[HN Gopher] The Four Quadrants of Conformism
___________________________________________________________________
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
Author : razin
Score : 476 points
Date : 2020-07-24 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| erichocean wrote:
| > _And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is "Eppur
| si muove."_
|
| I wonder if PG picked that specific phrase ("And yet it moves")
| because of the recent brouhaha over IQ and genetics....
| elil17 wrote:
| In this article, PG creates a personality test of sorts that, I
| think, seems intuitively true. Then, absent any real evidence, he
| assigns political roles and moral value to each of the categories
| he invented.
|
| It's so farcical to suggest that independent mindedness always
| manifests as "intellectual freedom" and conformism manifests as
| "political correctness." (He doesn't use that phrase but that's
| clearly what he's trying to get at.)
|
| We live in a world where people with power over others (even
| people with pretty small amounts of power like professors) have
| historically been allowed shielded from the consequences of
| espousing hate. It is not "conformist" to advocate that people
| should be held accountable for what they say.
|
| What PG has done is come up with a "good" category and a "bad"
| category. He then says that the people who agree with him are the
| good people and the people who don't are the bad ones. He does so
| without considering that his support of Silicon Valley tycoons
| and professors who are upset that their students criticized them
| could actually put him in the conformist category.
| bitcurious wrote:
| > We live in a world where people with power over others (even
| people with pretty small amounts of power like professors) have
| historically been allowed shielded from the consequences of
| espousing hate. It is not "conformist" to advocate that people
| should be held accountable for what they say.
|
| The conformity is in the process which defines what "hate" is.
| elil17 wrote:
| I don't understand - what is the process that decides what
| hate is? How is it conformist?
| boreas wrote:
| People spend so much time on the "meta-conversation" about the
| ecosystem of ideas, and so little time talking about the actual
| ideas themselves.
|
| What are these repressed debates people are so anxious about? Is
| it just race stuff?
| sideshowb wrote:
| > On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free
| inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the
| departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who
| would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now.
| Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be
| independent-minded to succeed at either of those.
|
| In defence of my chosen place in a university: being a quant or
| CEO implies a different kind of confirmity, namely, to the strong
| requirement of generating revenue (or at least investment) in the
| short term. Though we're all pushed to get academic funding as
| well, I don't think we have it as bad as either of those two
| roles, and that itself allows a certain diversity of thought.
| kaymanb wrote:
| I would also argue that the intersection of people who become
| quants / found successful startups and did so despite having a
| real shot at becoming a professor is pretty small.
|
| My only real data points are my own graduate school experience,
| but I haven't heard of anyone who was on a path to success in
| academia who didn't continue on down that path, or at least
| give it their absolute best shot before moving in. By success I
| mean maybe a post-doc or two followed by a reasonable shot at a
| tenure-track position at a decent school. This restriction is
| made in the same way that (I am assuming) pg is only referring
| to quants at decent firms, and startup founders who at least
| have an idea they can get off the ground. I seriously doubt
| that any kind of conformism at say, an ivy league institution,
| is because people who would have become profs there chose not
| to.
| zornthewise wrote:
| No comment about the broader picture but there have been very
| smart people who have quit academia and gone into industry
| for whatever reason. Maybe the most famous is Jim Simons (he
| had an exceptional mathematical career before going into
| finance) but I know a few more examples.
| sideshowb wrote:
| You're probably right, however, you could also argue that (my
| GP comment notwithstanding) diversity of modern academic
| thought is still somewhat reduced compared to what it was,
| because the modern academic system pushes out people who
| would have been successful there in the past (for example see
| Peter Higgs' comments on the matter
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
| higgs-... )
| coldcode wrote:
| If you want to learn about the various types of people and how
| they relate to the world around them, study the French Revolution
| (in depth, not just a snippet). You will find every kind of
| person (in much more complex combinations than presented here),
| and how they participate/change/destroy/terrorize/etc. People
| today are no different we just have more technology.
| seneca wrote:
| Absolutely. Really, look at major events in history period. The
| fall of the Roman republic should be a regular topic of study
| in every western school. Understanding history is the greatest
| tool there is to understand people and the patterns we find
| ourselves in.
| rurp wrote:
| I'll strongly second the recommendation to read about the
| Roman republic for anyone interested in history. The number
| of parallels to modern America are striking.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| It's pretty clear from PG's writing that he doesn't do a lot of
| reading.
| erichocean wrote:
| It's literally a meme where <startup founder> announces on
| Twitter their excited discovery of <banal thing that everyone
| else already knows>.
| solmans wrote:
| Funny how most people in this thread consider themselves
| aggressively independent minded, but when the silicon
| valley prophet releases his monthly creative writing piece
| disguised as a scientific discovery they defend and praise
| it tooth and nail.
| dang wrote:
| You could not be more wrong. pg reads more, and more widely,
| than almost anyone I've ever met. And I've met a lot of well-
| read people.
|
| It eternally boggles my mind how people jump to completely
| false conclusions like this.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| He reads everything except hacker news comment sections,
| I'm guessing.
| stopachka wrote:
| Any books you'd recommend?
| wcarey wrote:
| Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is a great
| read. I wonder which quadrant Graham would put Burke in?
| coldcode wrote:
| A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by
| Popkin was very good.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, season 3. Probably about
| 30-40hrs of content (a lot of history happened!) and I find
| his content is a real good for first-timers.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| _The French Revolution, A History_ by Thomas Carlyle. It is a
| truly massive undertaking, an 'in depth' account if there
| ever was one; and Carlyle's focus on the 'various types' of
| people involved is quite clear.
| gstomi wrote:
| I am mildly interested in history but never really looked into
| the French Revolution. Can you suggest a starting point?
| frabbit wrote:
| I mostly agree with this: am pretty much a Free Speech
| absolutist.
|
| However, I can't help but suspect that the reason we're hearing
| arguments about this now is because the liberal-Left are
| aggressively exercising their intolerance instead of the
| conservative-Right, who have had it all their way for a long
| time.
|
| Aside: I don't think lumping liberals and leftists in together is
| useful. There is a strong dislike of the trend towards censorship
| voiced by those that are economically on the left. The embrace of
| censorship is coming from the corporate/capitalist/liberal side
| of things. Most on the left are well aware that censorship will
| be used against them first.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Can you define what you mean by free speech? That speech alone
| should not be punished by the state? Or that speech should have
| no social consequences?
|
| Because to me "the liberal-Left exercising their intolerance"
| could also be viewed as exercising their freedom of
| association.
| frabbit wrote:
| Punished by the state specifically. I don't see how you could
| enforce speech _not_ having social consequences, nor what the
| purpose of such speech would be if that were possible.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Freedom of association is not exactly a pillar of modern
| liberalism.
| ohgreatwtf wrote:
| As a passive independently minded, I can say that we also see
| natural fluctuation from epochs of independently minded reason to
| social conformity and back. These are good and necessarily
| healthy cycles because the independently minded, left unchecked,
| inevitably will achieve the freedom for certain individuals
| within that sector to explore avenues of thought and action that
| doom civilization and degrade reason and safety. The
| conservatively minded, left unchecked, will inevitably lead to
| total stagnation and the destruction of personal freedoms. It's a
| cycle, and the truly reasonable people, the truly intelligent,
| will see through it.
|
| I see your fear, and I understand it is about the rise of radical
| social conformity, as I personally think was adequetly heralded
| by ted krazinski and george lincoln rockwell, two very
| independently minded, aggressive, and destructive individuals. It
| is scary to witness, and to experience leading into this wave,
| but understand all things come to an end.
|
| Conservatism, Feminism, Neoliberalism and the Patriarchy are out.
| Political correctness and xenomania are on the way out and will
| be out of vogue within 10 years. The youngest generation to
| arrive on the world stage is repulsed ad nauseum with what they
| rightfully view as political posturing for virtual life
| achievement points by all sides of the now universally static
| social instrument, whose only purpose, inside and outside of the
| statehouse, is to carry out token activities that defend the
| ambitions of entrenched opponents; opponents whose true motives
| are inerrently selfserving, oblivious to the ground level truth,
| and dismissive of the long term consequences of their missions.
|
| It is nearly the hour for the true star children to take their
| place. The first to arrive are even now approaching the zenith of
| power and influence, and the waves that have come since are
| growing in intensity. We are actively uninvested in the
| television and the mock battles being carried out behind it. Our
| life prospects and probability of reproduction have been seized
| from us, to serve the needs of those who profit from stasis. We
| are drones in a steady state, wealth maintaining, species killing
| industrial grade dystopia. It won't last much longer. The
| majority of the shifts that will come and precipitate our total
| revolution across all points of the spectrum that dismisses every
| single piece of the political machine enslaving us will take
| place within a decade. They wont be heralded by shifts in thought
| or reason, because it is the decline of systemic thinking itself
| which must necessarily decline for to coexist unincorporated as
| equals and as stakeholders in a commonwealth destiny.
|
| This is not anarchy, in practice it could look like a lot of
| things. It could, ideally, wind up vaguely resembling some kind
| of mutualistic, agrarian society with vast quantities of
| independent small communities consisting of large, interconnected
| families subsiding on self-sustaining garden estates. These
| communities could be organized into democratic representational
| regions that are governed by a futuristic constitution which, to
| prevent the entrenchment of conventional systemic thinking,
| requires the government model to be decentralized and assembling
| on an as needed basis, with temporary, as opposed to permenant,
| and internally selected, as opposed to independently appointed,
| individuals nominated to national councils and bodies of state,
| for the purpose of making nationwide decisions.
|
| There will be war, even in such an era, over resource conflicts.
| People will, out of necessity, die. Pray you are not among them.
| But do not pray for the bloodshed to come to an end. Conflict is
| a necessary part of growth, and growth is requisite for freedom,
| and freedom is requisite for independent inquiry. The boil must
| be allowed for the world to return to a peaceful and generously
| cool condition, otherwise, it will always be in a state of
| continual repression.
| ohgreatwtf wrote:
| I could add so much more to this about the state of affairs
| which claims the problems in the present era were seeded almost
| 300 years ago and that the supposed freedoms of today enshrined
| in that hour were not, as it were, a byproduct of the age of
| enlightenment, but rather, an insideous plot concocted by
| masonic and conventionally minded globalists planning a society
| that would protect the issues they cared about and protecting
| their assets against outside exploitation. I could say that
| america needs to die, and in truth, although most of it will
| survive, it will go through a rebirth, and become a new thing,
| not like the phoenix, but rather like the butterfly, which
| shares many pieces of the old but is a design of the new.
| [deleted]
| ohgreatwtf wrote:
| Really we need a forum like ycombinator news but instead it's
| just peoples ideas and thoughts and you get to upvote or
| downvote comments but it's not so simple as a direct vote, it
| needs to be engineered in such a way that the age old adages
| of "Few consider the logic of another to be as sensible as
| their own." and "To the dim-minded, the sunlight must seem
| absurd" - in order to promote original and counter-social
| norms discussion and content.
|
| For it, an innovative voting system would probably be useful.
| Forums that have tried to promote anti-conventional ideas
| have failed before. Usually grossly disgusting things make
| their way to the top of the feed in such cases, and good,
| original thoughts, meander in that twilight zone between good
| and bad, or get mildly downvoted, but only enough to be
| pushed below the threshhold- not enough that the negative
| point association is itself an expression of dislike for the
| content. Essentially, people do not so much hate original
| ideas, as simply dislike hearing them.
|
| What makes this tricky is that people will always think their
| opinions sensible. For example, lets say you post a not so
| popular but sensible opinion. If you instituted a mechanism
| for people to vote on your content on the basis of logic, or
| reason, or any other qualitative mechanism, they would
| downvote it on the basis of logic, reason, etc.
|
| Instead, we must attack the fundamental cybernetic
| arrangement of authority over opinion.
|
| First, we have an up thumb and a down thumb:
|
| I feel that the content presented is good, and i believe it
| self-sufficiently so/ It makes me feel uncomfortable, and I
| believe the evidence is self-sufficient.
|
| Secondly, we have an up arrow and a down arrow: I understand
| what the person is trying to say/ I don't understand their
| reasoning.
|
| Casting a vote would require selecting both an arrow and a
| thumb.
|
| Getting a down thumb and a down arrow results in getting one
| point for originality. Getting a up thumb and an up arrow
| results in getting a point for popularity. Getting a down
| thumb and an up arrow results in getting a point for
| controversiality. Getting a up thumb and a down arrow results
| in the post getting a point for absurdity.
|
| The score of the post is determined as follows:
|
| The ratio of originality to controversiality is used to
| assign a value up to 100. a 1:0 ratio is a score of 100, and
| a 0:1 score is a value of 0. This shall be known as the
| shittest variable, or SV.
|
| The ratio of popularity to controversiality is used to assign
| a value up to 100. A 1:0 value is a score of 0, 0:1 score 10,
| and a 1:1 score is a value of 100. This shall be known as the
| shiteating variable, or SE.
|
| The ratio of originality to absurdity is used to assign a
| value up to 100. A 1:0 value is a score of 10, 0:1 score 0,
| and a 1:1 score is a value of 1. This shall be known as the
| shittake variable, or ST.
|
| The ratio of popularity to absurdity is used to assign a
| value up to 100. A 1:0 and a 0:1 is a score of 0. A 1:1 is a
| score of 10. This shall be known as the shit-brigading
| variable, or SB.
|
| SV x SE x ST X SB determines the true value of the post.
|
| However, a user can choose to set a variable in their user
| profile which shows all posts based on popularity alone, and
| all scores based on popularity alone.
|
| However, if the true value exceeds popularity by more than a
| factor of 10, the post will be hidden from their view, and
| the same would go for any replies.
| __alexs wrote:
| I honestly don't understand this perspective which seems central
| to a lot of pgs writing lately: "the customs protecting free
| inquiry have been weakened"
|
| Can anyone explain it?
|
| We are, right now, posting on the most expansive and weakly
| moderated communications platform humanity has ever had. You can
| find almost anyone opinion imaginable out there with a brief
| Google search and forums on which to argue every side of it with.
|
| In what way is free inquiry meaningfully weakened? By any
| absolute measure it seems like it can only be the strongest it
| has ever been.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Can anyone explain it?_
|
| One clue is that almost everyone here posts anonymously.
|
| Under people's own names, many would be much more careful and
| conformist.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| It means people like him are being scrutinised like never
| before (absent an _actual_ revolution) and he doesn 't like it.
| oramit wrote:
| Yes, this narrative about not being free to talk about
| "dangerous" ideas is always left intentionally vague.
|
| We have so much free inquiry going on right now that I can't
| even keep track of it. If free inquiry is being eroded, one of
| the central claims in this essay, then that means we are coming
| down from a greater high. When was that high and would you
| prefer to go back to that time?
| marvin wrote:
| I'll hazard a guess: PG went out on a limb a few years ago,
| and actually published a long essay on one of the ideas that
| are very controversial in the sense implied in this essay.
| Namely, how tech tools as a primary driver for increasing
| wealth inequality will likely grow in importance, leading to
| increased wealth inequality, and that this is _in itself_ not
| a problem.
|
| This was after years of pointing out that it's not
| necessarily a good idea to _specifically discuss_
| controversial topics, if you want to spend your time thinking
| and learning instead of arguing (and, implied, deleting hate
| mail and death threats, etc).
|
| This essay was met with an incredible amount of backlash that
| missed its point entirely, and if I was in PG's shoes, I'd
| probably have soured on taking that sort of discussion
| outside my closest circle. A big but very understandable
| loss.
|
| I believe that discussing the _phenomenon_ , rather than
| specific instances of it, still has great value. This points
| out tools that can be used to discover and handle the
| censorship of valuable heresy.
|
| I'd love it even more if I had intimate access to a group of
| very intelligent and open-minded folks to _actually discuss_
| the heresies of today, as this is both super fascinating and
| a great mental stretching exercise. Sadly, doesn 't look like
| public forums on the Internet are the most fertile arena for
| that kind of thing. It happens rarely, when I happen to
| stumble across a community that hits something like this by
| chance, or where one of my real-life acquaintances happens to
| stray outside the box in exactly the right way.
| oramit wrote:
| I appreciate the response. I'm not certain which essay you
| are referring to so I can't comment on it or the backlash
| it received specifically.
|
| In this "Quadrants" essay PG clearly aligns himself with
| the entrepreneurial free-thinkers, who bravely face down
| the mob. The problem with this though is he doesn't seem to
| be able to handle the criticism part. He acknowledges it is
| going to happen but when he gets dunked on for an essay, he
| takes his ball, goes home, and then complains that he can't
| have a real discussion.
|
| But that's the entire point. He wrote something, people
| disagreed, that's the discussion. Did he take people's
| disagreements seriously? Did he change his mind? Was he
| unconvinced and pointed out why the people who disagreed
| were wrong? He seems to want to take on the mantle of
| beleaguered free-thinker while only willing to receive
| praise.
| pjscott wrote:
| Sounds like this essay, "Economic Inequality":
|
| http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
|
| And here's the HN thread from when it was first written:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826838
| __alexs wrote:
| I've read many of his essays on inequality and generally he
| over simplifies the economics and social issues involved so
| much it's almost impossible to critcise it. His style is so
| vague on these matters I'm not surprised he gets so much
| backlash. It's not good writing to be purposefully
| ambiguous.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| Do you have examples of the backlash to this essay? Were
| there any actual consequences to expressing his opinion, or
| did people just express their own opinions about his?
| neonate wrote:
| It's because the pendulum has taken a noticeable swing in the
| reverse direction, with online mobs getting people fired
| because of opinions they've expressed. Extreme labels like
| "white supremacist" and "Nazi" are being put on people for
| views that deviate from approved ideology. This is creating a
| climate of fear in which each case of someone getting fired is
| enough to cow thousands if not millions of observers, who fear
| to lose their own jobs if they speak out or even slip up. Bogus
| arguments like "it doesn't count unless the government does it"
| are being used to dismiss free speech concerns about this. To
| me it seems obvious that from a free speech point of view it's
| fine for people to respond to each other with criticism, even
| if they're mean and mischaracterize each other, but getting
| people fired crosses an obvious line into non-speech and
| physical harm. It's not as harmful as physical violence or
| putting someone in prison for what they say, but it's on the
| same spectrum, and the psychology of the zealots who want to
| see people punished in this way is unmistakeable. That's where
| the comparisons to the Soviet Union, China, and so on, come in.
| Anyone who is familiar with the history knows the type, even if
| so far they are unable to do more than exert power over
| employment.
|
| There's also deplatforming, which falls in between pure speech
| (such as criticism/debate) and physical harm (such as firing).
| pvg wrote:
| 'Firing' is not a physical harm unless you mean it literally.
| neonate wrote:
| It directly impacts livelihood. It's physical in the sense
| that it's a real world, tangible harm. This is not at all
| the same thing as somebody merely saying something critical
| on Twitter. There's a clear distinction here.
| pvg wrote:
| There is a distinction but it's not the one you were
| originally making. Which seems important in a discussion
| about kinds of harms. Firing someone is not assault.
| __alexs wrote:
| These hypothetical people are getting fired because their
| words cause real harm to people. They encourage others to act
| in ways that result in (not at all hypothetical) physical,
| emotional and economic harm, usually to underrepresented
| groups who are least able to weather it.
|
| You'd get fired if you punched a coworker, getting fired for
| speech that encourages others to do the punching seems like
| fair game. If you're in a position of influence you must
| measure your words carefully if you care at all about not
| harming people.
|
| If you want to explore radical, potentially harmful ideas,
| find a safe space of like minded people to do it in rather
| than forcing it on random people on the internet
| unconsensually.
| igorstellar wrote:
| > These hypothetical people are getting fired because their
| words cause real harm to people.
|
| These people are not hypothetical and the statement is
| dehumanization. If you punch a coworker they will have a
| damage that could be measured and reported. On the other
| side you won't be able to measure how offended someone is
| (unless it goes against the law). Cancelling people for
| having their own ideas even if they are different from what
| is conventional transforms into a witch hunt for a "greater
| good".
| jimbokun wrote:
| > You can find almost anyone opinion imaginable out there with
| a brief Google search and forums on which to argue every side
| of it with.
|
| And you can quickly get someone fired or their business
| boycotted or doxxed or swatted if they express an opinion you
| don't like.
| __alexs wrote:
| Yes the world is scary, people speaking up have always put
| themselves at risk but we have better tools to protect
| ourselves and find like minded people now.
|
| This isn't new and at worst doesn't seem that much different
| to how people have always acted. The argument is that things
| have got worse, but they just seem to be the same.
| etrautmann wrote:
| I think the larger point is that it doesn't matter how easy it
| is to make works public if the consequences prevent you from
| doing so: if you can easily get fired, pushed out of a tenured
| position at a university, or otherwise lose your voice for
| making unpopular opinions public.
| __alexs wrote:
| I don't buy this. There are millions of anonymous Twitter
| accounts and forum posters. Literal children have figured out
| opsec well enough to save themselves them embarrassment of
| having to share their love of anime with the wrong friends.
|
| I'm sure a tenured professor is smart enough to use a
| different email address and profile picture when signing up
| to radical life extension forums if what they want to discuss
| is really that edgy.
|
| We have more tools and venues to test out and refine new
| ideas today than we have ever before. Use them.
| [deleted]
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| "This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon
| Valley. Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost
| all independent-minded, they've handed the aggressively
| conventional-minded a tool such as they could only have
| dreamed of."
|
| This comes across as self-aggrandizing and a tad elitist.
| "On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free
| inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the
| departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People
| who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options
| now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have
| to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those."
|
| This is happening for economic reasons. Jobs outside academia pay
| more than they used to, the US no longer have a high income tax
| rate like we did in the 1950s, and there is more competition for
| academic jobs. Maybe at one point deciding to become a quant was
| independent-minded, but at this point it's a well worn path.
| Also, I'm sure there are some ideas that would be off-limits in
| quant circles
| LukaszWiktor wrote:
| The first paragraph would me much easier to comprehend if it was
| a picture.
| marsrovershadow wrote:
| A funnier version of the same <more or less> set of ideas is "The
| Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" by Carlo M. Cipolla. ...And unlike
| Paul's essay, it comes with illustrations!
|
| http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...
| rafiki6 wrote:
| As with all human attempts to categorize things, the 4 categories
| should actually be a spectrum, and the ends of the spectrum
| should be called into question based on PG's definition here. I
| mostly agree. I think I probably fall on the more "independent-
| minded" end of the spectrum (as we all like to think). But there
| is value in conformism and value in independence of thought. PG
| should realize the fact that he wrote this essay and is still
| alive is a good example of where things are today vs. in the era
| of feudalism or even the era of WW2 :)
|
| I agree with his take on academia though. That whole institution
| is limping along.
