except as insults).
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Etc.
There seems to be a secret penalty for bringing up that subject, unless you are running for MAGA like Ramaswamy and then possibly reverse opinion once people voted for you.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.