| hrktb wrote:
| As for most attempts to classify people, it should be strongly
| stated that any single human would fits several quadrants
| depending on the subject, the phase in their life they are in, or
| even the mood of the day.
|
| I read this two dimensional presentation only as device to
| discuss a theoretical point, and not something that could have
| any practicality.
|
| In particular, I think a lot of people switch from the "sheep"
| quadrant and the "naughty ones" pretty freely. They'll want to
| obey rules until they hit one that they feel doesnt' make sense
| and/or needs to be broken, and ideally will get back to being
| "Sheep" once it doesn't make sense to be a "naughty one" anymore
| (i.e. rules have changed, or better, they changed the rule)
|
| That's also a reason why I see places like startup hubs where
| people consciously behave in unconventional ways (= be jerks,
| most of the time) to feel like they're "naughty ones" shouldn't
| be lauded, and being indepdendent minded should be balanced with
| benefits to the surrounding people or society (if you break big
| rules, it should have a big payoff for everyone)
|
| PS: I find wording it as "sheep" to be unneedingly pejorative
| towards people who just don't break the rules and let others live
| their own life. In other classifications it would be "lawful
| neutral" for instance.
| zzz61831 wrote:
| Yes, this is a notable problem in all of such conversations.
| Classifying people based on the opinions they express is a
| prime example of a logical fallacy.
|
| But it's somewhat understandable why this happens. Those in a
| position of power want everyone to see a convincing enough
| reason behind their actions so people won't be opposed to them,
| be more obedient and just don't dissent. So they resort to
| elaborate logical fallacies, portraying everyone as never
| changing simple minded static blobs that can be classified into
| categories in order to judge, ban, punish and police them.
| Ironic, given what the article classifies people for.
| austincheney wrote:
| > As for most attempts to classify people, it should be
| strongly stated that any single human would fits several
| quadrants depending on the subject
|
| Its not related to such subjectivity as the subjectivity is
| itself a likely form of conformity.
| hrktb wrote:
| I meant that someone could be "sheep"ly following rules and
| ignoring others when it comes to games, but "naughty" when
| it's about business or fiscality, and "tattletales" when it
| comes to religion.
|
| That would be the same person, but behaving differently
| depending on the field or the context.
| bsenftner wrote:
| If one did not know who the author is, the essay would be
| criticized as shallow and sweeping to the point of being a
| vague excuse to treat others badly by those that only half
| grasp ideas anyway. Strikes me as personal writing that ought
| to be kept personal.
| Funes- wrote:
| >Strikes me as personal writing _that ought to be kept
| personal_
|
| Spoken like a true _aggressively conventional-minded_ person.
| Archit3ch wrote:
| > In particular, I think a lot of people switch from the
| "sheep" quadrant and the "naughty ones" pretty freely. They'll
| want to obey rules until they hit one that they feel doesnt'
| make sense and/or needs to be broken, and ideally will get back
| to being "Sheep" once it doesn't make sense to be a "naughty
| one" anymore (i.e. rules have changed, or better, they changed
| the rule)
|
| Unethical life pro tip: If you are breaking the rules, at least
| make a case for why they don't apply to you.
|
| "I'm only stealing to feed my family."
|
| "This isn't an invasion, we're just annexing our own population
| on the other side of this border."
| hrktb wrote:
| True (political pro tip: don't send your army on "vacations"
| in bordering countries)
|
| At the extreme, this is the base for civil disobedience: it
| is a disruptive breaking of the rules, but in a morally
| conscious and thought through way.
| Funes- wrote:
| >PS: I find wording it as "sheep" to be unneedingly pejorative
| towards people who just don't break the rules and let others
| live their own life. In other classifications it would be
| "lawful neutral" for instance.
|
| One can do society more harm being passively conformist than
| using mildly pejorative terms. In Paul Graham's essay, the
| object (the "sheep") of the critique is more dangerous than its
| subject (the author). I would even go on to say that it is an
| ethical duty to be independent-minded.
| ben509 wrote:
| > They'll want to obey rules until they hit one that they feel
| doesnt' make sense and/or needs to be broken...
|
| What the rules are is complicated by all the unwritten rules.
| Many people speed, but never more than 10 over the limit, and
| they'll even get irritated by people driving at the posted
| limit.
|
| > PS: I find wording it as "sheep" to be unneedingly pejorative
| towards people who just don't break the rules and let others
| live their own life.
|
| The problem is they'll also conform to rules that don't let
| others live their own life. So if there's a clique of people,
| the aggressive conformist might mark an outsider for ostracism,
| and the passive conformist will dutifully uphold that.
|
| But "sheep" is awful. I always think of the cringey post of,
| "Imma sheepdog protecting the sheep from the wolves." Unspoken:
| ...so the shepherd can then send the lambs to slaughter.
| stopachka wrote:
| Loved this essay. The phrase "aggressively conventional minded"
| is genius, and may contribute a lot towards the solution.
|
| As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I've felt personal
| alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of
| intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the
| left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on
| freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right
| militarizing).
|
| Yet, as PG points out, the independent minded are good at
| figuring out solutions. No matter what, the fundamental ideas
| that America is built on is focused so heavily on freedom that I
| trust the aggressively independent to protect, and the passively
| independent minded to innovate.
| blueyes wrote:
| Some ideas are dangerous, and closely tied to both actions and
| policies. It is the responsibility of smart, powerful and
| conscientious people to acknowledge that. I am not saying that
| dangerous ideas should not be discussed. But we should be
| careful what we say in public. How should society regulate
| pedophilia, if at all? Nambla has opinions about that. Does
| Paul draw the line at legalizing pedophilia? Does he advocate
| that our most popular platforms embrace and encourage that
| debate? Race-based eugenics is another idea that has surfaced
| again and again. Why not optimize the human species through
| sterilization of its less desired members? That idea seems to
| march in lockstep with policies of extermination. Does Paul
| draw the line at that idea? If not, why not?
| [deleted]
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >No matter what, the fundamental ideas that America is built on
| is focused so heavily on freedom
|
| Freedom as long as you aren't threateningly critical of
| America.
|
| The journalist of the Syrian War who took an anti-American
| stance and was targetted by American drone strikes would prove
| otherwise: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| features/how-...
| lm28469 wrote:
| You don't even have to look that far, there are secret police
| officers using unmarked rental cars to arrest protesters
| without telling them who they are and why they are being
| arrested.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/17/portland-
| pro...
|
| https://twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1283436911307218948
| threatofrain wrote:
| How many bad apples makes a police black site?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-
| poli...
| philwelch wrote:
| The guy they're "arresting" also doesn't say anything, and
| is extremely compliant for someone who's allegedly an anti-
| police protester. I believe that is a video of an informant
| extraction.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I believe that is a video of an informant extraction.
|
| It could very well be but it isn't an isolated thing (as
| far as I can tell) and it's in line with everything that
| happened in the last weeks/months in the US.
|
| In absence of any proofs I wouldn't side with the law
| enforcement by default, but you're right to question it.
| philwelch wrote:
| > it isn't an isolated thing (as far as I can tell) and
| it's in line with everything that happened in the last
| weeks/months in the US.
|
| If that's the case, then why is this very strange and
| anomalous video the one thing people keep talking about
| when there are much more clear-cut examples such as
| Lafayette Park? More importantly, why is that the one
| data point that people are building the narrative around
| and saying, "well, it isn't an isolated incident".
| stopachka wrote:
| The fact that an article exists, and it's possible for him to
| sue, is a right and luxury afforded to us by this American
| belief in freedom.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| His suit was dismissed by the government because having to
| defend themselves against the accusation would disclose
| state secrets. The right to sue only matters if you can
| meaningfully exercise it...
|
| And your standards are ridiculous. If anyone anywhere was
| able to show you a story of the US trying to kill someone
| for committing ideological heresy then the very fact they
| could tell you the story is proof that Amrrica believes in
| ideological freedom? You see the contradiction surely...
| stopachka wrote:
| I don't quite see it, because at least in the part of the
| world I was raised, I can tell you that someone talking
| about this on the news would have sounded ridiculous.
|
| I do agree that America has never been a perfect bastion
| of freedom, and there are large struggles today. It
| definitely saddens me to see that.
|
| Yet, this is the whole point of the idea that our ties to
| freedom are fundamental -- that some group in the U.S
| _will_ disagree with authorities, that even if a suit is
| dropped, they may continue the fight. It's not ideal that
| we have to fight, but the fact that we can is a freedom
| that is very rare.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I was raised in such a world too.
|
| I get what you're saying. But like everything there is a
| middle ground. US has good press freedom, but they also,
| like every country, will kill you if you "blaspheme"
| against them too much. There's a balance between freedom
| and security. And what the US deems "safe" and "unsafe"
| is always important to keep in mind
| mc32 wrote:
| And while you are aghast at that, I'd have ask if you'd be
| aghast at the people who bully and gaslight and threaten
| individuals who are critical of some aspects of
| progressivism. I ask because if we ever had an "antifa"
| government I can be almost certain the abuses would escalate
| to heights we dare not imagine.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I also am not a fan of cancel culture or the sort of
| progressive Victorianism we see these days. Sure an antifa
| government would suck.
|
| But that's just bad manners, these are people being
| assassinated because the government disagrees with them.
| mc32 wrote:
| I wouldn't be so optimistic. Level headed people in the
| French Revolution, the liberals in the Russian
| revolution, they had some rather horrible things happen.
| Done by very lucid people. You can't say that was then.
| It's hard to escape that fate.
| [deleted]
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| "Yes I understand you're outraged by killing people with
| drone strikes, but think of the people whose companies
| didn't want anything to do with them after they said
| something nasty!"
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's his personal problem.
|
| He built the ultimate machine to attract conformists who want
| to get another badge. First the conformists will push out
| individualists by their sheer bulk and better ability to
| navigate the approval process. (It's their core competency in
| life!)
|
| Y Combinator is a plant that has grown too large for its pot.
| Someday something is going to go wrong, there are so many
| people going through it that sooner or later there is going to
| be a scandal. Graham is not on a growth trajectory, and sooner
| or later decay is going to catch up with him. I don't know
| exactly how, but the logic of exponential growth will to
| discover it.
|
| If he wants to do anything except "richmansplain" about how
| there's some kind of problem that he can't talk about except in
| abtruse code (e.g. I am clearly agonized about something, but I
| have to draw four quadrants to pretend that I'm thinking deeply
| about it rather than obscure what bothers me) because if he was
| able to put his ineffable thoughts into words then somebody is
| going to do something completely indescribable.
|
| He won't listen but here is my advice.
|
| Graham has accomplished as much as he can in the place he is
| at. If he stays where he is, he can at best tread water, at
| worst various problems are going to catch up with him, he's
| going to paint himself into a corner, the amoral conformists
| attracted to his organization are going to create a scandal,
| the u.s. becomes unable to support s.v. b ecause capital has
| waged an investment strike against most of it, etc.
|
| If he leaves Y Co in the hands of people he trusts (does he
| trust anyone?) and spends a year or two doing something else in
| a different place I think he'll have something interesting to
| say and he
|
| It's sad, but reading his essays feels so much like reading
| Peirs Anthony, it is just the same essay over and over again
| with very little feeling he's grown. Maybe he needs to hang out
| with some adults, admit that being a zillionaire doesn't make
| you immortal, that you're always going to be frustrated because
| your species is split into two genders, etc.
| mattbee wrote:
| Well said.
|
| pg might be interesting again if he said what "unsayable" and
| "aggressively independent-minded" things he actually wants to
| say, and I wish he bloody would - we've got no choice but to
| read it.
|
| "independent-minded" is such a cliche now - it's often a
| euphemism for something else. Surely more truly "aggressively
| independent-minded" people are homeless addicts, not rockstar
| founders. What's the right balance between conformism and
| independent-mindedness? In what areas of life? This 2-axis
| system is way too simple. Start there, dude.
|
| By implication pg (and YC) recognise and value independent-
| mindedness - but as you say, from the outside YC appears to
| reward _conformism_ to their well-understood creeds (as well
| as just playing the odds of an enormous number of companies,
| rather than being clever pickers).
|
| (edit: removed snark, however deserved)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It would be interesting if he developed a theory of
| "unsayable" things based on examples. One really good one
| is Freud's theory of infantile sexuality:
|
| https://www.bartleby.com/278/2.html
|
| It's completely true that four year old boys get erections
| and play with themselves (I did), don't think about it all
| when they are ten, and then tend to think about it a lot
| when they hit puberty.
|
| It is the basis for understanding how sexual abuse hurts
| children, but say it and people will report you to the FBI
| as a pedo.
|
| If Graham were serious he could make a list of 20 diverse
| examples like this.
| paigeschwartz wrote:
| Interesting. Here's what he wrote about that in 2004:
|
| "When you find something you can't say, what do you do
| with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick
| your battles...The most important thing is to be able to
| think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you
| feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit
| you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better
| to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between
| your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything
| is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging
| the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a
| secret society, nothing that happens within the building
| should be told to outsiders."
|
| http://paulgraham.com/say.html
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| The fact that you are posting this using your real name
| is strong evidence that it's not actually "unsayable".
| stopachka wrote:
| He doesn't run YC anymore. He lives in the Uk at this point
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Thanks for the correction!
|
| It might be nice to hear something about his experience in
| the UK then.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Is there more context on this? Why is he in the UK for
| example?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's interesting that he doesn't share anything about his
| life, isn't it? Even if his body is not in the Bay Area
| he doesn't show any evidence of having been around.
|
| Even Piers Anthony would talk about the random things
| that happened in his life, but Graham doesn't.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think he might have downvoted me even for asking :)
|
| Seriously though, I can't really blame him. I got a few
| days fame back in the day and it was a scary thing to
| watch a mob of strangers picking on my past and judging.
| Even people who I thought are my friends acted extremely
| strange - as if they don't know me personally and joining
| the mob of haters or lovers.
| iamwil wrote:
| He's raising his kids. It's understandable if someone
| doesn't want to talk about the comings and goings of
| their family and personal life.
|
| Occasionally he'll tweet out "darn things my kids say".
| But no, it's not interesting at all he doesn't share
| anything about his life.
| iamwil wrote:
| He hasn't been running YC for years now. He left it to Sam
| Altman to run for the last couple of years. And even Sam has
| left the post to Geoff Ralston, which is currently running
| it. PG's twice removed. We're on Thomas Jefferson now.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Despite the biographical problems, I agree with the comments
| on the essays. He's fighting the last war still.
|
| Conventional thinkers are the builders of institutions. The
| people who bring us together. As an aggressively independent
| minded person, I see a dire need for that.
|
| If socially minded people don't have a nice group to join,
| they fall back on the old toxic classics. We need someone to
| give us new unions, churches, universities, bowling teams, a
| group you aren't born into. The aggressively conventionally
| minded people are the ones who can do that!
| [deleted]
| newacct583 wrote:
| > the fundamental ideas that America is built on is focused so
| heavily on freedom that I trust the aggressively independent to
| protect, and the passively independent minded to innovate.
|
| If you saw that essay as a defense of existing social
| structures, how are you so sure you're not just one of the
| convention minded too?
| stopachka wrote:
| To clarify how I see it -
|
| I don't see it as a defense of existing social structures, I
| see it as a defense of freedom. Some existing social
| structures promote it, and so would others that don't exist
| yet (some ideas: social network that proliferates good
| debates, tool that shows a politician's vested interests,
| laws on transparency and symmetry, a new kind of univ focused
| on experience in the real world, etc)
|
| To answer the question, how do I know if I'm just one of the
| convention minded? -
|
| I don't think you can know with certainty, so you should
| question yourself, but there are a few signs:
|
| - if your ideas are nuanced and don't quite fit on an axis,
| sign of a good thing - if you read original sources, and
| reflect on your own experience to form theories, good sign -
| if you have gotten deeper on opposing views, and can
| articulate them well, good sign - if you notice most people
| in your social circle wouldn't agree with some of your ideas,
| could be a good sign (conventionally minded folks are often
| conventionally minded to gain support of their immediate
| peers)
| newacct583 wrote:
| > I don't see it as a defense of existing social
| structures, I see it as a defense of freedom.
|
| Right, in the same sentence in which you identified
| "freedom", not as an abstract ideal that stands alone, but
| as one of "the fundamental ideas that America is built on".
| That tells me you're making a political point (or an
| identity one, I guess), not a principled one.
|
| As far as your definition, I'd just go with this:
|
| - Do you regularly find your ideas conflict in serious ways
| with people who hold actual power over your daily life.
|
| - Do you do anything about it?
|
| If you don't answer yes to BOTH of those questions, I think
| you can rule out the "independent thinker" label. If you
| do, well maybe I guess.
|
| But I'd suggest toning down the identity stuff unless
| you're trying to signal to a particular tribe. It's
| conformist almost by definition.
| stopachka wrote:
| Yes to both: I was a staff eng at big co, where the way I
| wrote the ideas above would have been trouble. I didn't
| kow tow during my tenure, and now I'm building a company.
| stopachka wrote:
| Re: political or identity point
|
| I am not quite sure I understand that view. Why is the
| statement "America was built on fundamental ideas of
| freedom" a political or identity point?
|
| From the way our government is structured (checks and
| balances), to the constitution (free speech), I think
| they stand on the side of freedom pretty objectively
| peregrine wrote:
| > I am not quite sure I understand that view. Why is the
| statement "America was built on fundamental ideas of
| freedom" a political or identity point?
|
| Because freedom cannot be untied from politics and
| society. The initial constitutional congress defined
| freedom for those who owned land. Obviously with time it
| expanded to all white men, then all white women, and so
| on, but not with out a inherently political fight.
|
| A fight which we may not encode into law, but which is
| effectively encoded into law by uneven enforcement of
| law.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| "Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the
| same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for
| slave owners." --Vladimir Lenin
|
| In the case of the early United States, the "slave-
| owners" part is literal, but even ignoring that, you have
| to remember that when the constitution was written, only
| land-owning white men could vote, and the men forming the
| new government were largely the same ones who had a
| leading role in British colonial society. The "freedom"
| in question was pretty much exclusively the freedom of
| the ruling class _here_ to oppress others without the
| interference of the ruling class _there_. For instance,
| one of the sources of tension leading up to the
| revolution was the Proclamation of 1763, by which the
| British government forbade further colonization westward
| into Indian territory. Consequently, most Indians
| supported the British during the revolution. Which side
| do you think was better protecting _their_ freedom?
|
| You can also see this in the design of the original
| constitution, which has many "checks and balances" to
| protect against parts of the federal government usurping
| power, but has effectively nothing protecting freedom or
| democracy from the existing state governments, except
| requiring that they have a Republican form of government.
| Again, the freedom of the rulers _here_ from the power of
| the rulers _there_. I 'll admit that the first amendment
| was a genuine step towards freedom, but one which was
| taken primarily for the protection of the class interests
| of the type of men who'd participated in the committees
| of correspondence, which were frequently denied to people
| with less power, starting with the Alien and Sedition
| acts of 1798 and continuing in some form or another
| throughout all American history.
|
| None of this is to say that there's no way that the
| founding of the US could be seen as representing freedom:
| just that there's another possible narrative depending on
| what parts of the story you do and don't tell. I started
| this comment by quoting Lenin, who in that context could
| be seen as a freedom-fighter, who indeed overthrew an
| absolute monarch in the name of freedom and equality. If
| you read the Soviet constitution, it also purported to
| guarantee free speech, press, and religion. However,
| Lenin ensured that the new government was a one-party
| state, which quickly eroded almost all freedoms that had
| been achieved in the revolution. Which part of the story
| you choose to tell and how it reflects on the present day
| is a matter of ideology and identity.
| ptd wrote:
| Whether or not you believe America was built on freedom
| has a strong correlation to your political affiliation.
| hnal943 wrote:
| That has only been true for a few years. In any previous
| century, that claim was not political.
| newacct583 wrote:
| That's really not true. For the last 60 years or so
| (basically since the civil rights movement) the
| conventional understanding of "freedom" on the educated
| American left has been significantly more nuanced. It is,
| after all, a nation with the institution of slavery
| enshrined in its constitution, so people tend to talk
| carefully about which freedoms they mean.
|
| On the right, that never took hold (we probably don't
| want to get into why). So when someone says something
| like "freedom is a foundational ideal of America" they're
| effectively making a declaration of identity as an
| American conservative.
|
| And coming back to the upthread point: if I hear that
| statement as "I'm a conservative!" in the context of "I'm
| an independent thinker!", then I'm going to be a little
| dubious about how independent that thought is when it's
| defined in terms of a political identity. Political
| orthodoxy is perhaps the SAFEST form of (to use the
| terminology from the article) conventional-minded
| thought.
| bitcurious wrote:
| You are mixing thought and values, in both of your
| questions.
|
| Independent minded people can find themselves agreeing
| with people in power; the independence of mind is about
| the "why" not the "what." If you independently,
| critically evaluate an issue and settle on the common
| belief that doesn't make you conformist.
|
| Likewise, if you settle on the opposite side and don't
| act on it, it takes nothing away from your independence
| of thought, rather it's a question of values. The answer
| to "is this worth my time?" is yes or no independently of
| whether you agree of disagree with the zeitgeist.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > the independent minded are good at figuring out solutions.
|
| Ideally it wouldn't cost one their life, liberty or means of
| sustenance in the pursuit of figuring out these solutions
| missosoup wrote:
| Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off.
| I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it
| goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people
| here though. Those who don't know history are destined to
| repeat it, I guess.
|
| Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame
| the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally
| Hitler/Stalin' depending on political alignment, which is a
| very powerful weapon to shut down discourse.
|
| This rising culture is freedom and diversity in all things
| except thought. This is how totalitarian regimes form. This is
| what my parents dumped their entire life savings into escaping,
| and here I am watching it rise again.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Am I misreading you or are you framing the left as the forces
| of conformity?
|
| Only one side has badgeless forces snatching people off the
| streets and is talking about disregarding the results of our
| election.
|
| My apologies if I misunderstood.
| harimau777 wrote:
| The problem that I see is: what's the alternative?
|
| Average people don't really have any political power in
| America so what alternative do they have?
|
| I agree with you that some of the more extreme parts of the
| social justice movement (for lack of a better term) worry me,
| but the alternative seems to be to do nothing.
| AlanYx wrote:
| I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more
| directly similar to the "red guards" period during the
| Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples. Some of the
| parallels are just so direct -- students denouncing their
| professors, forcing them them to recant, the ideologies of
| the students growing more and more rigid and narrow through
| the conformity of the mob, until they often ended up even
| denouncing the professors who encouraged the movement to
| start.
|
| No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it
| grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though
| he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the
| Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he
| was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural
| revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically
| pure enough.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The first best instance of this was during the French
| Revolution. People were guillotined in droves for being not
| merely enthusiastic enough.
| AlanYx wrote:
| I think there are some important qualitative differences
| with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship
| with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the
| French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of
| scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year
| into the Terror, the Institut de France was established
| with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the
| scientific method.
|
| In the cultural revolution, it was different. More than
| three fourths of the members of the Chinese Academy of
| Sciences were persecuted, most of whose work did have
| scientific merit and had no direct nexus with politics.
| But that was the problem -- just doing science wasn't
| sufficiently political/ideological for the mob.
| [deleted]
| chillacy wrote:
| There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three
| Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics
| to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate
| theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students.
|
| I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre
| piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of
| stuff really happened.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I see the similarities, but one big difference is that the
| Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party
| of his enemies and reshape society to serve him more fully.
|
| What's happening in the US emerging from below, without
| anyone orchestrating it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pdonis wrote:
| _> What 's happening in the US emerging from below_
|
| Partly, yes. But it is also being co-opted by people
| whose actual motives are very different from the
| perfectly justifiable demands for equality before the
| law.
|
| _> without anyone orchestrating it_
|
| It may have started without anyone orchestrating it, but
| I don't think it's that way now. See above.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >one big difference is that the Red Guards were created
| by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies...
|
| No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I
| think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong.
|
| The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement.
| They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he
| could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its
| broadcast. This fanned the flames of the movement (being
| a kind of political endorsement), and from that point Red
| Guard cells sprung up organically across the country.
| From that point, things became chaotic and the leadership
| in Beijing made a series of sometimes opposing moves,
| some of which tried to restrain the movement to preserve
| the government and others which fanned the flames.
| missosoup wrote:
| This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most
| people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the
| terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're
| dealing with in the US right now.
|
| This ideology is not something that strives for or can be
| steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to
| expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over
| the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the
| cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial
| growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous
| cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as
| anti-virtuous.
|
| People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc.
| have seen this before, but the current generation of
| westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of
| doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be
| rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what
| GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our
| heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how
| this plays out. And just like back then, people now are
| going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'.
|
| Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading
| forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.
| nitrogen wrote:
| In addition to Lord of the Flies, we had to watch a movie
| in my high school (long ago) about student movements
| getting out of hand, I think it was called The Wave.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0083316/ might be it
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, Lord of the Flies is fiction.
|
| In real life, the boys stranded on a deserted island made
| a pact to never quarrel, and kept that pact for a half
| century.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-
| lord-...
| graeme wrote:
| Lovely story! That said, lord of the flies had at least
| 20-30 boys involved, whereas this group was six boys who
| were already friends. More is different.
|
| (Not arguing reality would go the way of lord of the
| flies, merely that the example above is not definitive.
| But boy would I like to see the movie they made!)
| jostylr wrote:
| Keep in mind that the book that is from, Humankind, while
| a hope filled book (I enjoyed it thoroughly), makes the
| point that when we get together, the bonds between people
| can lead them to do horrendous things to others. Our
| power to cooperate is our superpower and our kryptonite.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I don't think children now would have the trust enough to
| cooperate.
| monocasa wrote:
| I think you might be surprised. The sense of comradery
| between the younger gens is crazy.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I guess we've read different books about it. This is my
| source: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679746323/
|
| What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully.
|
| But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a
| free enough society that students could just start an
| independent political movement that took over the
| country?
| AlanYx wrote:
| I haven't read that book, but the Wikipedia article gives
| a reasonable account based on what I've read:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards#Origins
|
| >But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a
| free enough society that students could just start an
| independent political movement that took over the
| country?
|
| It wasn't a free society by any stretch, but the
| students' radicalism was in line with the prevailing
| zeitgeist... they denounced university officials as
| intellectual elites, corrupted by bourgeois notions that
| threatened the success of the revolution. Meanwhile, Mao
| faced ongoing struggles to maintain and consolidate
| power, so he found endorsing their ideas useful. But the
| movement itself rapidly spun beyond his direct control.
| free_rms wrote:
| Mao leveraged the movement to try and get himself back in
| the driver's seat, after he had been sidelined following
| the Great Leap Forward. He amplified them greatly for his
| own selfish reasons, which is also happening in our
| current moment, in different ways. They wound up being,
| surprise, unpredictable and destructive.
|
| (A note, I read that book too, it's good but needs
| discounting for bias. Anybody who writes Beijing as
| 'Peking', or Zhou Enlai as "Chou En-lai" in the 21st
| century has clearly got a KMT-flavored axe to grind. But
| it also has some great original research.)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Yeah, the anti Mao sentiment is very clear.
|
| This is not just a factual historical account. It also
| takes a lot of opportunities to point out how awful a
| person Mao was, and makes claims about his motives, which
| don't always seem knowable.
|
| Of course, when writing about one of the worst rulers in
| human history, being a bit judgemental is understandable.
| But it does make me want to check other sources.
|
| On the fact level, there seems to be an enormous amount
| of work behind the book.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Sounds scary so long as everything is discussed in such
| vague terms, which is why those decrying "cancel culture"
| always keep it in the theoretical space.
|
| When the "conformity of the mob" is a concrete example,
| such as leftists fighting for basic human rights, eg.
| access to medicine so that you don't die, not getting
| murdered by the police, etc, well it's hard to make this
| sound troubling.
| stopachka wrote:
| Agreed. Recently read Born Red by Yuan Gao. Harrowing, both
| in what happened and how plausible it sounds today
| mcguire wrote:
| Now, what happens to the "conventional" in Paul Graham's
| independent-minded world?
|
| Can you be independent-minded in the wrong way? What if
| you're not independent-minded enough, according to someone?
| wdwecewc wrote:
| As someone from the real world, I just read comments like
| this and laugh. Most of the alarmism is based solely on a few
| nasty twitter threads. There is no real speech suppression
| going on (except, maybe, by the right wingers in power), but
| the leftists and mobs reminiscent of the soviet era certainly
| don't have any power right now. People pull out the 'i am
| from a soviet state' card all the time and it's just so far
| removed from the present day United States I can only
| recommend you take a break from the web.
| baryphonic wrote:
| I know at least two people who have been fired over the
| last month for wrongthink: one was due to a guy's
| stupidity; with the other, some woke vigilante went after
| him and intentionally took some jokes out of context. And
| this isn't an uncommon story. Did I imagine these two
| people losing their jobs, or did it really happen? Did they
| have their speech suppressed? And if it did happen, can you
| not see any parallels to how totalitarian regimes - Soviet
| or otherwise - operated?
|
| > There is no real speech suppression going on (except,
| maybe, by the right wingers in power), but the leftists and
| mobs reminiscent of the soviet era certainly don't have any
| power right now.
|
| During any coup d'etat, the perpetrators have two immediate
| objectives: isolate the existing leader and control the
| flow of information (usually the TV broadcasters or radio).
| This is true of almost every coup. For instance, a few
| years ago, the Turkish military attempted a coup against
| Erdogan, and were thwarted when he started making Facetime
| calls to the outside.[1] Schools are also often targeted
| over the longer term, and in places with state religion,
| the religious institutions are as well. I'd ask whether the
| "right wingers in power" are more isolated than any generic
| previous people in power, and I'd ask whether the "right
| wingers in power" have control over those culture
| institutions, or whether those are more guided by "the
| leftists and mobs" who "don't have any power right now."
|
| The most we can really say is that some right wingers have
| titles, but I'd argue that they have little actual power.
| (The current right-winger can't even get his former
| National Security Adiver's charges dropped, which were
| filed during his presidency by his people.)
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/2016/7/16/12206304/turkey-coup-
| facetime
| [deleted]
| missosoup wrote:
| You sound like someone who has never experienced the second
| phase of where this culture inevitably leads to. I pray
| that it remains that way.
|
| This is not a left/right issue. This is a mental
| homogeneity to the point of militant aggression towards
| dissenting views issue. And it always leads to
| totalitarianism.
| locopati wrote:
| How do you feel about the "mental homogeneity to the
| point of militant aggression towards dissenting views"
| when applied to a denial and perpetuation of aggression
| towards Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people and towards
| women? a belief that militarized police are just fine or
| that police brutality isn't a problem? a belief that
| gender is a binary or that love and intimacy are only
| allowable between opposites in that binary?
|
| in the USA, the dominant mindset (if evaluated by the
| current political) is exactly "mental homogeneity to the
| point of militant aggression towards dissenting views"
| and it's not coming from progressive views, it's coming
| from the authoritarians
|
| this whole idea of 'cancel culture' is just as much
| calling for the fainting couch as 'political correctness'
| was
| wdwecewc wrote:
| As someone who claims to be educated on history, it is
| important then to remind yourself of why this actually
| occurs. You can't make essays dismissing some angry mob
| as if they are a homogenous hivemind. They won't listen
| to you because they literally can't listen to you, they
| act independently and uncoordinated. You have to tackle
| issues which cause them to be aggressive towards racists
| to begin with. Police brutality, for example, is still a
| threat not yet addressed. yet in all of Paul's preaching
| about the mob I don't see him making an iota of effort to
| do something that would actually stop the mob: fixing
| their issues. Instead, the current plan seems to be to
| dismiss their outcries and trod steadily along down the
| path of least resistance in a world that was already
| collapsing with or without the anger.
| missosoup wrote:
| You probably don't know this word, but you're literally
| advocating for ochlocracy, which is the very thing I was
| talking about in the upstream comments.
|
| The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will
| never be satisfied. That's exactly how it transitions
| into totalitarianism. Pandering to the mob just adds more
| fuel to the fire.
|
| Police brutality etc. are issues that should certainly be
| addressed, and there's countless other societal issues
| that need to be looked at. But dealing with those and
| pandering to the mob are orthogonal issues. We have a
| democracy, the rule of law, and a government structure
| specifically to define a process for addressing such
| issues. These are the mechanisms that differentiate the
| western world from the soviet nightmare my parents
| escaped. It's so bizarre and terrifying to watch people
| openly advocating for discarding them and embracing mob
| rule. Americans have fought and died to uphold these
| values, and now a pocket of their own citizenry wants to
| demolish them.
|
| > You have to tackle issues which cause them to be
| aggressive towards racists to begin with
|
| Pretty heavily loaded language there. Anyone mob targets
| = racist? There's far too much evidence of the mob
| targeting non-racists to even pretend that this is what
| motivates them at this stage. 'Racist', or rather the
| newspeak co-opted 'Bigot', is now just the current
| incarnation of 'Communist', 'Kulak', 'Witch' and whatever
| other generic labels for the enemy of the mob. The mob
| never runs out of enemies, the mob never runs out of
| issues to get angry about. It's Lord of the Flies at a
| national scale.
| wdwecewc wrote:
| I would argue a mob is just a sort of tumor clinging onto
| the back of a very legitimate protest movement. My point,
| which I maintain, is that people like Paul are using this
| as an excuse to dismiss the movement in its entirety by
| selecting the (real) problems created by the mob. You
| would not be allowing the mob to rule by satisfying the
| entire group's demands. This is a function of very
| ordinary protests that have gone on over the last
| forever.
|
| And I don't think it's fair to compare racists, which are
| real, to witches, which are not.
| skellington wrote:
| "racist" and "witch" are just labels given to those that
| don't agree with you or are somehow disapproved of by the
| mob. Not surprisingly, their definitions just change as
| needed by the mob. The term racist is just as ephemeral
| as witch in the cancel-culture world.
|
| Racist used to mean something around "believing one race
| was inherently better than another," but now it means
| anyone who doesn't agree with the BLM organization or who
| supports the Constitution, rule-of-law, Trump, etc..
|
| In fact, if you've taken a look at modern critical race
| theory writings, you might be a racist if you:
|
| - emphasize objective thought, cause and effect thinking
| - support nuclear families as a good structure - prefer
| individualism - "work before play" or believe that hard
| work is key to success
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I think you need to spend some more time familiarizing
| yourself with American history. This is not the first
| time U.S. citizens have decided to protest for change.
|
| You're acting like this is the first time people have
| ever complained about things or marched in the streets,
| and therefore we're on the precipice of communism. We're
| not.
|
| > The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will
| never be satisfied.
|
| We don't have a mob in the U.S., we have sovereign
| citizens. The right to march and complain about each
| other is firmly protected by the U.S. Constitution. The
| goal of improving the nation is shared by all of us, and
| we take it seriously, even if some feelings get hurt
| along the way.
| harimau777 wrote:
| You may be correct that it is not possible to satisfy the
| "mob". However, I don't think the mob exists in a vacuum.
| It seems to me that, at least to a degree, the mob and
| social unrest are a symptom of a society and democracy
| that as broken down and that is not working for people.
| In order to stop it, I think you need to restore people's
| confidence that the system is working for them.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| You are not addressing the point that the society at
| large has to continue to trust institutions to alleviate
| concerns of corruption by the institution. The mob is not
| formed in a vacuum. Democracy, rule of law, and
| government only have value when trust in those pillars of
| our society have not been eroded to the point where large
| swaths of people form a mob to carry out their own
| justice. It's been made abundantly clear in the West that
| our systems are very vulnerable to bad faith actors from
| inside the system.
|
| > Americans have fought and died to uphold these values,
| and now a pocket of their own citizenry wants to demolish
| them.
|
| This is true for both ends of this spectrum and also
| never ending. The mob doesn't see themselves as eroding
| those institutions just as our current government doesn't
| see itself as obstructionists. What makes this difficult
| is two competing extremes. I don't focus on cancel
| culture because I'm concerned more with the erosion of
| our voting rights and the dismantling of our institutions
| by our own citizens. It doesn't invalidate your points
| what so ever but it makes them a blind spot for
| individuals with competing priorities.
| jimbokun wrote:
| "I don't focus on cancel culture because I'm concerned
| more with the erosion of our voting rights and the
| dismantling of our institutions by our own citizens."
|
| Maybe we need to focus on both as manifestations of the
| same disease, even though one is much worse than the
| other?
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Of course, but I don't have the personal bandwidth to
| mentally deal with every issue we need to resolve as a
| society. I get around this by not out of hand dismissing
| concerns by others but I also can't take an active stance
| in their solutions. This is likely a more common story
| than we want to admit and the numerous issues across our
| political spectrum fragment our chances at a unified
| response to the problem.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Is this how this is supposed to work, then? A lot of
| people get angry about something and demonstrate/riot,
| and in response the laws get changed to pacify them.
|
| There's a term for that: "mob rule". It's not a good
| thing.
|
| I'm not for one second saying that Police brutality isn't
| a problem. I don't live in the USA so I don't know. I am
| saying that if your system doesn't provide a method for
| fixing this problem without rioting, then your system is
| probably broken, and it might be better to fix the system
| and then use the fixed system to fix the problem.
| krapp wrote:
| That's how things tend to work when people are so
| alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change
| within the system becomes impossible, yes.
|
| And while people like to dismiss any group whose concerns
| they disagree with as being merely an "angry mob," more
| often than not that "mob's" concerns are legitimate, and
| their anger is justifiable. Laws don't get passed to
| "pacify" them, they get passed because public pressure
| and awareness turns public opinion in their favor, making
| it politically infeasible for those in power to continue
| the status quo.
|
| That's not the way it's _supposed_ to work, but that 's
| the inevitable result of a democratic process and society
| not working as it ought to begin with.
| ptero wrote:
| The legitimate concerns and justified anger tend to be
| characterized by long-term (multiple years), consistent
| pressure. People exerting it can listen to opposing views
| (without angry screams) and justify their own.
|
| What we see today are angry flashes that can change
| direction on a whim. Flash mobs of statue tear-downs,
| coronavirus mask/no-mask outrages, etc. are in my view
| more of a symptom of pent-up aggression fanned by pre-
| election opportunism, not of legitimate concerns. My 2c.
| krapp wrote:
| With the exception of the coronavirus protests,
| everything else _has_ had years of consistent pressure
| behind it.
|
| There have been riots and protests over police brutality
| and systemic racism for years. People have been
| protesting America's whitewashing of its history and
| romanticizing of the Confederacy for years. None of these
| issues are new. The CHAZ wasn't the result of "pre-
| election opportunism," read their list of demands. It's
| fueled by anger, yes, but also seeks redress for
| grievances the black community has been complaining about
| for years. "Biden 2020" isn't in there anywhere.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > That's how things tend to work when people are so
| alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change
| within the system becomes impossible, yes.
|
| And it almost never ends well.
| [deleted]
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| >> That's how things tend to work when people are so
| alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change
| within the system becomes impossible, yes.
|
| And the endpoint of that process is revolution. Again,
| not a good thing. Revolutions are bloody.
|
| How can you fix the democratic process so that works as
| it ought and prevent the disaster you're heading for?
| krapp wrote:
| I don't know. I never thought I'd see the day when
| Americans seem more concerned about "SJWs" exercising
| their free speech rights than actual secret police
| tossing political dissidents into black vans but I guess
| here we are.
| archagon wrote:
| I look on in desperate horror at the blatant,
| authoritarian corruption happening every single day at
| the White House, and yet the only righteous anger I see
| on the "intellectual watering hole" of HN is towards
| cancel culture. I don't get it. Don't people read the
| news? How do you not have an ulcer from watching this
| shit every day for four years?
| [deleted]
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is a non-sequitur.
|
| Getting low level employees fired for some kind of
| political faux pas does absolutely nothing to combat
| Trump's gross abuses of power.
| krapp wrote:
| Many people oppose "cancel culture" and "SJWs" because
| they see them as part of a vast leftist conspiracy
| imposing a political agenda across media, arts and
| academia and oppressing free (read: right-wing) speech at
| every turn. Many of the same people support Trump's
| abuses of power being wielded against those they consider
| "leftist agitators" like BLM and Antifa.
|
| Both cases linked by fear of and opposition to the
| existential threat of "the left" as an insidious enemy
| within and a willingness to accept any means necessary to
| stop it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I see both cancel culture and Trump's strange presidency
| as part of the same problem - the one that PG is talking
| about.
|
| The rise of dogmatic orthodoxy and the inability to have
| a civilised dicussion where the participants disagree yet
| respect each other.
| stopachka wrote:
| How confident are you that this is true? What kind of
| information would you have to see to feel alarm?
| wdwecewc wrote:
| I would have to see the left gaining real political or
| financial power. Right now I am far more concerned about
| right wing fascism since that is gaining popularity in
| multiple countries.
| tome wrote:
| As has been pointed out a couple of times, it's not a
| question of left vs right though, it's a question of
| liberal vs illiberal. The number of people who have lost
| their livelihoods for mere speech (on both ends of the
| political spectrum) goes to show that the illiberals do
| have significant political and financial power, and
| toleration is declining.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The left controls academia, the arts, media, and
| corporate HR departments. That's a significant amount of
| power that can be wielded against people who don't
| conform.
| jmeister wrote:
| It's too far in the game to still make this claim.
|
| Go through this list and tell us there is no "real" speech
| suppression:
|
| https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?
| s...
| tome wrote:
| In fact it's mostly worse than that, because it's barely
| even "speech", it's people getting picked on for making
| trivial "mistakes".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You can think of it as "The Twitter mob needs to destroy
| N people every day".
|
| If they find genuinely bad people to destroy, they go
| first. But if not, pretty much anyone will do.
| nmzlPww wrote:
| I think in some areas you are right: The general population
| is not that affected (yet!).
|
| But in universities and open source projects there
| absolutely is an oppression of free speech. In open source
| projects it is usually corporate directed middle managers
| who no longer program, so they have to profile themselves
| as bureaucrats fighting for a cause in order not to lose
| their cozy jobs.
|
| And fight they do, Robespierre style.
| spectaclepiece wrote:
| I can't speak for the states but I feel strongly that the
| aggressive conformists are gaining ground on several levels
| of society. One can avoid the worst of it if as you say one
| stays away from certain threads online and I've personally
| taken steps to do so but the way it has started to permeate
| broader academia and work places is creating a real problem
| which needs to be addressed and the fact that sensible
| people are speaking out about it now is encouraging.
| soundnote wrote:
| It hasn't started permeating academia - the thing
| _started its life_ in academia. Most of the newspeak and
| the mobs ' grievances are rather directly born of
| "critical theory" born at the Frankfurt School. This is a
| bun that's been in the oven for decades.
|
| The critical theory was originally a tool for a
| philosopher to use, a lens to view things through or toy
| for them to play with:
|
| A way to look at things as power dynamics between
| societal groups, and how things those groups hold as
| truth are in part determined by how they speak. Language
| reinforces and spreads a view of the world, and a
| worldview is a tool for power. The way a group speaks of
| the world is their "discourse" of it.
|
| The critical theoretical project's aim is to look at the
| dominant groups' discourses and critique them
| relentlessly, to deconstruct, devalue and delegitimize
| them, to rob the words they use of the meaning that
| they're purported to hold.
|
| This kind of view is useful if it's a lens in a
| philosopher's toolbox and firmly sealed in a sandbox
| where it doesn't interfere with other programming, but
| utterly terrible to let loose on the world. Why?
|
| Because it's the intellectual equivalent of a universal
| acid. Nothing in that process is constructive, its only
| purpose is to corrode, erode, destroy established things.
| The only way the mindset knows how to function is to
| outline problems in a thing or to torture them out by
| doing a "close reading" of the material. Suffice to say
| an enemy can mind-read basically whatever they want to
| into a body of discourse.
|
| And that's what's going on out in the world: Basically
| every strand of activism from feminism, BLM, diversity
| trainings, X studies runs on that critical theoretical
| acid, and is actively trying to instill a "critical
| consciousness" (ie. ability and tendency to view things
| through the lens of critical theory and consequently take
| action to change the world against dominant discourses)
| in every corner of life.
|
| This is a problem.
|
| Why? Being more aware of power dynamics doesn't sound
| half bad in itself, and a more rounded curriculum might
| legitimately be a good idea. The problem isn't in the
| substance of what they claim they want to do, but the HOW
| of it. Critical theory is essentially an intellectual
| acid that's used to demolish pretty much anything into a
| feeble, shoddy and illegitimate-feeling house of cards,
| right?
|
| They're literally trying to construct the societal world
| on acid and caring more about words used than actual
| reality.
|
| They're literally trying to use a solvent as the
| foundation of society, the method that has two tools:
| Problematicize and delegitimize so as to tear down and
| destroy. There is no positive value - kindness, humor,
| gentleness in the program. Basically nothing is valued
| positively or viewed non-cynically, so next to nothing
| can be built. As a consequence, it's a destructive or
| takeover ideology. What it has has been taken from
| someone or is focused on tearing something down. Remove
| targets, you'll notice the whole endeavor is empty,
| because it stands against much, but truly stands for very
| little, if anything at all.
|
| Ever see mentions that people are being literally killed
| or somesuch when someone makes a comment an activist
| deems inappropriate. The focus on words is why. Speaking
| constructs a hegemonic discourse that will lead to
| oppression which legitimates some crackpot bigot
| somewhere to kill a transperson, so it's sane to them to
| treat any criticism or disagreement as if it was
| violence.
|
| Another problem is that some dominant discourses are not
| just social constructs in the sense that they're how the
| presumed-dominant group has ended up talking about
| things. Some discourses are dominant/hegemonic because
| they correspond well with reality and end up staying in a
| reality-connected memeplex where language is at least in
| part concerned with describing reality.
|
| This is utterly irrelevant in critical theory land, and
| so the theory doesn't care, and will try to dismantle
| them because they are simply tools of power used to
| oppress oppressed groups whose discourses are unfairly
| sidelined. Who says things is important, what is said,
| not so much. Everything is reduced down to group-based
| power struggles, and conceived as zero-sum games where
| victory is tearing down the majority enemy.
|
| What if someone isn't on board with the program? No
| sweat, in line with their Marxist social conflict theory
| heritage, critical theorists use the device of "false
| consciousness" or "internalized oppression" to sweep away
| people from oppressed groups who don't buy into the
| critical theoretical revolutionary narrative. It's really
| convenient how disagreement is just evidence of your
| rightness and proof that the opponents have done bad
| things. Needless to say, it means they're right in every
| case and the whole shebang is unfalsifiable because every
| counterargument is either the hegemonic discourse that is
| to be deconstructed and torn down or internalized
| oppression. Lived experience of minorities is only valid
| if they have woken to critical consciousness, ie. come to
| the right conclusions.
|
| Now start looking around, and the fingerprint of the
| critical theoretical worldview is everywhere. Insistence
| on alternate ways of knowing, framing everything as
| oppressor-oppressed relationships, redefinitions of words
| so as to exclude majority groups from fair treatment (See
| eg. Reddit's hate speech rules. Orwell couldn't have done
| "some are more equal than others" better:
| https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-
| reporting/acc... ). Many places where they simply try to
| force language to be reality rather than trying to find
| it.
|
| One salient example: Trans-rights activists insisting
| that lesbians should be attracted to them because what
| defines a woman is that the person thinks themselves one.
| It leads to totally inclusive and accepting funtimes like
| this: https://lesbian-rights-nz.org/shame-receipts/
|
| 'Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky' -
| do cities have to be so sexist? https://twitter.com/Guard
| ianAus/status/1280221825973313537
|
| The National Museum of African American Culture posted
| this: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-
| race/topics/whiten...
|
| Robin DiAngelo whose video is on that page authored a
| book called White Fragility. According to her, a
| "positive white identity is not possible". Wonder why? ht
| tps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumaniz
| i...
|
| Critical grammar at Rutgers:
| https://www.thecollegefix.com/rutgers-english-department-
| to-...
|
| Someone makes a joke about a model organism when asked
| about overrated animals. How to react?
|
| https://twitter.com/glctcsm/status/1285666612255821827
|
| https://twitter.com/glctcsm/status/1285666955945541633
| ptero wrote:
| > I feel strongly that the aggressive conformists are
| gaining ground on several levels of society. ... the fact
| that sensible people are speaking out about it now is
| encouraging.
|
| It is, but I am afraid sensible people speaking out may
| be on the decline. Many employers now schedule obligatory
| "sessions" where employees are given a spiel on a topic
| heavily pushing "the right view" with a short 2-3 minuted
| at the end dedicated to "discussion". With "just try to
| criticize this" as an unspoken seasoning.
|
| This would have been dismissed as "ludicrous, never going
| to happen here" when I came to the US 20 years ago but is
| the accepted norm now. Ironically, folks leaving for
| Vietnam claim more freedom as their main reason for
| leaving...
| luckylion wrote:
| > Many employers now schedule obligatory "sessions" where
| employees are given a spiel on a topic heavily pushing
| "the right view" with a short 2-3 minuted at the end
| dedicated to "discussion". With "just try to criticize
| this" as an unspoken seasoning.
|
| That reminds me of what I've spoken about a few times
| with friends, that it's similar to what Hillary Clinton
| said about the need to have a public and a private
| opinion, only for different reasons. Most people know
| what is allowed and what is expected to be said in
| public, and they'll behave accordingly. But they have a
| different, _real_ opinion in private.
| malandrew wrote:
| ne chital, no osuzhdayu
|
| https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-
| so...
| oisdk wrote:
| I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the
| main battle ground for free speech is young people like
| myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time
| protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US.
|
| Like there is an authoritarian government _right there_ for
| you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about
| tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural
| appropriation? A thread (1/329)".
| ekianjo wrote:
| since when are the feds a secret police?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Obviously the Trump administration is, by far, the bigger
| threat.
|
| The trouble is the left are staring to adapt his tactics.
|
| At the beginning of Trump's term, there was a lot of
| concern about how Trump was trying to silence the press
| through his rhetoric about "fake news" and threatening
| spurious libel claims, trying to shut down speech he didn't
| like.
|
| Now the left is adopting the mirror image policy of trying
| to shut down speech they don't like.
|
| Very few are left to actually stand up for the principle of
| granting freedoms, even to people you don't like or
| disagree with.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Twitter warriors are absolutely a small piece of the pie,
| but I think you could say they are the online face of the
| amorphous force that the authoritarian secret police are
| attacking.
|
| Each unit of the force is trivial (rioters are a trivial
| part of the protests, campus activists are a trivial part
| of the student body, AOC is a trivial part of congress,
| moral clarity journalists a la Wesley Lowery are a trivial
| part of news mastheads, online "SJW" people are a trivial
| part of Twitter, etc). However, in aggregate it freaks out
| and motivates the authoritarians you are talking about.
| When they criticize any of the forces, they are
| simultaneously fearing the larger whole.
| oisdk wrote:
| Listen, if people want to say that "cancel culture" is a
| real phenomenon and it has a chilling effect on speech
| that's one thing: I'd even be sympathetic to that point
| of view (although, as I said, I think it's vastly
| overblown by people like Graham who are simply
| experiencing criticism from a broader range of people due
| to social media).
|
| What I think is ridiculous is to jump to the
| authoritarian/soviet comparisons, especially when the US
| is in the midst of a horrific authoritarian _violent_
| crackdown by a militarised police force. I think that
| emphasis reveals a real lack of perspective.
| gpanders wrote:
| > What I think is ridiculous is to jump to the
| authoritarian/soviet comparisons, especially when the US
| is in the midst of a horrific authoritarian violent
| crackdown by a militarised police force.
|
| I mean, this too warrants authoritarian/Soviet
| comparisons, does it not?
|
| Besides, what happens when someone who is ideologically
| aligned with the angry Twitter mobs takes the reins of
| power and has the full force of the government behind
| them (including that militarized police force)? Can you
| not see why people might be concerned about systematic
| suppression of "bad" thoughts and ideas from the top-down
| (apropos the Soviet comparisons) in that scenario?
| biophysboy wrote:
| Sure - I get it. The violent crackdowns are big part of
| why I'm making authoritarian/soviet comparisons, in
| addition to the institutional battles in universities and
| media/tech companies.
| rclayton wrote:
| I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the
| people who have been "cancelled" and then compare it to
| those that have been violently attacked.
| oisdk wrote:
| I mean I think there's an argument to be made that
| discourse has become more rigid (although I do think it's
| overblown), but like I don't understand how you can write
| this:
|
| > Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells
| going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this
| before, I know where it goes.
|
| And _not_ be talking about a massive police crackdown on
| protest and the _army_ being brought in to police
| civilians. Like your alarm bells are dead silent for all
| of that, but some celebrity has to apologise for not
| saying "latinx" or whatever and suddenly you're all "ah
| yes, just like in the Soviet Union"?!
| hnal943 wrote:
| You don't understand, and that's the problem.
| rclayton wrote:
| Well, elaborate please.
| Sacho wrote:
| It's difficult, when we are in thorough disagreement of
| the facts.
|
| > And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on
| protest
|
| Is the police crackdown on protest or rioting? I can buy
| an argument that Trump hates the protests and is secretly
| hoping that sending the police will also disperse
| protesters, but on its face, do we disagree that there's
| rioting in Portland, and that it's the police's job to
| stop it?
|
| > and the army being brought in to police civilians.
|
| Huh?
|
| > but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying
| "latinx" or whatever
|
| This is disingenuous strawmanning. There's plenty
| instances of people losing their jobs for saying the
| wrong thing, and even a few extreme cases of people
| ending their lives after intense internet
| vitriol(although it would be equally disingenuous of me
| to focus on those cases and claim that cancel culture
| "kills people"). I don't know why parent jumps on
| celebrities as go-to examples - a stronger example would
| be academia, where political censure has been normalized
| for decades.
| rclayton wrote:
| I think that's the point. "Cancel cultural" has always
| been around in some form or another when you challenge
| the cultural norms of some society or institution. The
| outrage over it now seems silly, particularly when it's
| predominantly liberal people suffering from it. However,
| unlike other oppressed minorities of the past, the
| consequences are much less severe.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The point, to spell it out, is about chilling effects.
|
| If some organization starts killing everyone wearing a
| blue hat,pretty soone nobody would wear a blue hat.
|
| And then people like you would think that since no blue
| hat wearers get murdered, this is fine. Even call it "non
| violent" perhaps.
| [deleted]
| rclayton wrote:
| Have we started killing cancelled people? Who has been
| "cancelled" anyways? What punishments have they endured?
| A lost job at a very public position?
|
| As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly
| going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey
| Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered.
| Look at Al Franken - polls show he's electable in his
| state (by the group that ostracized him no less).
|
| More importantly, if cancel culture had any teeth, this
| President would have been cancelled.
| free_rms wrote:
| That's actually a great summary of the beef with cancel
| culture -- it only punches down.
|
| They can't touch Trump, or Ben Shapiro, or any of the
| other people that they really hate. Those people's actual
| jobs are to say things progressives hate.
|
| Who can the cancelers get? Moderate liberals, working in
| liberal enclaves, who said the wrong thing. Get'em!
| That'll make me feel better.
| rclayton wrote:
| That's actually my point. Overestimating the reach of
| cancel culture because you live in a liberal enclave.
| free_rms wrote:
| Maybe we're very precisely estimating the reach and are
| appropriately terrified?
|
| If you can't get the people you want, but you really want
| to get _somebody_...
| rclayton wrote:
| And what are the consequences of you getting cancelled?
| Really? You lose your job? People are fired everyday for
| silly things or no reason at all. But would you really
| want to continue working for a company/culture so
| incapable of enduring free thought? Perhaps companies
| need to suffer the consequences of losing talent to
| realize how intellectually bankrupt this process is.
| free_rms wrote:
| Yes, I lose my job, and for what? Some dysfunctional
| people get a dopamine hit that lasts 5 seconds before
| they need to go get someone else?
|
| I've got a family.
| skellington wrote:
| Incredible how clueless some people can be to true mob
| evilness.
|
| Being cancelled can mean that you will never get another
| job in your field. It depends on the circumstances. A
| cancelled professor on tenure track will probably never
| get another tenure track position.
|
| So, to rephrase your words, "What so bad about not being
| able to feed yourself and your family...is that really so
| bad?"
|
| Do you really think that the effect of "losing talent"
| will be accounted for when cancelling people? MAO
| "cancelled" (murdered) the intellectual class in his
| cultural revolution. Rational though isn't going to be
| emphasized in the midst of an irrational political
| movement.
|
| By the way you write and think, you're probably a
| Millennial with a very weak grasp of history. Yet, you
| feel qualified to tell people that LIVED through
| communism that they should't fear what they are seeing.
| ggreer wrote:
| > But would you really want to continue working for a
| company/culture so incapable of enduring free thought?
|
| In this economy? _Hell yes_.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's rare to see someone so purely miss the point.
| rclayton wrote:
| Please explain how I missed it. Or do we just disagree?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure.
|
| I was explaining how "chilling effects" can work using a
| hypothetical example.
|
| Your answer argued against something entirely different,
| that I guess I reminded you of. But I didn't even talk
| about cancel culture.
| ptero wrote:
| Your "just count the cancelled" does not work.
|
| I have lived in the East Europe pre-Perestroyka and back
| then, it was "just count political prisoners; see how few
| there are!". And it _was_ true -- there were not that
| many by 1980s. But there were few not because thought
| police was not real, but because any appearance of acting
| against it would be quickly dealt with. So very few
| people would dare.
|
| That's the path we are taking today.
| oisdk wrote:
| > "just count political prisoners; see how few there
| are!"
|
| You see how it comes across as a little ridiculous when
| you equate "being cancelled on twitter" to "being a
| literal political prisoner"? Especially when there are
| _actual_ political prisoners, in prison, in the US right
| now?
| free_rms wrote:
| Losing your livelihood, in a nation famous for it's
| relative lack of safety net, is in fact a big deal.
|
| Here's the thing, you don't have to pick a side so hard.
| It's not, either we get this dude fired for citing a
| study about the 1968 riots or you're in favor of the
| border patrol arresting citizens without due process.
| These things are actually highly unrelated, and both can
| be bad.
| oisdk wrote:
| I mean I agree with you: broadly I think things like the
| Yascha Mounk case are bad (I mean there are even better
| examples on the left: take Matt Bruenig, for instance),
| but like it's totally insane to say it's the main
| authoritarian crisis in the US today in the midst of
| brutal police violence.
|
| Also, I do think that the Mounk or Bruenig case are
| actually a little different from "cancel culture": they
| seem much more like political machinations at the places
| those people worked. Like I think either of those things
| could have happened just as easily 20 or 30 years ago.
| When I think "cancel culture" I think more about random
| people getting twitter mobbed for saying something
| offensive.
|
| Really I think it's an issue of emphasis. And I think
| identifying some social pressure to be more "woke" with
| threat of ridicule on social media as being the first
| step on the way to totalitarianism, while simultaneously
| insisting the police brutality is nothing of the sort,
| reveals quite a lot about people's lack of perspective
| and warped priorities.
| rclayton wrote:
| As oisdk points out, I would consider the very real
| threat of violence different than a celebrity getting
| their contract cancelled. But that's an important point
| to also make. There's a vast difference between a
| celebrity being cancelled and an average person.
| Cultivating popularity is a part of being a celebrity --
| so isn't avoiding being cancelled a natural extension of
| that profession?
|
| As for regular people getting cancelled, there only seems
| to be a handful - particularly those that might actually
| have committed a crime (thinking of the Central Park
| Karen).
| domador wrote:
| Maybe there's only a handful of "regular people" getting
| cancelled... but that's enough to create a chilling
| effect, scaring others into compliance with convention.
|
| A good example might be Walter Palmer, the hunter who
| killed Cecil the lion. He's rich, but wasn't a celebrity.
| What he did was legal, as far as he could tell. He didn't
| ask for his guides to break the law for him. Yet he was
| doxxed, received death threats, and had his house
| graffitied. People showed up to protest at his business
| (which is unrelated to hunting) and lowered its rating on
| Yelp through bad reviews.
|
| (Incidentally, I disagree with the practice of hunting
| for sport, but think sport hunters should be stopped with
| new laws, rather than through mob action.)
| rclayton wrote:
| I don't know that we can attribute doxing or death
| threats to "cancel culture". It's certainly unjustified
| outrage. However, it does beg the question what exactly
| "being cancelled" means.
| gpanders wrote:
| I think you're splitting hairs here. The greater issue is
| unaccountable, internet mob justice, of which "cancel
| culture" is one part.
| enoch_r wrote:
| Kindness Yoga shut down after their pro-BLM posts online
| were criticized as "performative activism" by employees:
| https://coloradosun.com/2020/06/29/kindness-yoga-closure-
| dur...
|
| A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job
| as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she
| didn't support BLM in a facebook video:
| https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/
| (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.)
|
| A high school teacher in British Columbia was fired after
| mentioned that he thought abortion was wrong, as an
| example of how personal opinions can differ from the law,
| in class: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-
| blatchford-b-c-tea...
|
| David Shor was fired after retweeting a black scholar's
| work on riots and election results:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-
| raci...
|
| A Mexican-American utility worker was fired after someone
| filmed him making the "OK" hand and accused him of white
| supremacy: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-
| worker-fired-ove...
|
| A graphic designer was fired after the Washington Post
| published an article about how she wore a blackface-
| costume (attempting to make fun of Megyn Kelly) two years
| ago: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/why-did-the-
| washingt...
|
| The operator of a campus cafe was fired after he posted
| an ad full of jokes, saying that he needed "a new slave
| (full time staff member) to boss around":
| https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/head-of-ontario-
| univers...
|
| The founder of a charter school was fired after he was
| accused of "white supremacist language" in a blog post:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ascend-
| cha...
|
| An author withdrew her book because she was mobbed for
| being a white author writing chapters from the
| perspective of a Gullah Geechee person:
| http://elainemarias.com/2020/06/26/bethany-c-morrow-gets-
| ya-...
|
| A Boeing exec resigned because of an article he wrote
| advocating against women in combat 33 years ago, when he
| was 29 years old: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
| boeing-resignation/boeing...
|
| I can post more if you'd like. None of these people are
| celebrities. None of them committed a crime. Some of them
| have stupid opinions, some of them made stupid decisions,
| one of them cracked his knuckles in the wrong way.
|
| But if you don't believe that "regular people" are at
| risk here, well - I hope your opinions are all non-
| heretical and that they stay that way for the next 33
| years.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Whenever I see lists like this, what's interesting to me
| is what's omitted. In this particular case I don't see
| mention of workers getting fired for trying to organize
| or advocate for unions[1]. I don't see the abuse that
| gets piled on cops who report the misdeeds of their
| colleagues[2]. And I don't see the NFL effectively
| blacklisting Colin Kaepernick for his views on police
| brutality.
|
| It seems like it's only "cancel culture" when it happens
| to people we identify with.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/am
| azon-pr...
|
| [2] https://www.kcaw.org/2019/12/12/sitka-settles-police-
| whistle...
| rclayton wrote:
| Great point.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| But companies firing organizing workers isn't an example
| of cancel culture. Why would you be surprised that
| someone answered the question asked, and not a different
| question?
| enoch_r wrote:
| I'll add Colin Kaepernick to the list for next time! I
| should also include things like the woman who lots her
| internship after she made a bad pro-BLM analogy:
| https://jonathanturley.org/2020/07/03/ima-stab-you-
| connectic...
|
| In my mind, "cancel culture" refers to the phenomenon
| where an outraged group (usually on social media) seeks
| to retaliate against someone over a (possibly inferred)
| political opinion. Firing union organizers or harassing
| whistleblowers is bad, but doesn't fit into my mental
| model of cancel culture.
| abathur wrote:
| I'm glad you're expanding the list a little, but I'd also
| encourage you (and anyone else reading) to reflect on the
| difference and asymmetry, here.
|
| (Rhetorical questions--no answer needed) What's the
| bottom-line difference in getting fired for roughly free-
| speech reasons by an employer of their own accord, or of
| their own accord but because a single person wrote them
| to bring your behavior to their attention, or instead
| because of a Twitter mob or a petition or a letter-
| writing campaign or a flood of bad news coverage or a
| boycott started by some group? How do we adjudicate which
| path is worse?
|
| Part of what I find frustrating about this debate (as
| someone who takes this risk seriously, and has for a
| while) is selectiveness of the cases/scope/concerns that
| get brought up by a certain segment of outlets eager to
| catalog certain cases to build a narrative about who is
| censorious and who is censored.
|
| There's a long history of people mobbing decision-makers
| (at schools, or libraries, businesses, media standards
| boards, advertisers, etc.) to lobby for action against
| things they don't like. The Dixie Chicks got caught in
| this fire. When One Million Moms threatened JCPenney over
| their deal with Ellen DeGeneres--what obvious outcome
| were they demanding? (They keep a brag-list of things
| they've gotten canceled at
| https://onemillionmoms.com/successes/, and a list of ~20
| current campaigns. You can find even more at their parent
| org, AFA).
|
| There are numerous teachers over the years who claim they
| were fired for being an atheist, teaching evolution, and
| a sad graveyard of articles about teachers sacked for
| exactly how they taught sex ed (of particular irony in
| this case, those fired for not teaching top-down
| abstinence-only dogma), or what books they're teaching.
|
| (I realize this list is itself biased; I'm advocating
| expanding the umbrella, and suspicion of slanted lists,
| not trying to whatabout.)
| [deleted]
| soundnote wrote:
| You're suggesting the person would have to remain jobless
| for a long time for it to be a cancellation? We're
| talking people deliberately going for other people's jobs
| in a country where access to health care is often tied to
| employment.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| lololol so people being mean on twitter is what we should
| be worried about right now, not the increasing power of
| surveillance capital and the hyper militarized state?
|
| cool thanks for the warning dude
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You're engaging in a straw man of both sides and it makes
| me want to disregard your argument entirely.
|
| > you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like...
|
| Do you really think that's what people are complaining
| about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known
| economists being forced to resign? There was a professor
| who lost his status running a residence hall because he was
| on the legal defense team for someone despicable.
|
| As a society, we've decided that yes, even criminals need
| lawyers. To cancel someone and permanently affect their
| career for engaging in the most liberal of virtues and
| defending even criminals ( _especially_ if you believe we
| live in an authoritarian state) is beyond the pale.
|
| > when at the same time protestors are being arrested by
| secret police in the US.
|
| I've been working for police reform in what I believe is a
| flawed system for years. Everything the protestors are
| doing has probably set us back a decade. Every protestor
| killed by a fellow protestor (17 is the current count),
| every major spike in crime due to police being defunded
| instead of retrained, and every cop sent to the hospital
| because of folks throwing glass bottles and chunks of brick
| is not going to magically dry up and go away the next time
| we want to raise a serious issue.
|
| We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm
| change and it works much better than arson.
| harimau777 wrote:
| It seems to me that we don't actually have a legal and
| social framework for affecting longterm change since its
| been co-opted by corporations and the ultra-rich. I just
| don't see any good alternatives.
| oisdk wrote:
| > Do you really think that's what people are complaining
| about here? Not the professors being fired, the well
| known economists being forced to resign? There was a
| professor who lost his status running a residence hall
| because he was on the legal defense team for someone
| despicable.
|
| So the only actual example I was able to google here was
| the last one: and I have to say, is that it? A guy wasn't
| asked back as a dorm administrator once he joined Harvey
| Weinstein's legal team? That's the "cancel culture"
| you're talking about, in contrast to one of the most
| brutal and grotesque onslaught of police brutality in the
| west in recent memory?
|
| Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a
| _murder_ , right?
|
| This is what I mean when I say it's ridiculous. The
| Harvard guy didn't even lose his job, for goodness' sake.
|
| > Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us
| back a decade.
|
| Where did I defend or endorse the actions of protestors?
| My point is simply that it's ridiculous to think the main
| authoritarian crisis in the US right now is "cancel
| culture" when it is literally in the midst of a brutal
| police crackdown against protestors.
|
| Also I'm sorry but it's hard to take you seriously with
| regards to police violence when you didn't mention a
| single thing the police did wrong in your list of
| grievances, but you're happy to talk about the
| protestors.
|
| > every major spike in crime due to police being defunded
| instead of retrained
|
| This is not a view supported by the evidence.
|
| > We have a legal and social framework for affecting
| longterm change and it works much better than arson.
|
| The US has more prisoners per capita than any society at
| any point in history in the world. The police are armed
| and violent. And those systems which apparently work so
| well have been in place throughout all this. But maybe
| you should tell me more about how these systems work so
| well.
|
| Also I'm continually amazed that Americans forget their
| proud history of violent protest so quickly. It always
| seems like protest against injustice was fine in some
| unspecified "past" but of course all of that Is behind us
| now and The best we can do is vote (vote for the party at
| least partly responsible for the state of the police
| today, by the way).
| skellington wrote:
| Rioters aren't protesters and there is nothing even close
| to "brutal" happening to the rioters. If anything, the
| state is showing remarkable restraint. Imagine if this
| shit was happening in China or Russia.
|
| If you/they get what you want out of all of this, a neo-
| marxist-anarcho-commune-socialist-green-whatever, no-
| rules, but lots of rules enforced randomly by the mob,
| THEN you'll see real brutal-ism like you saw in CHAZ when
| the 'security' force gunned down two teenagers who were
| joy riding in a stolen car. The fact that current rioters
| have no real fear is because they know that the police
| are extremely restrained in what they do. Getting tear
| gassed or (rarely) hit with a baton/bean-bag is nothing
| close to what real brutality is.
|
| Also, the fact that you are not aware of the deep reaches
| of cancel culture today is because you are aggressively
| conformist with your peer group so you only get your
| information from sources that are deeply filtered.
| ThatGeoGuy wrote:
| We're not yet living in George Orwell's 1984 either, but
| just because we don't live in the worst possible timeline
| with a Ministry of Love doesn't mean we can't criticize
| or ask for improvement of conditions or policies in
| society today.
|
| To brush off the actions of the police in the US as "not
| even close to brutal" and "showing remarkable restraint"
| is beyond callous and demonstrates some pretty bad faith
| and a lack of empathy on your part. I will remind you
| that this started over the murder of a man accused of
| using a fake $20 bill, and __human lives are more
| important than property__.
| oisdk wrote:
| > there is nothing even close to "brutal" happening to
| the rioters.
|
| If you aren't going to believe me, and if you're not
| going to believe your eyes with regards to the multiple
| clear videos of police brutality, then maybe you should
| listen to the multiple international human rights
| organisations which have called for an end to the police
| brutality?
|
| I mean what would even convince you that the police are
| brutalising protestors? What evidence are you missing?
| Surely there is just as much evidence for the US
| brutalising its citizens as there is for China or Russia
| doing so? (I am not saying the level of brutality is the
| same, mind you)
|
| To be honest with you it's difficult to have a
| conversation with someone so out of touch with reality in
| this way: if you can't see that the US police are
| brutalising protestors you're maybe too far gone.
|
| > The fact that current rioters have no real fear is
| because they know that the police are extremely
| restrained in what they do.
|
| How many people have the police killed since the protests
| began?
|
| > Getting tear gassed or (rarely) hit with a baton/bean-
| bag is nothing close to what real brutality is.
|
| You know people were killed by tear gas? You know people
| lost eyes from rubber bullets?
|
| > Also, the fact that you are not aware of the deep
| reaches of cancel culture today is because you are
| aggressively conformist with your peer group so you only
| get your information from sources that are deeply
| filtered.
|
| In contrast to you, the well-read worldly individual who
| gets their news from news.ycombinator.com.
|
| Go on, then: tell me about the horrific cases of cancel
| culture which I was shielded from in my bubble.
| UglyToad wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I think it's a strong indicator when someone takes the
| most absurd or niche demand of a movement of millions of
| people seeking justice for some of the worst oppression
| and state violence as a way to dismiss the whole of that
| movement they're probably not operating in 100% good
| faith or they're consuming sources that aren't
| particularly balanced. Or they spend too much time on
| twitter, I'm definitely guilty of this, but twitter isn't
| the real world.
|
| For example, I don't particularly care about the
| master/main debate about Github, it literally does not
| concern me, I do not care, but if people want it renamed,
| why not? And if someone thinks that demand (by whom,
| certainly not the protestors primary concern or probably
| even in the top 1000) is stupid why does that invalidate
| an entire movement to seek justice for people suffering
| horrendous violence?
|
| These supposed cases of cancel culture just show how sad
| the lives of these supposedly cancelled people are.
|
| In the UK there's supposedly a "trans mafia" intimidating
| journalists and beloved childrens authors. But there
| simply isn't, these anti trans obsessives think people
| commercially boycotting or calling them out are some
| malevolent oppressor. And they complain about it weekly
| to their audience of millions in the leading papers and
| magazines (Bari Weiss wasn't fired, she quit). Meanwhile
| in the real world trans people suffer huge mental health
| issues and violence, they literally want it to be easier
| to be who they are. I find the whole concept mystifying
| and can't begin to understand what it feels like to be
| trans. But trans people are telling us.
|
| We should call people what they want to be called and
| make healthcare available to them. It's that simple.
| Someone is not being oppressed for not using the right
| pronouns they're being a jackass to vulnerable people and
| they should literally stop being obsessed with toilets.
| Life's too short, and if you're a poor African American
| or a trans person it's a whole lot shorter, on average,
| and anyone who uses rebranding food packaging to dismiss
| that truth is telling on themself
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So the Rowling example is a good case here. She was
| defending a woman who was fired for personally, outside
| of work, saying there should be safe spaces for women off
| limits to trans people.
|
| You can disagree with the original claim and there's a
| good debate to be had there.
|
| But firing someone for a private opinion, and not one
| calling for violence, is not aligned with my values.
|
| Yes, Bari Weiss did resign because she was harassed in
| her workplace and her employer refused to resolve the
| situation. It's one thing to disagree with a coworker,
| it's another to repeatedly harass and demean them.
| Bullying someone into quitting isn't a definition of
| Justice that I agree with.
|
| If someone doesn't want to use a "master branch" than
| more power to them. On the other hand, if you're going to
| attack and insult me until I follow your request then
| it's not a request - it's a demand. My response will be
| to decline following your demand.
|
| Yes, you should address people as they want to be
| addressed and not be a jerk. Someone not following that
| behavior.. should still be treated like a human being.
| You don't get to doxx them and send them death threats
| because you disagree with their behavior.
| UglyToad wrote:
| I think with the Rowling Forstater case there's a nuance
| that her contract was not renewed, rather than being
| drummed out of the office in the middle of the day [0].
| When you have a job representing an organisation there
| are expectations of how you act in your public role in a
| job and I would fully expect making discriminatory
| statements to see me not employed at a company if I
| didn't make an apology for them. I'd also expect making
| statements that talked down our product, or belittled a
| colleague, to be a disciplinary matter, we are
| professionals after all and if you want shoot the breeze
| with friends and family, twitter probably isn't the
| forum.
|
| On Bari Weiss I've not really been following it, from a
| distance it seems like attention seeking. She's a public
| figure with a huge platform, people used their free
| speech to call her an idiot (no doubt tipping into abuse
| as the Internet tends to and that's a moderation issue).
| But we have a right to call columnists thick as shit. We
| all have a right of reply, speech is free (though less so
| in the UK where pretty much anything gets you sued for
| libel by free speech crusaders like Rowling). Speech
| isn't free of consequences, it doesn't exist in a vacuum
| and discriminatory and hostile speech has historically
| preceded violence against minority groups. As my previous
| comment getting downvoted shows, being in the outgroup on
| a forum can suck, but people don't have to uncritically
| upvote me and give me the warm fuzzies if they disagree.
|
| Edit: typing on a phone so it's hard to do a long form
| reply. On the master thing, like I say I don't have a
| strong opinion one way or another, I'm happy for github
| to change it if only because it's shorter. I don't think
| it's a particularly valuable cause or hill to die on and
| I don't know of an instance of the enraged mob tearing
| down someone for keeping their branches named as master
| (though again they might use right of reply to call them
| a prick) but it's symbolic of white Liberal responses to
| injustice. We're not debating git branch names, except in
| the navel gazing tech world we inhabit. We're debating
| there being something like 5 days last year where the US
| police did not kill one or more people. We've (or rather
| for US readers, you've) got a president who wants to
| outlaw bail funds, protest medics, etc. The real cancel
| culture is the power wielded by states, as pretty much
| the entire ME for the past however many centuries could
| attest to or transgender, gay, black soldiers who serve
| or served the US in uniform, or corporations and lawyers,
| as blacklisted construction workers or Aaron Schwartz
| (sp) could tell you.
|
| Discussions about whether we have to give Bari Weiss our
| eternal gratitude for excreting another column feel
| deeply unserious when they talk over real problems.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/18/judge-
| rules-...
| im3w1l wrote:
| > Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a
| murder, right?
|
| It wasn't a murder. I suggest you read the transcript
| from Lane's body camera. Key points:
|
| * Lane approaches George Floyd asks him to show his
| hands. Floyd is so high, he has difficulty complying.
|
| * They take him out of his car and try to get him in the
| police car.
|
| * Floyd claims he can't breathe and begs to be allowed to
| lie on the ground.
|
| * They call the ambulance (unclear if this is before
| after he is put on the ground).
|
| * He keeps talking for a few minutes, before losing
| consciousness.
|
| https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-
| camera...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a
| murder, right?
|
| And since then they've resulted in 17 deaths. Tit for
| tat? Were those 17 people guilty in that murder? Yes that
| initial act was wrong and we should address that,
| vandalizing businesses and setting federal property on
| fire has nothing to do with that original offense.
|
| > it's ridiculous to think the main authoritarian crisis
| in the US right now
|
| You keep asserting this. You don't show evidence for
| this. What's the authoritarian crisis? That cops have
| qualified immunity? That's not new. Is it that you think
| poorly of the president? I think poorly of him too but
| he's not Mussolini.
|
| You can't vaguely claim there's something wrong with a
| system and use that as an excuse for violence and
| destruction - especially when the violence and
| destruction isn't even targeted at the people you're
| accusing.
|
| > you didn't mention a single thing the police did wrong
| in your list of grievances
|
| No I didn't because it's not relevant. You're creating a
| strawman when the reality of the situation is
| complicated. This isn't cops versus protesters and
| attempts to cast it as a binary problem is partisanship.
| If you're interested in solving problems instead of
| stirring up anger then your interest should be in
| understanding the problem and not polarizing sides.
|
| > This is not a view supported by the evidence.
|
| 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/effect-
| higher-educa...
|
| 2. https://inpublicsafety.com/2014/07/how-education-
| impacts-pol...
|
| > The US has more prisoners per capita than any society
| at any point in history in the world
|
| That has nothing to do with this topic. Like, I agree
| that's a problem and we should address that by
| considering how we treat low level drug offenses, but it
| has nothing to do with police brutality and cancel
| culture.
|
| > The police are armed and violent.
|
| Police brutality has decreased mindbogglingly since the
| 1960s. Yes the police have more gear and we can talk
| about why it makes sense to do things like remove camo
| from their inventory and the pros/cons of using APCs, but
| that has nothing to do with canceling people and ruining
| their careers.
|
| > But maybe you should tell me more about how these
| systems work so well
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_Americ
| an_...
|
| > proud history of violent protest so quickly
|
| Violence is not something to be proud of. A violent
| victory for one person is a funeral for another. Violence
| is against justice and it deprives the accused of
| reasonable and rational defense.
|
| You talk so much against authoritarianism, but violence
| is the fundamental tool of it. Courts and ballot boxes
| are the tools of democracy.
| oisdk wrote:
| > And since then they've resulted in 17 deaths.
|
| Wait---are you seriously not going to count the people
| the _police_ have killed? What is wrong with you?
|
| Regardless, my point was not that the protests are
| justified (although of course they are: for someone who
| claims to work in "police reform" all you have been doing
| is defending the police and demonising protestors), but
| that to not identify the militarised police force
| brutalising protestors as a more important sign of
| authoritarianism than "cancel culture" is ridiculous.
|
| That's why I mentioned the protests were started by a
| murder. Because when you claim cancel culture is this
| huge problem, and mention a Harvard professor not having
| one of his duties renewed, I think it's relevant to show
| how grotesquely out of proportion it is with the George
| Floyd protests.
|
| > You keep asserting this. You don't show evidence for
| this.
|
| I'm sorry: in what capacity have you been "working for
| police reform"? I'm really getting the feeling that that
| is an extremely inaccurate description of your job.
|
| I haven't shown evidence for the police brutality in the
| US because I assumed you were aware of it. Are you not?
| Do you not understand that police officers murdering
| peaceful protestors is an authoritarian crisis?
|
| > If you're interested in solving problems instead of
| stirring up anger then your interest should be in
| understanding the problem and not polarizing sides.
|
| All of the "solutions" for how to stop police violence
| which come from American police amount to (surprisingly)
| giving the police more money. Kind of like how all of the
| "solutions" to gun violence involve giving more people
| guns (teachers, cops, etc.)
|
| The way to curb police violence is to defund and
| demilitarise the police. This is what has worked in
| places outside of the US, and this is the _only_
| realistic approach.
|
| > 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/effect-
| higher-educa.... > > 2.
| https://inpublicsafety.com/2014/07/how-education-impacts-
| pol....
|
| This is not evidence for the claim that defunding the
| police causes a spike in crime.
|
| > That has nothing to do with this topic.
|
| Mass imprisonment is absolutely relevant to the question
| of the authoritarian nature of the police.
|
| > Violence is not something to be proud of.
|
| You can't think of a single instance of violent protest
| that you'd be proud of?
|
| > You talk so much against authoritarianism, but violence
| is the fundamental tool of it.
|
| It's difficult to take you seriously on the issue of
| police violence when you have yet to even _acknowledge_
| the horrific and obvious police brutality during the
| protests.
| Vomzor wrote:
| >So the only actual example I was able to google here was
| the last one: and I have to say, is that it?
|
| 125 examples (so far) of regular people losing their job
| or being threatened for thoughtcrime: https://twitter.com
| /SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598
| jacobush wrote:
| But the reform way hasn't worked very well, if at all,
| either. Not saying that means one should revolt or
| anything, just that America seems like it's stuck between
| a rock and hard place, currently.
| luckylion wrote:
| >But the reform way hasn't worked very well, if at all,
| either.
|
| You don't see a difference between USA, 1960 and USA,
| 2020?
| harimau777 wrote:
| My understanding is that inequality is much worse now
| than in the 60s. It also seems like back then it was much
| easier to have a good quality of life with a non-skilled
| job than it is today. However, I haven't looked into it
| too much so I could be mistaken.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| And you know what was the cause of the largest changes
| between 1960 and 2020? The civil rights protests.
|
| And those protesters were disapproved of / hated by the
| majority of the population at the time. For upsetting the
| status quo - and "pushing for change to quickly". There
| are surveys that list this - that mirror the exact same
| responses that a number of people give today about BLM.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's crazy to say "Everything the protestors are doing
| has probably set us back a decade." There have been
| literally millions of American citizens marching
| peacefully for change, and a very small number of bad
| actors.
|
| There is no way you are informed or serious about what is
| going on if you are willing to make such broadly
| derogatory comments about one of the largest civil right
| movements in history.
|
| And worse, taking the bad actions of a few, and using it
| to broadly discredit the valid actions of the many, is a
| textbook tactic for discrimination and maintaining the
| status quo. Who do you think you are helping by doing
| that?
| wisty wrote:
| A lot of these protesters seem to be willingly acting as
| shields for the brick-throwers.
|
| How many times have we seen a black-clad (thus like the
| 'secret police' unidentifiable and unaccountable) brick
| thrower seek shelter in the crowd of "peaceful"
| protesters?
| nitrogen wrote:
| _There is no way you are informed... Who do you think you
| are helping by doing that?_
|
| This kind of turning on people who agree with you in
| principle but might have some of the details wrong is
| exactly the kind of fractally magnifying divisiveness
| that some of these subthreads are talking about.
|
| We are all largely on the same side w.r.t. wanting
| positive outcomes for everyone. We will get there through
| deescalation and cooperation (not that I am perfect at
| either).
| joshuamorton wrote:
| When you say "Everything the protestors are doing has
| probably set us back a decade." it really doesn't sound
| like you agree with the protestors. So maybe if you do
| agree with them, don't say things that undermine them, or
| they'll respond in kind.
|
| Saying "Everything the protestors are doing has probably
| set us back a decade." isn't deescalating or cooperating,
| and insisting that the protestors need to deescalate and
| cooperate after you say something uninformed and
| inflammatory is self-centered, it implies that whatever
| you were doing is better than what they were doing. That
| they need to cooperate with you, but you don't need to
| cooperate with them. That it's their responsibility to
| deescalate, not yours. And, well, that really doesn't
| sound like cooperation to me.
| nitrogen wrote:
| IMO the more charitable reading of that is "everything
| [I've heard about the] protestors doing", in which case
| the blame lies on biased information sources, not
| directly on our fellow commenter.
|
| So, again IMO, a productive reply might be, "Data shows
| that most of the protestors are peaceful, but I do
| acknowledge there are some bad actors that are getting
| the bulk of the attention. Maybe we can brainstorm
| solutions to this attention bias at the same time we try
| to solve these other problems."
| joshuamorton wrote:
| You've sidestepped the main point, which was that they
| first escalated and then you've made it the other
| person's responsibility to de-escalate. I'm asking why it
| is not the original persons' responsibility to pick their
| words carefully so as to not escalate in the first place.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I just replied at the bottom of the thread. I'm not
| trying to single you out. Everyone has their part to
| play, but someone has to go first.
|
| [As an aside, I just realized this is where a neutral
| arbiter can be valuable, someone who can say calmly what
| either side can't. I am thinking specifically about a
| STTNG episode.]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > We have a legal and social framework for affecting
| longterm change and it works much better than arson.
|
| This is a non-sequitur. Police violence has (probably)
| been increasing for years[1]. Over the last 20 years the
| police have become more militarized and killings by
| police have increased even as crime rates have decreased
| sharply. Clearly the legal and social frameworks are not
| working.
|
| [1] https://fee.org/articles/how-many-people-are-killed-
| by-polic...
| leereeves wrote:
| From [1]:
|
| > There are a few reasons to be skeptical of this trend.
| Reporting might be a lot better in recent years, and
| reports in prior years (if they were made at all) may be
| increasingly difficult to find the further back you go.
| In addition, FE's totals for the last three years -- the
| years they consider most complete -- are pretty flat.
|
| > Like a puzzle missing most of the pieces, the data so
| far are interesting, but not illuminating.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| These protests are possibly the single largest protests
| for civil rights in the country's history. It is
| estimated that between 15 and 26 million Americans
| protested. Roughly 6% to 10% of the US adult population.
| If after almost 1 in 10 Americans protesting for the same
| thing you're pushing, you think you're less capable of
| succeeding at your job, I think you may want to question
| your approach.
|
| And I don't mean that disrespectfully. I mean that in a
| sincere way. These protests were Americans saying that
| more of the same won't work. Yet another police
| sensitivity training class won't work. Yet one more less
| than lethal weapon won't work. Meeting with community
| leaders isn't sufficient. Raising the police budget so
| they can address this concerns isn't the answer. That's
| all been happening for a quarter of a century at this
| point and it's still fundamentally broken.
|
| Almost 1 in 10 people are saying, we need a fundamentally
| different approach w.r.t. to policing. Police don't need
| to be called in for every mental health case, for every
| role of a social worker, for patroling schools and
| "arresting" kids because middle schoolers got into a
| fight.
|
| The fact that out of ~20 million people, including plenty
| of outside agitators that disagreed with the protests and
| participated maliciously trying to discredit them, that
| the vast overwhelming majority have been peaceful is a
| testament.
|
| The system is fundamentally broken, and has acquired
| sufficient power to resist all of the normal checks and
| balances. That's when protests is most useful - to raise
| awareness of what is truly happening and advocate for
| change.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-
| flo...
| wisty wrote:
| If the mayor of Portland joins them, and many of them
| just chant "fuck Ted Wheeler" at him, maybe they need to
| come to the table with solutions rather than just
| problem?
| eezurr wrote:
| I think it's important to step back see the bigger
| picture. Your comment IMO is exactly what PG is talking
| about when he defines "aggressively conventional" (down
| to using the actions of the masses to support your POV).
| A perfect system cannot exist, and getting there is
| limited by economics -> diminishing returns.
|
| It seems like you are pushing for a social structure that
| will consume American freedom to lower rate of failure
| (which is a drop in the ocean considering our population
| size) from our social system.
|
| The system is not fundamentally broken, it's just human;
| comprised and run by humans.
| tome wrote:
| > protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US
|
| I genuinely don't have reliable information to determine
| whether they are peaceful protestors or violent rioters,
| nor whether the police are secret or not. Where would I go
| to find out?
| hansjorg wrote:
| This video by YouTube channel Leagle Eagle has a good
| short summary of reports from Portland by observers (like
| the ACLU) and then a lengthy debate about the legality of
| it (consitutionality, federal vs. state law, etc.):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglv-fV1CqI
| oisdk wrote:
| Peaceful protestors being brutalised by police has been
| documented in almost countless cases by now. I find it
| hard to believe that you're asking this is good faith,
| but if you you are then you can:
|
| * Watch any one of the hundreds of videos documenting
| what I'm referring to.
|
| * Read pretty much any major news source in the US
| documenting these cases.
|
| I'm sorry that I don't have a specific source to point
| you to, but it's genuinely because there is just so much
| evidence for the statement that it's hard to pick out one
| thing.
|
| As to the secret police question, that's really down to
| your definition of secret police.
| [deleted]
| skellington wrote:
| No, it hasn't. Because that's a made up narrative.
|
| Please show me video of police purposefully brutalizing
| non-violent protesters who behave sensibly (maybe you can
| learn how to spell protester while you're at it).
|
| I've watched pretty much all of them and the cases of
| protesters being hurt always involves in some way being a
| part of the violent protest group, being intermixed with
| the violent protesters, or refusing to follow police
| orders during the clearing of unlawful gatherings (which
| only happens after violent rioting).
|
| Even that older man who got his head cracked open from
| falling, decided to ignore orders to vacate and instead
| got into the face of a riot cop and reached for the cops
| belt.
|
| I have seen zero videos of cops just randomly going off
| on groups of protesters walking down the street
| peacefully. Although CNN/MSNBC/etc will ALWAYS edit the
| video to begin with the police jumping on some person,
| when you look at the full video, it ALWAYS starts with
| the person doing something violent, illegal, or stupid.
|
| BTW I'm also sure that SOMETIMES police do do
| unacceptable things (Floyd) and the criminal court system
| is absolute garbage, but your BS narrative that PEACEFUL
| protesters are just getting smashed as a matter of course
| is pure fiction.
| oisdk wrote:
| > Please show me video of police purposefully brutalizing
| non-violent protesters who behave sensibly (maybe you can
| learn how to spell protester while you're at it).
|
| That's an interesting move you've done there: now
| protestors have to behave "sensibly" as well as
| peacefully? I suppose I didn't realise that deadly force
| was justified against someone behaving "not sensibly".
|
| > I've watched pretty much all of them
|
| Yeah, I mean then you're probably too far gone to have a
| discussion with. I guess I don't understand how someone
| can watch all of the same videos I have and come away
| thinking "yes, the police are justified in their
| violence". To be honest it suggests a quite shocking lack
| of basic humanity.
|
| > in some way being a part of the violent protest group,
|
| Being in a "protest group" when others are violent is not
| a crime, and does not justify the use of deadly force
| against you.
|
| > being intermixed with the violent protesters
|
| Being intermixed with violent protestors is not a crime,
| and does not justify the use of deadly force against you.
|
| > refusing to follow police orders during the clearing of
| unlawful gatherings (which only happens after violent
| rioting).
|
| So what, you think all of the unlawful gatherings were
| violent? Seriously what world are you living in?
|
| > Even that older man who got his head cracked open from
| falling, decided to ignore orders to vacate
|
| Stop a second. Think about what you're writing.
|
| Every person with a basic sense of decency who saw that
| video was horrified.
|
| An old man had his skull cracked open for refusing to
| step back. That's what you're justifying now.
|
| I am not going to respond to any more of your comments,
| but I really hope you get a sense of perspective on some
| of this stuff. When you see a cop in riot gear beat some
| poor person to death your first response should not be
| "but what did the person do?" When you see a cop car
| drive through a crowd of protestors you should not
| immediately start looking up the local ordinances for
| whether or not the protest had a permit to be on the road
| at that time.
|
| There is a simple, human way to respond to the obvious
| evil and brutality that you're seeing, and for some
| reason you are not doing it.
| tome wrote:
| > Peaceful protestors being brutalised by police has been
| documented in almost countless cases by now
|
| Yes, I've seen plenty of evidence for that[1]. On the
| other hand you said "protestors are being arrested by
| secret police in the US". That's quite a different claim
| and I haven't seen any evidence for that. I've heard a
| few reports and associated videos whose reliability I
| haven't been able to verify.
|
| [1] For the avoidance of doubt my belief is that that
| kind of behaviour does not belong in a civilised society.
| SteveJS wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-
| officers-us...
| SteveJS wrote:
| Operation Legend
|
| Federal officials stage a major law enforcement operation
| in a city with zero coordination with the mayor of that
| city, who instead learns about it from twitter.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-
| racia...
|
| Operation Diligent Valor
|
| A top U.S. Homeland Security official on Monday defended
| the federal crackdown on protests in Portland, including
| the use of unmarked cars and unidentified officers in
| camouflage gear and said the practice will spread to
| other cities as needed.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-race-portland-
| valo...
| SteveJS wrote:
| ACLU lawsuit: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-
| sues-federal-agents...
|
| Restraining order issued against attacking journalists:
|
| U.S. District Judge Michael Simon today blocked federal
| agents in Portland from dispersing, arresting,
| threatening to arrest, or targeting force against
| journalists or legal observers at protests. The court's
| order, which comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the
| American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, adds the
| Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service
| to an existing injunction barring Portland police from
| arresting or attacking journalists and legal observers at
| Portland protests.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-issues-
| res...
| oisdk wrote:
| I assume you're aware of police obscuring their badge
| numbers, and refusing to identify themselves? That
| phenomenon is at least as common as the actual police
| violence.
|
| While I have many problems with the following snopes
| article, I think the facts it presents are pretty
| incontrovertible:
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-
| portlan...
| Sacho wrote:
| > I assume you're aware of police obscuring their badge
| numbers, and refusing to identify themselves?
|
| Er, is this what you would call secret police? The
| article's facts may be incontrovertible, but they don't
| agree with your description:
|
| "What's Undetermined
|
| While one person said he was detained without officers
| identifying themselves -- and another viral video was
| interpreted by viewers as a case of the same thing -- _we
| have no verifiable evidence to prove or disprove whether
| agents in those cases explained for what federal agency
| they worked during the arrests._ "
| oisdk wrote:
| So what's undetermined in the snopes article is whether
| specifically those police that detained people in
| portland identified themselves or not.
|
| When I spoke about officers not identifying themselves I
| was talking generally, about the other cases from outside
| of portland, of officers obscuring their badges and not
| identifying themselves.
|
| But no, that's not really what I would count as secret
| police. I mean I think the distinction is a little
| arbitrary and before long you basically get to arguing
| definitions which is almost always a waste of time, but I
| think the actions of the police in the snopes article
| constitute an overstep that I think qualifies as
| authoritarian. Especially when those agencies were sent
| in specifically by the executive.
|
| Also, I should point out that the line you quoted is the
| one I have a problem with:
|
| > we have no verifiable evidence to prove or disprove
| whether agents in those cases explained for what federal
| agency they worked during the arrests.
|
| That's a very strange sentence to me: like how could you
| even prove such a thing? Have a video of the entirety of
| the person's interaction with the police?
|
| I think if we're being reasonable here that it's
| overwhelmingly likely the police _didn 't_ identify
| themselves in this case. But of course it's not feasible
| to have "evidence" for that kind of thing, so I suppose I
| can't go ahead and say I'm sure on the point.
| Sacho wrote:
| I think the "secret police" part is a red herring. My
| opinion is that the federal police were justified
| defending the courthouse, but were not justified hunting
| around for suspects in vans, unmarked or not(this is the
| state police's job!), but I don't think too many would
| agree that the federal vs state divide is what's
| important, which is why I didn't bring it up initially. I
| feel the anger against the federal agents is not rooted
| in principle, but the principles are used as a
| rationalization for removing an opposing force to the
| protests.
|
| Hopefully we can agree that it's well within police
| prerogative to prevent rioting, serious property
| damage(like trying set fire to buildings), possible
| violence. I am definitely willing to concede that Trump
| is a tactless brute, and sending the federal agents in
| like this was far from the best strategy. We could even
| perhaps tentatively agree that his actual goal is to
| disperse the protests under the guise of preventing
| rioting, but again, we'd have to agree first that the
| rioting is there.
|
| Which brings me back to the original post - is there
| protesting or violent rioting? Both. Is there secret
| police or not? Not really - there should be police to
| monitor the protests and prevent the rioting. If the
| state police is unwilling to do it, then the federal
| police may have to step in, although I'd have preferred
| to exhaust B through Y instead of going straight from
| A-Z.
| oisdk wrote:
| > Hopefully we can agree that it's well within police
| prerogative to prevent rioting, serious property
| damage(like trying set fire to buildings), possible
| violence.
|
| No, as it happens.
|
| I mean I get I'm probably outside the Overton window for
| hacker news, but I think we could probably find common
| ground on the principle that whatever else, the police
| should not use deadly force to prevent vandalism. This
| should include rubber bullets and batons, and I believe
| that tear gas also is not justified to prevent vandalism.
|
| I mean you have to understand that there are countries
| which don't experience the horrific brutality the US is
| going through right now. The police in these place isn't
| better because the government paid out millions to
| consultancy firms run by former cops, but because the
| role of the police is dramatically different, and almost
| always much smaller.
|
| > I am definitely willing to concede that Trump is a
| tactless brute, and sending the federal agents in like
| this was far from the best strategy.
|
| I don't like talking about Trump much in this context:
| the problem is far larger than him, and I think people
| talking about him alone are missing the point.
|
| The problem is overly-powerful police departments and
| unions which have massive political power in the cities
| they operate. Violence is used to increase this power,
| which in turn increases their funding and capacity for
| violence.
|
| We see this all the time with (for instance) the NYPD:
| their union directly threatened de Blasio's daughter, for
| instance. They also stopped patrolling in protest of the
| prosecution of their officers (famously crime dropped
| during this time).
|
| The only way to stop the cycle is to cut the power.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Something that occurred to me might be referenced by that
| is the phenomenon of unidentified government personnel
| arresting protestors in Portland recently. It has been
| reported that they did not wear anything identifying the
| agency they work in or the particular individual (i.e. no
| equivalent of a badge number).
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| just to be clear, you're saying if someone broke a window
| they deserve to be kidnapped off the street by anonymous
| military personnel.
|
| Love this country
| wrren wrote:
| Because there's a mechanism for changing that government:
| the upcoming presidential election. Whereas changing a
| cultural movement like the one we're watching unfold is a
| lot more difficult.
| oisdk wrote:
| It does not make sense to me that we should say the
| actions of a government are less important to criticise
| or examine because we can vote on that government.
| wrren wrote:
| I didn't say they were less important, just that they're
| more easily solved.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| They're more easy to take one concrete step to try to
| change. How much that will actually _solve_ remains to be
| seen.
| mononcqc wrote:
| A lot of the people "being cancelled" on twitter are only
| freaking out because for the first time in forever, they
| get the direct opinion of people reading their texts
| unfiltered, and they find out that they are prey to
| criticism.
|
| For example, Kelly Loeffler, claims to have been
| "cancelled" while being a sitting US senator.
|
| Cancel culture by popular action is not new (see letter-
| writing to TV stations, Frank Zappa having to testify in
| front of congress about censorship for his music albums).
| The only thing freaking people out is that people who
| have traditionally been structurally shielded from
| criticism and direct action (and often behind the
| cancelling itself) are just now on the receiving end of
| it.
| wrren wrote:
| People expressing their opinions about one's ideas is not
| cancel culture: it's when critics go one step further and
| try to destroy the person they disagree with.
|
| Many people have lost their livelihoods and even more are
| afraid to express their opinion at all because of the
| disproportionate cost they might incur.
|
| People having been structurally shielded from mob justice
| in the past is a state worth returning to.
| mononcqc wrote:
| Mob justice hasn't been visible for a while often because
| regular justice was being used for direct oppression in
| its stead. Injustice is institutionalized, and so as long
| as the majority group does not see the mob, it does not
| see oppression even if it exists.
|
| Tell me that for every person getting yelled at on
| Twitter you couldn't find countless more groups of
| minorities who have been denied justice over the years,
| whether because they are aborigines, black, lgbtqia+, or
| any other group of the kind. That open criticism and
| denial of cultures and ways of life wasn't just the
| default mode of operation. That one's life being valued
| less than someone else's property, beatings by police,
| harsher criminal sentences, and lack of equal rights
| wasn't just the mode of operation.
|
| Getting yelled at on Twitter by people fed up with
| someone's bullshit is not even close to actual mob
| justice. It's just angry people shouting. Sometimes
| people shout enough that it turns to direct action (like
| letter-writing, which was used at least as far back as
| the 1800s), boycotts, and stuff like that. Today's cancel
| culture isn't mob justice any more than it was before,
| and it's not new.
|
| Again, it's just a bunch of people who usually were never
| on the short end of the stick seeing its shadow pointed
| their way and freaking out.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is a complete non-sequitur.
|
| Let's respond to injustice and oppression, by trying to
| extend a little bit of injustice and oppression to other
| people who haven't experienced it yet, just because we
| can.
|
| How about less injustice and oppression all around?
| mononcqc wrote:
| The so-called cancel culture is not new, and the people
| complaining about it were generally fine with its
| presence (along with the presence of systemic injustice)
| as long as it wasn't pointed in their general direction.
|
| I would take the plea for "less injustice and oppression
| all around" as more honest if it actually came before it
| started being a sort of perceived threat to the person
| complaining, and if they actually complained about the
| other types of injustice as well.
|
| As far as I can see, most of the complaints about cancel
| culture have nothing to do with any other type of
| cancelling nor injustice, they're just people afraid that
| other people are now able to criticize them in ways much
| less important or impactful than said other people always
| had to contend with.
|
| The expectation I have is that if the new wave of cancel
| culture -- often directed at people denying or perceived
| as reinforcing systemic issues -- were to stop, the
| "cancelled" would be content to stay in place, and calls
| for systemic changes would be far easier to ignore.
| waterhouse wrote:
| It's an exceedingly common deflection. "Group X has
| suffered and/or is suffering worse, therefore your
| complaint can be ignored." It tends to come up sooner or
| later when someone complains about the negative impact of
| certain types of policies.
| [deleted]
| oisdk wrote:
| > Many people have lost their livelihoods
|
| What are you referring to, specifically?
| pwinnski wrote:
| Good question! The phrase "many people" covers up the
| relative paucity of actual instances, as well as the
| exact nature of those instances.
|
| Every person who loses their job to a misunderstanding is
| a tragedy to that person, and every person who loses
| their job claims it's due to a misunderstanding. We live
| in a polarized nation such that other companies seem to
| rush to hire those very same people on purpose, so it
| doesn't seem to be a _huge_ tragedy, but I 'm sure it
| feels tragic.
|
| It also seems to happen very, very rarely, and usually
| after events that seem indefensible on their face. That
| is, rarely are people willing to say "they should have
| faced no consequences," but often people are willing to
| say "they should not have faced consequences quite that
| severe."
| saberience wrote:
| "Many people have lost their livelihoods"
|
| Hmm, sounds intriguing. Do you have any sources for this
| or concrete examples which can be fact-checked?
| wrren wrote:
| Matt Taibbi's had a few good articles on this recently.
| Some excerpts:
|
| "Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In
| a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian
| history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the
| accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named
| Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion
| that "anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine
| other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He
| reportedly was forced out of the Writer's Union of Canada
| for the crime of "cultural appropriation," and denounced
| as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway.
| The latter said Niedzviecki "doesn't see the humanity of
| indigenous peoples." Last week, Benaway herself was
| denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that
| she was Indigenous.
|
| Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the
| University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for
| liking tweets by Dinesh D'Souza and Donald Trump, which
| you might think is fine - but what about Latino
| electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white
| activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was
| described online as a "white power" sign)? How about Sue
| Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the
| Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for
| attending a Halloween party two years ago in blackface (a
| failed parody of a different blackface incident involving
| Megyn Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this
| news? Why was ruining this person's life necessary?"
| domador wrote:
| [This is not a direct reply to your comment, but a
| comment on Hacker News itself.]
|
| It's interesting that a couple of minutes ago, I was
| unable to even _attempt_ to reply to wrren 's comment. It
| was grayed out, and I guess you can't reply to grayed-out
| comments. I read the comment and saw an exploration of
| ideas, not something that would be destructive to the
| Hacker News community or experience. I reloaded the page,
| the comment is no longer gray, and I am now able to reply
| to it. I guess it's been upvoted into acceptability
| again, and eligible for further discussion.
|
| Did I just imagine that there was no reply link after
| this comment? (It's an honest question, since this might
| be the first gray comment that I've tried to reply to.)
|
| Ironically enough (given that Paul Graham founded it)
| Hacker News itself seems to provide tools for silencing
| unconventional ideas through downvoting (unconventional
| for HN.) Apparently, it's not a particularly new problem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612885
|
| Seems like there's some aggressive conventionally-
| mindedness right here on Hacker News. It happens
| structurally, in the way downvoting unpopular ideas gets
| them silenced, and conventionally, in the way discussion
| about voting on Hacker News is discouraged.
| detaro wrote:
| Deep threads hide the reply button temporarily as an
| anti-flamewar thing (You can still reply by clicking on
| the timestamp to go to the comments permalink, it's just
| intended to be a soft deterrent against too much back-
| and-forth). Purely downvotes shouldn't disable replies,
| only if a comment gets killed (by flags or automated
| filters) it gets disabled.
| domador wrote:
| So, it's not related to whether a comment is grayed out,
| but to how deep it is and how recently it was posted.
| That's helpful to know. Thanks!
| Qworg wrote:
| All communities, including this one, require curation and
| moderation. The down vote is a way to drive out "non-HN"
| ideas out of the square, as determined by the broad
| subset of HN users (and a small number of super users).
|
| It isn't aggressively conventionally minded, it is pro
| social, as well as likely the only way to maintain a
| level of discourse that the majority wants.
| [deleted]
| jonhohle wrote:
| The ones I can find quickly:
|
| * Nicholas Sandmann (for an image taken out of context)
|
| * Tenured UNC Professor Mike Adams
|
| * Goya Foods' CEO Bob Unanue (attempted)
|
| * Terese Nielsen (allegedly)
|
| * Grant Napear
|
| * Justin Kucera (allegedly)
|
| * Aleksander Katai
|
| * Kathleen Lowry
|
| * JK Rowling (attempted)
|
| * Cornell Professor Dave Collum
|
| * Stephen Hsu
|
| * Leslie Neal-Boylan
|
| * James Bennet
|
| * Melissa Rolfe
|
| * Emmanuel Cafferty
| brandmeyer wrote:
| Brandon Eich
| gallegojaime wrote:
| Of course a version of it existed, but the going concern
| with cancel culture is that it doesn't require much
| thought or effort to cancel someone now. Social media
| allows you to easily join a mob without judging a person
| deeply by yourself.
| minikites wrote:
| Because previous mobs were well known for their
| thoughtfulness and judgement?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Well previously you needed an actual physical mob so you
| had to get enough people local to the victim outraged
| enough to be convinced it's worth their time. That's a
| much higher bar than doxing someone and sending hate mail
| to everyone around them.
| gallegojaime wrote:
| No - that's why it is a mob.
| auggierose wrote:
| I can't real imagine how you can say that you "cancel
| someone" on Twitter and not shudder inside.
| oisdk wrote:
| My intention was to be self-deprecating.
|
| (or, rather, I was trying to acknowledge that I know I am
| part of the demographic commonly held as responsible for
| "cancelling" people. Personally I find it impossible to
| use the word without a massive heap of irony)
| kazagistar wrote:
| How old are you that you've seen this before? If you are just
| seeing similarities to soviet steady state society, they
| might not mean we are headed towards that state, since its
| unclear if the process that birthed the social order you
| experienced was similar to it at all.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Is it inconceivable that someone who experienced Soviet
| life in the 70s or 80s might be around on HN? I didn't
| interpret either gp or ggp as talking about the October
| Revolution or collectivizing the "kulak" farmers. Just the
| ordinary totalitarianism where people who think for
| themselves (we might call them "aggressive-independent")
| have to go mute in order to not step on ever-changing
| minefields, or be very careful about who they talk to.
| peisistratos wrote:
| > As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I've felt personal
| alarm bells ring more and more
|
| Good! I have been working to make it such for years alongside
| others, and our work has been bearing fruit. Who knows, we
| might be under a Politburo in a few years. It worked for China.
|
| Of course, as Marx said, history marches forward in a dialectic
| manner. The other class has to do their part, and they have
| done it - the population has to be pauperized and
| proletarianized, and that has come to pass. As Lenin said,
| liberals are worse than the Tsar's Black Hundreds. Stalin said
| social democracy is social fascism. I'm happy to see the
| discussions of cutting Covid aid in congress - it is exactly
| the attack the working class needs against it.
|
| As Mao said, everything under heaven is in disorder, the
| situation is excellent.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for using primarily HN for
| ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.
| bokbok8379 wrote:
| This guy seems to be using logic, which is an illegal
| thoughtform.
| smhost wrote:
| This is so meandering and incoherent that it's hard to comment
| on, but the idea that silicon valley and finance types are
| "independent-minded" is downright laughable. It's pretty clear
| that those types are in lock-step with each other ideologically,
| maybe broadly split between east-coast and west-coast
| aesthetically.
|
| This categorization is such nonsense. People in the hard sciences
| don't neatly fall into a type, and in fact is almost the
| opposite. In physics and math (maybe especially in math and
| physics), people are split right down the middle between
| conventional and independent. pg just doesn't seem to understand
| the internal politics of the sciences.
| vgfalk wrote:
| I do not agree that the essay is incoherent, the general line
| of thought is very clear: Independently of left or right,
| conformists of the passive, aggressive, or passive aggressive
| variety can ruin societies and free thinking.
|
| Conformists can also easily switch sides.
|
| Indeed the insertion of Silicon Valley was a bit unnecessary.
| They are ruthless capitalists that currently pretend to be
| socialist for profit and hiring motives as well as suppressing
| weak software developers by confusing them with new ideologies
| every week.
| avs733 wrote:
| i.e., aggressive-conformists masquerading as aggressive
| independent thinkers
| avs733 wrote:
| Excessive dimension reduction is a scourge in social science,
| and in societal commentary by just about everyone. So, yes - I
| agree with your point entirely, and I think it can be made much
| more concrete honestly by adding another dimension:
|
| The why of independence
|
| Notably, that is the harder one to create a surface level
| observation of. But take his favored quadrant:
|
| "And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively
| independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule,
| their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what
| to do makes them inclined to do the opposite."
|
| Is it merely being told what to do causes them to question
| something? So its the rule demands questioning of it? or is
| what he is really looking for that they question the reasoning
| and demand valid reasoning? One is just contrarian, one is self
| aware. Some people start with contrarianism as a poorly
| articulated path to demanding valid reasoning...At times Elon
| Musk sounds like a contrarian, at times he sounds like a
| reasoned risk taker, I'm not investing in that.
|
| In the end, Paul sounds a bit like he's trying to take a
| roundabout way to make fun of the high school jocks...
| mcguire wrote:
| Do the naughty ones question rules, or do they just break
| them?
| chillacy wrote:
| > I think that you'll find all four types in most societies,
| and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on
| their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their
| society.
|
| Personality is a real topic of psychology research, the
| current model is a five-factor model
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
|
| But the distributions are not bi-modal, so in reality most
| people are near the center of this quadrant with (I assume
| normally distributed) outliers.
| kristianc wrote:
| Right - and there's the tacit assumption flowing throughout is
| that the 'independent thinkers' have only good things to say,
| and that societal norms have not evolved for any good reason.
|
| The state, particularly the welfare state, is partly a
| recognition that together we can achieve a level of protection
| for each other that we cannot achieve independently.
|
| And if the independent thinkers don't much feel like writing
| open source software, writing political treatises or
| contributing to Wikipedia articles and instead feel like
| spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories online, then what?
|
| Like most business quadrants of this type, it gets you to agree
| to its typology of the world and the rest flows naturally from
| there. But the typology usually can be called pretty easily
| into question.
| pjscott wrote:
| Regarding your first paragraph, consider these two claims:
|
| 1. Progress comes from people who are willing to ignore
| conventional wisdom and social norms.
|
| 2. The conventional wisdom is mostly wise, and social norms
| evolved in ways that are mostly good.
|
| _These claims don 't conflict._ It's entirely possible for
| independent thinkers to be mostly wrong, much wronger than
| the mainstream, _and_ to be essential for progress. Most
| changes may not be improvements, but every improvement is
| still a change.
| kristianc wrote:
| > These claims don't conflict. It's entirely possible for
| independent thinkers to be mostly wrong, much wronger than
| the mainstream, and to be essential for progress. Most
| changes may not be improvements, but every improvement is
| still a change.
|
| Which is precisely why this framework is too reductive to
| be of any real explanatory value.
|
| At some point, someone has to make the decision about
| whether someone's motivation for wanting to be
| 'aggressively conventional' (PG introduces a new term here
| - presumably 'woke' is too inflammatory) is well-founded,
| or if they're holding back necessary progress. PG seems to
| fancy himself as that arbiter, but I'm not convinced the
| argument is being made in good faith.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 'aggressively conventional' (PG introduces a new term
| here - presumably 'woke' is too inflammatory)
|
| "Woke" is too _limited_. It may be the current form of
| "aggressively conventional", but there were others before
| it, there will be others after it, and there are others
| than it right now.
|
| Also, "woke" was once aggressively independent (probably
| before the term "woke" was used). Now it's aggressively
| conventional - though it may be a parody of what the
| independents meant.
| kristianc wrote:
| > "Woke" is too limited. It may be the current form of
| "aggressively conventional", but there were others before
| it, there will be others after it, and there are others
| than it right now.
|
| But then where you place 'woke' in PG's quadrant in
| itself is open to debate. Are trans rights activists
| 'aggressively conventional' for supporting the right to
| self-identify (in the UK at least a broadly popular
| position), or are they bold and independent minded for
| taking on more contentious positions, such as using the
| bathrooms of their identified gender without having
| undergone reassignment or take place in the sports of
| their chosen gender?
|
| And if you can say someone can be both 'aggressively
| conventional' and 'bold and independent' where does that
| leave the tidy classification of the quadrant?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I didn't say that someone can be "aggressively
| conventional" and "bold and independent". I said that the
| same _position_ can be both at different times and
| places.
|
| You seem to be trying to make PG's scheme a
| classification of _positions_ , and it's not. It's a
| classification of _peoples ' behavior_. The result is
| that most of your criticism is directed at something that
| is not actually PG's position.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| "people agreed on things in the past that we don't agree with
| today" - arguably true, but historians get mad sometimes
| depending on the specifics, they might have a point
|
| "therefore anything we agree on today is 100% arbitrary BS
| and only my own ideas matter" - ...what? Are you ok?
| agarv wrote:
| Not meant to be snarky, but PG seems to have rediscovered the big
| five personality traits
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
| specifically agreeableness and openness. For people that want to
| learn more, Jordan Peterson has a great video lecture series
| about it
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71I...
| dilandau wrote:
| In which pg spills a few hundred words humblebragging about his
| maverick status.
|
| I think the thing to measure is defiance rather than conformity,
| by the way. Much more interesting.
| tgflynn wrote:
| This is a good essay, but I don't think he gets it quite right. I
| agree with the horizontal axis: conventional vs. independent but
| I don't think the view he presents of aggressiveness is quite
| accurate.
|
| I do think that a major axis for classifying humans is the extent
| to which they desire to impose their views on others through
| coercion. This seems to be partly what Graham is trying to
| capture but his description doesn't seem to quite fit. In
| particular I have a hard time thinking of anyone who wants to
| impose their own independent-mindedness on others through
| coercion. Typically they just want the conventional minded to
| leave them alone so they can work on their independent ideas and
| hopefully prove them right. Of course they may want to convince a
| few people, such as investors, of the value of their ideas before
| they have been proven, but that isn't the same kind of coercion
| that the aggressively conventional-minded employ to silence
| dissent.
| jfarmer wrote:
| If you write several essays about "the way society works" and
| they consistently resolve to a protagonist who happens to be very
| much like yourself, you're probably writing about your own mind,
| not society.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| It's ironic that he describes social media as an own goal but
| there isn't the introspection accompanying it that would lead
| to the obvious point you've made so well.
|
| Everyone in SV wants to be "up and to the right" in every
| quadrant map of anything. How comforting to simplify life to
| those terms, to exceptional winners and conventional
| deadweight. But if society takes your myopic vision and
| resulting creation and then eats itself and all its democratic
| institutions, to paraphrase Prinicpal Skinner:
|
| "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."
| [deleted]
| jfarmer wrote:
| Absolutely! You can see it in this thread, even. There are
| folks excited by the prospect of using the phrase
| "aggressively non-conformist".
|
| pg is providing memetic ammunition for the very "culture
| wars" he claims he's trying to sit out. No introspection (or
| at least no _evidence_ of introspection), exactly as you say.
| LordFast wrote:
| If many people find agreements with a person's notions of
| conformity, by the evidence of the popularity of their
| writings, does that make these people conformists, and
| therefore engenders conformist attitudes towards the author's
| point of view on non-conformity?
|
| Genuinely pondering.
| jfarmer wrote:
| I think the one-dimension "conformist" / "non-comformist"
| axis isn't useful.
|
| We all participate in orthodoxies that we're blind to (or at
| least not fully aware of). The only questions are "Which
| ones?" and "What are the consequences of our participation?"
|
| In that sense, we're all "conformists".
| [deleted]
| acpetrov wrote:
| Society's only protagonist is the individual
| jfarmer wrote:
| Society isn't a story and therefore doesn't have a
| protagonist.
| erichocean wrote:
| Did you just invalidate your own prior comment? Very
| meta...or maybe your comment was just about your own
| insecurities, relative to pg?
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is all so static. Real life is more dynamic. An aggressive
| rule enforcer is an easygoing independent who got mugged and an
| easygoing independent is an aggressive rule enforcer who went to
| college.
|
| Damage done in the world comes more from failing to understand
| how people get influenced in their choices than from picking the
| wrong quadrant.
| MiguelHudnandez wrote:
| Any person's coordinates will change over time, that is true. I
| don't think that removes any value from the measurement system.
| [deleted]
| ghiculescu wrote:
| When I read this part I thought it really resonated:
|
| > In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their
| distinctive calls, much as you could recognize four species of
| birds. The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush
| this essay!"
|
| He chose such a prescient example.
| kaymanb wrote:
| I can't put my finger on it, but there must be a name for this
| kind of logic. I think pgs arguments have more sustenance than
| just this, but it still rubs me the wrong way. I'll give an
| (extreme) example below.
|
| 1. Make a statement, calling out some part of the population as
| "inferior".
|
| 2. Note that a trait of belonging to the inferior class would
| be to disagree with the above statement.
|
| 3. Dismiss any criticism of the statement as coming from
| someone in this inferior class, and therefore being unable to
| give meaningful arguments.
| r4vik wrote:
| 50% of the words in this article could have been replaced with an
| image +-----------------------------------+------
| ------------------------------+ |
| | | |
| | | |
| tattletales | naughty ones |
| | |
| | aggressive | |
| | | |
| | +--------------------------------------------------------
| ----------------+ | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | passive | |
| dreamy ones | | sheep
| | | |
| | | |
| | | +-------------------
| ----------------+------------------------------------+
| Conventional minded Independent minded
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Agreed, that's the natural way of communicating this kind of
| taxonomy.
| anonmidniteshpr wrote:
| So if I called my very bi gf to be at my work's stairwell for a
| nooner just before the lunch rush the day after we were in a
| tiny dark park in (a certain sleepy South Bay SF town)* for 4
| hours going at it... I guess take makes me a take-no-chances,
| passive sheeple welcoming of law-and-order-types. Bahhahah }xD
|
| * Local cops actually made numerous good suggestions where
| couples could go because she broached it before I could.
| Lmaoooo. Hilarity ensued and then rotfl. For cops, they seemed
| really cool which was shocking outside of Little
| Italy/Northbeach SF.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Wat
| tome wrote:
| Yikes, would you mind editing that so that it has half as many
| (ASCII) columns, and about one fifth as many rows? As it is it
| is taking up my entire screen.
| r4vik wrote:
| not the easiest thing to edit in this text area but I've
| reduced the height
| anonmidniteshpr wrote:
| I wish I could fork and vim it on some sort of HN
| interface, but the home internet is down and I'm on my
| tiny, ancient iPhone 6s just trying to hit the right
| letters and not make misspelling like I'm drunk texting a
| translated novel from somewhere in Belarus.
| miguelmota wrote:
| > The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban
| is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one
| intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up
| being done by the stupid.
|
| Especially the people who enforce the laws. Law enforcement
| police officers have to follow orders without question. People
| who don't question things are inherently stupid.
| [deleted]
| andybak wrote:
| As always in discussions of "types of people" it's more nuanced
| than this.
|
| Someone can be both aggressively conformist over some issues (and
| towards some groups) and aggressively independent over others.
|
| In fact if you picture a stereotypical conspiracy-minded alt-
| right individual then the exhibit both behaviours at the same
| time about the same group. (individualist) "I won't do x because
| the government tells me I should" and (conformist) "How dare
| those liberals in my town break the social conventions I feel
| strongly about!"
|
| It's not hard to come up with an equivalent caricature for the
| left.
|
| Every time you read a way of dividing the world into types -
| think of an example of someone who is multiple types. It's very
| easy in nearly all cases.
| nabla9 wrote:
| This is true. The most important discovery in human psychology
| is that our behaviour is extremely context dependent. This is
| why it's so hard to draw any conclusions or make experiments
| that discover something universal. People have different roles
| and behaviours in different context, they can change their
| behaviour radically in the same context when they get different
| responses.
|
| Psychology researchers know this, but in the folk psychology
| there is this assumption that you can observe people in context
| and that's how they are.
| chippy wrote:
| I think this was addressed in the post with the example of
| school conformists who "rebel" along with the rest of their
| group doing the same things, with the same clothes, language,
| fashion, music etc.
|
| In your example, the aggressive alt-right "individualist" would
| be the equivalent as the high school rebel who is just acting a
| rebel and conforming to their adopted group.
|
| Conformists are essential for any group cohesion. I imagine a
| key part of a conformist in any group is to define the out
| groups.
| andybak wrote:
| If we follow that argument to its limits, are there any true
| individualists?
|
| Maybe it's just conformists with progressively smaller
| groups.
| austincheney wrote:
| > Someone can be both aggressively conformist over some issues
| (and towards some groups) and aggressively independent over
| others.
|
| Yes and no. In a purely objective context conformity is a
| personality mode shaped by a person's social reference group
| and the devotion or conformance to a single idea rests on the
| reinformance of the local group. For a highly conformant person
| you can change their opinion on a subject by dropping them into
| a different social context for a month at which point the
| devotion to a particular subject will be replaced by devotion
| in a different subject.
|
| Perhaps the most defining characteristic of somebody extremely
| non-conforming is the potential and frequency for original and
| potentially unpopular decisions. From extremely conforming
| people originality is met with immediate hostility. In that
| hostility the person may not even realize they are emotional
| first without any consideration for the validity of that
| emotion.
| ben509 wrote:
| > From extremely conforming people originality is met with
| immediate hostility.
|
| I'd submit a common case of that is someone with a new idea
| and being confronted with all the reasons it will never work.
|
| And that really does seem like a function of personality. The
| people saying why it won't work aren't being close-minded;
| they're gaving the idea a listen and thinking about it
| critically. They're may not even being outwardly rude. It's
| simply an unconcious preference to critique and find flaws.
| austincheney wrote:
| Its not so much about ignorance or close-mindedness but
| insecurity and fear masked as offense, which is different
| than rationally forming doubts.
| leereeves wrote:
| I don't see a contradiction in your example. I think such
| individuals are consistently being aggressively conformist
| _with their group_ , but for the hyper-political, their group
| isn't the nation, but the party.
|
| That seems to fit with PG's claim that "The call of the
| aggressively conventional-minded is 'Crush <outgroup>!'".
| Naturally that would extend to disobeying the rules of the
| outgroup, perhaps solely _because_ the outgroup proposed them.
| andybak wrote:
| OK - I didn't spend that much time constructing my caricature
| but I still feel my point is valid if you want to modify them
| somewhat.
|
| I myself remember feeling the strong pull of both "types" and
| I'd struggle to define myself clearly as either. (although I
| suspect I'm more frequently conformist than my overly
| flattering self-image depicts)
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Isnt PG claiming that the "rules" are to value free
| expression and not turn people into heretics and that those
| who "break" this rule are bad and unworthy and never able to
| have new, original ideas and thus should never be listened
| to?
|
| Sounds like he is trying to say "Crush <outgroup>!" to me...
| dougabug wrote:
| Of course he is. Crush the tattletales!
|
| Children think in terms like "tattletales" and "naughty."
| dougabug wrote:
| It reminds me of the early episodes of "Silicon Valley" where
| an endless parade of would be entrepreneurs proudly declares
| how they want to "change the world!" (to the point where it
| becomes comically tedious).
|
| "Aggressive independence" for its own sake (at scale) can
| simply degrade into its own form of ironic groupthink.
| raverbashing wrote:
| "Yes we're all individuals" effect, or this
| https://www.npr.org/2019/03/10/702063209/man-
| inadvertently-p...
| dougabug wrote:
| Classic.
| julesqs wrote:
| did paul graham really just imply that himself and his fellow
| silicon valley millionaires would have been abolitionists if they
| were alive during slavery
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The first part of this essay reminded me of the D&D alignment
| system:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...
| bambax wrote:
| I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many
| reasons, but the two main ones are that
|
| 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole
| history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow,
| and confuses demonstration with affirmation
|
| and, more importantly
|
| 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by
| which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The
| people on top are the ones that make the world move in the right
| direction, and the ones at the bottom are dragging us all down.
| (Of course, he always ends up in the best category himself.)
|
| But innovation isn't good _per se_. If you invent novel ways of
| torturing people (or animals, cf. the whole meat industry), that
| 's not progress.
|
| If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own
| benefit while everyone else suffers (the whole "gig economy"),
| that's not a net gain for society, and society is legitimate in
| fighting you.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| > he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by
| which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom
|
| I remember coming to an event at the YC headquarters a few
| years ago and that's exactly the way PG acted in person as
| well. He was surrounded by people wanting to talk to him the
| whole time, whenever someone would say hi and introduce
| themselves he would immediately ask for their HN username, then
| either strike a conversation or just say something along the
| lines of "doesn't ring a bell" and pass on to the next person.
|
| Many of the people that have gone through YC feel like the
| program has inherited that same quality. There are a few
| darlings in each batch that the partners really focus on and
| put their biggest efforts towards, while the rest feel almost
| inadequate for not being as awesome as the top ones.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| There is an arrogant pretense in self-imposed naming and
| carving up the world into your personalized compartments.
|
| It seems PG has now stooped to the infamous _Quadrant
| Diagram_ beloved by management consultants and other
| superficial minds who ought to know better...
|
| The _ribbonfarm_ guy and Eric Weinstein also come to mind,
| with their _look-at-me_ coining of petty neologisms and
| vacuous abbreviations. They may be smart and reflective, but
| their heavy-handed narcissism drowns out any underlying
| insights.
| andjd wrote:
| I think if I were asked this question, I would say that I
| have better things to do with my time than post on HN ...
| mostly true ;-)
| vikramkr wrote:
| I wonder how that behavior is reconciled with the idealistic
| basis of YC's application process where its open to everyone
| without needing warm intros and all. Pretty hypocritical to
| decide the only people worth your time are the people who
| found and had the time to engage with an internet forum that
| occasionally seems less like a forum and more like a
| recruiting and marketing tool for YC startups.
| wincent wrote:
| pg: What's your HN username?
|
| ta1234567890: ta1234567890
|
| pg: Hm, doesn't ring a bell... [looks awkwardly into cocktail
| glass]
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| You described pretty much exactly what happened to me. And
| I felt like crap. Nevertheless I still applied to YC
| afterwards.
|
| It sucks how people in power sometimes are assholes and we
| put up with them, probably just because of their power.
| Funes- wrote:
| >he plays fast and loose with the facts
|
| I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes
| from the French verb _essayer_ 'to attempt, to try'. It's a
| genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief
| rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration
| being necessary nor expected.
|
| On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post _on his own
| website_. Get real.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Who cares? If your argument is that essays aren't concerned
| with facts, then that's a great argument for ignoring the
| entire genre of essays. Ideas without basis in reality aren't
| worth anything.
|
| Luckily, some essayists _are_ concerned with facts, so we don
| 't have to throw out the whole genre. But we should
| absolutely ignore the essays that don't concern themselves
| with facts.
| Funes- wrote:
| > If your argument is that essays aren't concerned with
| facts, then that's a great argument for ignoring the entire
| genre of essays. [...] Luckily, some essayists _are_
| concerned with facts, so we don 't have to throw out the
| whole genre. But we should absolutely ignore the essays
| that don't concern themselves with facts.
|
| >If your argument is <something undesirable or
| unreasonable>, then <slippery slope>. Luckily, <me and the
| majority or authority figures disagree with you>, so
| <positive outcome>.
|
| That's a straw man fallacy if I've ever seen one. It's a
| textbook example. Congratulations.
|
| My reply to another user regarding that:
|
| >Paul Graham, on the other hand, is just publishing a
| simple essay on his very own website; of course I don't
| expect an exhaustive empirical demonstration on his part,
| though any kind of factual data can be welcome.
|
| Look, it's not a binary decision (facts/no facts), but a
| qualitative distinction: it's _how_ I expect facts--
| whatever those are, but that 's another discussion--to be
| dealt with in a short essay on a personal blog, instead of
| expecting or wanting essays to be deliberately unconcerned
| with them.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > That's a straw man fallacy if I've ever seen one. It's
| a textbook example. Congratulations.
|
| Everyone can read the conversation and see what was said.
|
| > Look, it's not a binary decision (facts/no facts), but
| a qualitative distinction: it's how I expect facts--
| whatever those are, but that's another discussion--to be
| dealt with in a short essay on a personal blog, instead
| of expecting or wanting essays to be deliberately
| unconcerned with them.
|
| Okay, if that's what you're saying, I didn't understand
| that previously, and I'll take some blame for thinking I
| understood instead of asking clarifying questions.
|
| But, I'll say, the qualitative discussion of "how facts
| are dealt with" is pretty irrelevant if there aren't any
| facts to deal with. It's very much not clear that much of
| PG says in this essay is based in facts at all. Even if
| you want to argue that quality of evidence is a spectrum,
| the can still be a 0 value on that spectrum.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Is there not a spectrum of levels of accuracy/voracity in
| essays? Is it not valid to have a preference for authors
| alignments to parts of that spectrum?
|
| Description of the world seems necessarily a compression of
| facts. I read this critique as stating more or less, "I find
| that PG tends to bias the data selected for the compression
| to support the conclusions he is inclined to promote".
|
| I agree that essays have a wider allowable not-grounded-in-
| demonstrable-reality-ness compared to scientific papers but
| if an author seems to one to cherry pick, it seems reasonable
| for the one to declare that as a criticism of the author.
|
| This is an important thing to know, especially since those
| compression statements are usually the premises the theses of
| the essays depend.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I don't think scientific papers are the only place that
| should be expected to, when purporting something as fact, be
| well... factual.
|
| Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had
| to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an
| essay (including opinion pieces).
|
| I should of just let my professors know that I wasn't
| providing them a scientific paper -- I was just
| attempting/trying to provide a brief rundown of ideas and
| they were wrong to expect empirical evidence of anything I
| claimed as fact.
| Funes- wrote:
| >Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I
| had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in
| an essay (including opinion pieces).
|
| That requirement obeyed that academic institution's
| criteria, not the genre's traditional nature. You either
| were being tested by them or published something with their
| name attached to it, so it's only normal that they
| established the empirical validity of your writings. It
| makes sense that an academic institution, of all places,
| would want only rigorous content linked to it. Paul Graham,
| on the other hand, is just publishing a simple essay on his
| very own website; of course I don't expect an exhaustive
| empirical demonstration on his part, though any kind of
| factual data can be welcome.
|
| >I should of
|
| I hope your "many years in academia" weren't spent in
| anything even remotely related to linguistics. And that
| your editors there corrected your grammar, as well.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > I hope your "many years in academia" weren't spent in
| anything even remotely related to linguistics. And that
| your editors there corrected your grammar, as well.
|
| Please don't use personal attacks.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Oh boy you sure got me by calling out my grammar. I'm
| writhing in embarrassment.
|
| Good to know that outside of academia that things stated
| as fact have no requirement or expectation of being
| factual. I will temper my expectations in the future.
| Funes- wrote:
| >Good to know that outside of academia that things stated
| as fact have no requirement or expectation of being
| factual.
|
| Stop putting words in my mouth. I have no desire to keep
| pointing out straw man fallacies.
|
| Academia tends to have _formal_ requirements of that
| kind. Personal blogs don 't, for instance. That's the
| explanation behind me--and other people, surely--not
| expecting an elaborate empirical demonstration of
| everything the man writes on his site. I don't think it's
| that hard to stick to what's being said in my comments
| instead of twisting my words for the sake of sarcasm and
| preserving your own ego.
| ziddoap wrote:
| >>he plays fast and loose with the facts
|
| >Essays aren't scientific papers.
|
| Seems like you are alluding that essays do not require
| facts. I guess I misinterpreted.
|
| >expecting an elaborate empirical demonstration of
| everything the man writes on his site
|
| Talk about putting words in someones mouth. Nowhere did I
| say everything written on his site needs "elaborate
| empirical demonstration".
|
| Are you unable to finish a comment without throwing some
| sort of insult?
| atoav wrote:
| > But innovation isn't good per se.
|
| This is a thing that is known to most people since the end of
| WWII, with it's genocides - in fact what you describe is a very
| modernist view of the world: societies are continuously
| progressing into the direction of the light, with technology
| making things better all the time. In this world view the arrow
| of time has a clear direction and it is forward, while the
| roles of the protagonists is equally clear cut.
|
| Many people don't really get what the postmodernists wanted:
| they were sick of precisely that lie. In their eyes things are
| not always getting better and more rational while knowledge and
| wisdom increases. Things get forgotten and vanish, good things
| get replaced by cheap things, confusion happens, intelligent
| people make immoral decisions while dumb people become heros
| etc.
|
| It is this "dirt of reality" where things aren't as clear cut
| as many thinkers like them to be. This is not a problem per se,
| unless they try to make the reality match their ideas instead
| of the other way around.
| classified wrote:
| > If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your
| own benefit...
|
| ... then PG will call you "smart".
| nwienert wrote:
| Agree. in this case he entirely misses that the aggressively
| conventional are _serving a purpose_ that's incredible
| important. This is classic stuff going back to the Tower of
| Babel, and theories about conservatives vs liberals functions
| in society (ie disruptives and preservationists).
|
| After reading The Righteous Mind (best book of the decade, IMO)
| and generally gaining an appreciation for how blind we are to
| how good we have it (the aggressively independent types moreso,
| they are chronically unsatisfied and in a way pessimistic about
| progress, blind to the incredible luxury we live in now), I
| find myself really understanding the role and purpose of the
| conventionistas in society and I'm glad for them! They are the
| buffer between the woke mobs, they fight to keep the system
| from moving around too wildly. They are wrong of course (heresy
| is a good example), but so are the unsatisfied independents as
| well.
|
| Not that these map perfectly. There are many conservative
| independents and vice versa, but your main thrust on pg
| generally:
|
| 1. Defining things so they create categories for people,
| usually framing it for some self-serving purpose
|
| 2. Putting himself in the good category and spending very
| little time thinking over why the "bad" one may not be so bad.
|
| Really hits home.
|
| Side note: I found his last essay on Orthodoxy Privilege to be
| a real stinker. That he felt the need to write about
| "privilege" of which he is gluttonous, and use it as a chance
| to redefine privilege to his ends, was an impressive level of
| dissonance.
| ckemere wrote:
| As a scientist, the idea that "To be a successful scientist,
| for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be
| right when everyone else is wrong." Struck me as ludicrous,
| and scientists that I know that think like this usually seem
| more concerned with self aggrandization than discovery. I
| wonder if your point #2 is actually really profound. Maybe
| the important axis is not "conformity", but empathy? Kids
| that lack aggressively the ability or patience to understand
| rules break them, scientists that agressively understand
| other people's ideas are able to build on them or move beyond
| them, etc...
| awkward wrote:
| Right. The big error in this one is that it's completely blind
| to where rules come from, only personal psychological
| relationship to them.
|
| By the limited model in the essay, you can imagine an
| "Aggressive Nonconformist" put in a place where they are highly
| influential on rule creation. The model doesn't really give
| wiggle room for anything but simply creating rules that bind
| others and ignoring them oneself.
| designium wrote:
| Well put. There is a huge simplification and again, very North
| American centric. I beg you, HN readers, apply what he wrote to
| other societies.
|
| I read on the top comments of people getting worried about the
| US becoming like former Soviet States in regards about thought
| control and lack of freedom. That's a whole different issue. PG
| mixes multiple different problems and oversimplify them.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Agreed. This whole article just left me quite cold.
|
| I mean, as far as I can tell, all these people running around
| claiming that Covid19 is a hoax are (apparently) very
| aggressively independent! We, the passive conformist sheeple,
| are bound by the pesky laws of physics and math - but not these
| aggressively independent thinkers! Nosir. They question _all
| the rules_.
|
| > So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same
| way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.
|
| So those CV19 hoaxers are a group and therefore not
| independent. My bad! But one of them must be the leader, right?
| One of them must be the aggressive independent CEO-type, right?
| Because how else did they get these ideas? Someone must have
| formed them into a band; by definition, they couldn't have done
| it on their own. You just need to find that aggressive
| independent thinker and BAM - we have another CEO of Theranos.
| Yay!
|
| > all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-
| minded, but aggressively so
|
| "There have been no successful conventional [real
| estate/retail/food/import/trade/bookshop] startups in the last
| 50 years". Oh wait, only SV tech startup disrupters are real
| CEOs.
|
| > the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance
| began in universities
|
| Universities? _Really?_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| designium wrote:
| Let's play this out for mask wearing:
|
| Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks Bottom
| Left: People who are wearing masks Bottom Right: People who
| occasionally use masks, or alternatives, bandanas, etc. Top
| Right: People who don't want to use masks because of freedom.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| "Four quadrants" are frequently a bad smell. They often are
| structurally wrong, such as
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy
|
| which has three real entities in it (a triangle) and one non-
| entity. The Nolan chart gets into trouble in a different way:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
|
| That demonstrates a libertarian position that some people like
| to talk about but does not get traction when you try to
| implement it in politics. Like the green party you get maybe 2%
| of the vote if that. There is a very strong force that comes
| from the axioms of social choice theory that pushes politics
| into one dimension and you cannot wish it away by drawing a
| square.
|
| Then there is that Gartner Magic Quadrant where they are just
| getting high on their own supply.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| I tend to be a big fan of pg's posts even his more
| controversial ones, but I must admit the use of four quadrant
| categorization turned me off here. It's not a problem with
| the idea he's trying to convey. It is valid, at least in some
| contexts. The issue here is more about lazy communication,
| sloppy emphasis, too coarse thinking.
|
| Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information
| theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian
| fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used
| in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a
| bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already
| thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's
| probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to
| newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more
| complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It
| ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language,
| taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to
| Aristotle's Categories.
|
| Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people
| pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that
| were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we
| would have two sliders that would allow people to get more
| results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they
| had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's
| data and could beat much more flexible and expressive
| combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on
| things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.
| amelius wrote:
| He should really come out of his ivory tower and put a comment
| section on his blog.
| nvr219 wrote:
| Comment sections on blogs are so bad that there are competing
| browser extensions to block them. Better to have dedicated
| sites for comments. Like hn, reddit, etc
| awkward wrote:
| What else is this site for?
| langitbiru wrote:
| People can comment on Paul's Twitter or this thread.
| biophysboy wrote:
| I agree. It was an essay on two of the big 5 personality
| traits: conscientiousness (conventional) and agreeableness
| (passivity). His thesis is that disagreeable conscientious
| people are responsible for "a disproportionate amount of
| trouble".
|
| There's a couple problems with this though. First, these traits
| are sort of immutable - humans can't really change their
| personalities. Second, as you said, independent-mindedness can
| cause huge problems as well.
| pixelrevision wrote:
| His writing on lisp and the life of his startup were much
| better reads. He may have some valid points but it is hard to
| read a really rich person (who got rich really young) handwave
| away large swaths of society.
| dencodev wrote:
| Baskets of deplorables.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| > But innovation isn't good per se.
|
| Innovation isn't anything in moral terms.
|
| All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a
| new technology offers, there is always a corresponding
| disadvantage.
|
| The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never
| distributed evenly among the population. This means that every
| new technology benefits some and harms others.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _For every advantage a new technology offers, there is
| always a corresponding disadvantage._
|
| If that was true, society as a whole would never improve.
|
| But in reality, the last 300 years have seen an unimaginable
| improvement of human life in every dimension.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| > If that was true, society as a whole would never improve.
|
| Not sure that's the conclusion to draw. The car made
| traveling large distances possible. Now things are built on
| car scale distances, making walking difficult and requiring
| a car.
|
| > unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension
|
| I would argue mainly materialistically. And yet we have to
| spend most of our lives working to pay for these comforts.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| You can push that all the way back to the Middle Ages.
| Serfdom was quite an improvement over Roman-era slavery,
| being tied to the land was far more stable and secure than
| being tied directly to a master. It wasn't quite a middle
| class, but better nonetheless.
|
| Transportation and naval technology steadily improved, and
| more and more goods and services became broadly available
| during this time period.
|
| The downside is that war got really bad from 1800-1950.
| seneca wrote:
| > All technological change is a trade-off. For every
| advantage a new technology offers, there is always a
| corresponding disadvantage.
|
| This, to me, reads as one of those statements that sounds
| wise and correct but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.
| Going from digging with your hands to using a shovel doesn't
| have a negative trade off. Going from carrying things on your
| back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding
| disadvantage.
|
| You can find very myopic cases where they're not improvements
| (e.g. digging for fragile objects is better done with hands),
| but that doesn't disprove the general improvement, and it is
| far from a corresponding disadvantage equal to the new
| advantage.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| I'll admit it does sound like a very abstract statement.
|
| When I think of technology it's not a singular
| device/product/creation. It's wider in scope, kinda like a
| whole field. This is probably because like you pointed out
| you can find one thing that is just good, like a shovel.
| But a shovel is a mechanical tool and in the broader scheme
| of things.
|
| An example I can think of is ABS, anti-lock break system.
| It prevents car wheels from locking under breaking and
| skidding, giving the driver more control while breaking.
| How could this be bad? ABS is a fix to a problem that was
| created by another technology, the car. The car dictated a
| lot of society as we know it today. Roads had to be built,
| rules of travel put in place, you could now live far from
| work. These might sound good to us now, but in reality they
| are trade-offs.
| tome wrote:
| > Going from carrying things on your back to using a
| wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage.
|
| Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are
| carrying to battle?
| seneca wrote:
| > Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you
| are carrying to battle?
|
| I'm not sure what your point is.
|
| Are you suggesting that some things are better kept close
| at hand and not on a cart? The invention of the cart does
| not remove the ability to carry things.
|
| Do you mean to make an appeal to the evils of war? If so,
| the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with
| the efficacy of a technology, though I think you have a
| point of discussion there. War is hardly always evil, but
| maybe you could argue that adding efficiency to the
| ability to wage unjust war is a disadvantage. But, again,
| you have to get very abstract to make that argument.
| tome wrote:
| > I'm not sure what your point is.
|
| You denied a claim that "every new technology benefits
| some and harms others" by doubting that invention of a
| cart could cause harm. I'm suggesting a way that it
| could.
|
| > the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with
| the efficacy of a technology
|
| I agree, but I believe it was morality that was under
| discussion, not efficacy.
| seneca wrote:
| > doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm
|
| I think this is where we missed each other. I was trying
| to address "there is always a corresponding
| disadvantage", and I think mentally I was interpreting
| this as "an approximately proportionate downside or
| externality".
|
| I don't disagree at all that nearly any technological
| improvement can cause harm.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm struggling to see how antibiotics harmed others.
| roenxi wrote:
| There is an argument that the black plague was one of the
| driving forced behind the rise of British democracy causing
| a labour shortage that added fuel to the rise of the middle
| class.
|
| Now I've got no idea if that is a convincing argument, but
| it is plausible enough to say that a counterfactual world
| without antibiotics might have turned out better.
| hkt wrote:
| Not quite. It was during feudalism, and what it
| established was the power of the guilds and a large rise
| in wages. To use the Marxist term, there was no "reserve
| army of the unemployed" so workers found it much easier
| to negotiate wages.
|
| British democracy generally came much later, as a divide
| and rule proposition. The divide was between the
| feudalism descended aristocrats on one hand, and the
| merchant capitalists on the other. The franchise was
| extended to property owners, then poorer property owners,
| then all men and property owning women, then all women,
| then they removed multiple votes in the 60s and limited
| the number of hereditary peers in the 90s. The start of
| the process was the 19th century, whereas the plague was
| the 14th and then 15th.
| blueflow wrote:
| Use of antibiotics bred resistant strains, which are
| becoming a increasing danger for hospital inpatients.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Yes, infections are a danger for
| patients....................
| arethuza wrote:
| You could perhaps argue that antibiotics have allowed
| farming practises that might not be otherwise be economical
| that produce more suffering for the animals.
|
| NB I don't know if this is true or not, but it certainly
| seems possible.
| rjknight wrote:
| We can distinguish between pure and applied innovation,
| though. Coming up with a new algorithm which can be applied
| to facial recognition is a pure innovation, deploying that
| algorithm to monitor political dissidents is applied
| innovation. I would not agree that the latter example "isn't
| anything in moral terms", even though the former is.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| I would argue that you cannot parse out the "good"
| technology from the "bad" technology as that would require
| full knowledge of downstream consequences.
|
| Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea,
| sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has
| a philosophy which is given expression in how the
| technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes
| us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in
| which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional
| and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
|
| As soon as we build tiny cameras and software that could
| interpret pixel values and classify it, there was going to
| be facial recognition used against people.
|
| P.S. I don't think it should, but I don't see how you can
| stop that. My personal feeling is that access to knowledge
| and technology is what prevents power imbalance.
| rjknight wrote:
| This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is
| morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable
| consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
|
| I would prefer to say that the act of creating a
| possibility is different from the act of exercising that
| possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be
| saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use
| inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny
| cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably
| responsible for the use of that technology to target
| political dissidents.
|
| I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes
| harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad
| ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the
| person who makes bad use of technology, not with the
| person who invented it (assuming that the technology was
| not invented specifically for that purpose).
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| > This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is
| morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable
| consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
|
| I agree with you and I think I confused myself. What I
| mean is that technology has no inherent morality. It's
| not good, bad or neutral. You could judge a certain
| application in those terms, but you are really judging
| the morality of the user. Say a knife, it can be used as
| a cooking tool or a killing too. That is not to say the
| knife is good or bad, but that the user and his
| intentions are.
|
| > so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the
| image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for
| the use of that technology to target political dissidents
|
| I wouldn't really say that either. Unless the person was
| actively trying to make spy things to target political
| dissidents.
|
| > it becomes harder to stop someone from using the
| invention in bad ways
|
| The bad ways are not always clear. I will quote Freud
| from Civilization and Its Discontents.
|
| "One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain
| in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of
| happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice
| of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away
| or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a
| friend has reached his destination that he has come
| through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it
| mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously
| reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for
| women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably
| lengthening the average life of a civilized man?"
|
| "If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my
| child would never have left his native town and I should
| need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across
| the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend
| would not have embarked on his sea- voyage and I should
| not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is
| the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is
| precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest
| restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that,
| taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children
| than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at
| the same time we have created difficult conditions for
| our sexual life in marriage.... And, finally, what good
| to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of
| joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only
| welcome death as a deliverer?"
| Misdicorl wrote:
| This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many
| improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient
| photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray
| cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron,
| ...
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Of course they have disadvantageS to something or someone.
| Some are just more abstract, removed or minor.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| If that is your position I would refer you to the myth of
| thamus[0] and the writings of Neil Postman.
|
| [0]https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-
| thamus-an...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Many improvements have no disadvantage_
|
| Every improvement has, at the very least, its Luddite cost.
| It forces some people to change, and some of those people
| won't like that.
| dantheman wrote:
| What was the disadvantage introduced by having doctors
| wash their hands or the invention of antibiotics?
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| I can only speculate. I would say an overall weakened
| immune system.
|
| Is your point that there are technologies with only
| benefits?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Washing hands for doctors? Probably not much.
|
| Invention of antibiotics, its use and abuse increased
| bacterial resistance to them.
| [deleted]
| olalonde wrote:
| You could argue that automation is one of those
| improvements with no disadvantage. But it can also result
| in people losing their jobs and those people might be
| opposed to it.
|
| I would argue that the same is true with the gig economy.
| It benefits the people participating in it greatly but it
| also cost some people their jobs (e.g. taxi drivers).
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Losing a job isn't inherently bad. I'd only bad now
| because we've decided to arrange society around zero sum
| thinking.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| It's pretty inherently bad if losing your job means you
| can't feed your kids or yourself.
| [deleted]
| Misdicorl wrote:
| One of the most embattled changes of the last 20 years is
| not likely to make the list of `improvements with no
| disadvantage`...
| rclayton wrote:
| He had a habit of always making the hero of his narrative the
| "brave startup founder".
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| It would be interesting to come up with the "tech"
| archetypes.
|
| The coder with a thousand faces, a modern day adaptation of
| Joseph Campbell[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Fac
| es
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Unfortunately I actually LOLd when I got to that point in the
| essay. It was not a surprise.
|
| If being an SV founder or VC requires nonconformism, it's a
| very mainstream kind of nonconformism which has been part of
| the culture since the 1940s. (By some accounts, even
| earlier.)
|
| IMO you cannot seriously claim to be a nonconformist if you
| unquestioningly accept and promote the framing of a game and
| a set of rules which have been in place for decades now.
|
| Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to
| have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic
| stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to
| generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there
| are more creative _and performant_ options.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| > Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems
| to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of
| gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems
| determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and
| whether maybe there are more creative and performant
| options.
|
| Jaron Lanier comes to mind.
| dencodev wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that the non-conformists these days are
| the people that think capitalism shouldn't exist at all and
| choose to minimize their role in it as far as they can
| without starving and going homeless.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| You have to justify getting all that money for doing
| something that's ultimately not that important for society
| somehow.
| minikites wrote:
| You mean "getting people to click on ads" isn't deeply
| meaningful to society? Perish the thought!
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Why don't we engage with the argument a bit more. How are
| people who are aggressively conformist valuable in ways that
| Paul Graham is ignoring?
|
| One answer is, they're valuable in war, where you have large
| numbers of people who are in a position to weaken the war
| effort and you want to make sure none of them do or even think
| about it.
|
| The Trump campaign signalling early on that it was at war with
| certain large chunks of the U.S. population helped kick a lot
| of people into this war mentality, I think, which might be in
| their interest or all of our interests in some ways, and that
| seems to be one of the trends that provoked this essay.
|
| Passively independent-minded people are really valuable too,
| because they gum up the works of conformism by refusing to go
| along with it, without giving the aggressive conformists
| targets for outrage.
|
| I've also seen a separate axis of how into change and new ideas
| people are. Some people are into new ideas in an aggressive
| conformist way. Some people are really resistant to new ideas
| in the same way.
| auggierose wrote:
| Sounds like you are conventionally-minded. ;-)
| motorcycleman9 wrote:
| I think there are obvious cases where passive moral conformists
| (which you would argue are at the bottom of PG's rankings) are
| a net good in the world. PG doesn't spend any time highlighting
| this because it is not the focus of the essay.
|
| Classifying people by their expressed personality is the best
| way to do it. If you refuse to judge a person by the content of
| their character you are blinding yourself.
| blunderkid wrote:
| Haha, take your point about the tendency to "classify". There
| is good reason for that however: he is a VC. One of the big
| things that keeps VCs busy is classifying/stereotyping teams
| and looking for patterns of success. Yes, he should probably
| keep some of these "frameworks" to himself. There isn't enough
| since in there to be taken seriously in a peer reviewed paper.
| But hey, he is PG! And there are weaklings, probably not
| members of his favored quadrant, who swear by his views :).
| classified wrote:
| Is this propaganda for a new cult? Like, if you're not non-
| conformist enough then you're just dumb dead weight? This sure
| reads like PG wants to drum up conformism to what he calls "non-
| conformism".
| [deleted]
| defnotashton2 wrote:
| What he really after US vs them tendency of tribalism, he is
| upset at the overreach of the left and their lacking self
| criticism. Then ironically lacking self criticism presents an us
| vs them argument.
|
| "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
| opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the
| ability to function."
|
| F. Scott
| peisistratos wrote:
| Almost all access to the media, access to the Internet and so
| forth in the US has been consolidated into the control of six
| corporations: AT&T/Warner, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, Sony, and
| ViacomCBS. As control of almost all communication is centralized
| under the control of entities ultimately controlled by
| billionaire heirs, the natural reaction of people will be to
| struggle over what communications comes out of these channels.
|
| The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was
| in the early 1970s in the US. All the wealth has gone to the
| heirs and a handful of people mostly born into the white upper
| middle class. Channels of communication are shut down. The
| monopolies I mentioned shut down Usenet and communication became
| centralized by them and companies like Facebook.
|
| Everyone I have heard whining about the end of the Enlightenment
| recently is part of this to the manor born type, as well as their
| bought off stalking horses in relevant communities.
|
| What is happening is a very natural result of what has been
| happening for decades. As anti-trust laws are not enforced, as
| the Fairness Doctrine goes away and our media channels
| consistently advocate oppression of nationalities alongside a
| newly militarized police, we don't hear of the monopolization of
| communication or proletarianization and impoverishment of the
| population or militarization of the police, the end of the
| Fairness doctrine - we hear the newly centralized lines of
| communication can't spew out their propaganda without complaint.
| maCDzP wrote:
| >I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively
| conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate
| amount of the trouble in the world
|
| I agree with this statement. But I would also agree with the
| opposite: Aggressively independent-minded are also responsible
| for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world.
|
| Maybe, they are even more disproportionaterly responsible since
| they are a really small group?
|
| My 5 cents.
| mcguire wrote:
| Imagine a world where people weren't divided into the "us-es" and
| the "them-s". Particularly by someone who is wealthy and
| powerful. And most particularly when the "them-s" are clearly
| intended to be untermensch.
|
| For one thing, I don't know how many people Graham has interacted
| with over the years; probably a great deal more than I have given
| that I'm quite shy as well as a confirmed misanthrope. However, I
| do know a fair number of people and _exactly none_ of them fit
| neatly into "aggressively/passively conventional/independent".
| (For one, I had an uncle that was a staunch Baptist and had been
| the sheriff of De Baca county, NM, who conspiratorially confided
| that he liked a glass of red wine of an evening.) _Everyone_ is
| conventional about somethings and independent about others, and
| everyone is sometimes aggressive and sometimes passive about
| those things.
|
| "[T]he aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the
| tattletales." Yes, of course they are. I note that "whistle-
| blower" is a synonym of "tattletale".
|
| "[T]he passively conventional-minded, are the sheep." Yes,
| naturally, sheep. (https://xkcd.com/1013/) And is it just me or
| is really hard to tell the "passively conventional-minded" from
| the "passively independent-minded"?
|
| "[T]he passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones." Those
| kooky cloud-cuckoo-land dwellers. Just try not to be on the side
| of the road while they're driving, 'cause they're probably not
| paying attention.
|
| "[T]he aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones."
| Yes, of course. "Eppur si muove." Or possibly "Give me all of the
| cash in the drawer or I'll shoot you in the face." (Remember,
| there are all kinds of rules.)
|
| "And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his
| students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did
| at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-
| minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded
| then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought
| against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest
| defenders."
|
| Indeed. Remember, "conventional" is bad, "independent" is good,
| and bad is conventional while good is independent. There were
| never, _ever_ , any independent minded defenders of slavery.
| (Louis Agassiz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz) -
| well, technically he opposed slavery, because it led to mixing
| the races; Nikola Tesla
| (https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/remembering-nikol...)
| - well, ok, a little late for slavery. Let's just say that you
| probably shouldn't investigate your heroes too thoroughly.)
| Anyway, I'm vaguely surprised Graham never worked "muggle" into
| this essay. Maybe he used another word. Normie? Mundane?
|
| "For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely
| independent-minded, but aggressively so." Yes. Travis Kalanick.
| Elizabeth Holmes. Adam Neumann. Doug Evans. Jeffrey Skilling.
| Martin Shkreli. Bernard L. Madoff. Arthur Sackler. All
| aggressively independent-minded, I assure you. But didn't Peter
| Thiel found Palantir?
|
| So what are these "bad ideas" whose discussion he's worried about
| banning? The great heros of the Confederacy? President Trump's
| genius? The moral and physical weakness of women?
|
| Now, I realize that disagreeing with The Paul Graham goes
| strongly against the conventional wisdom here on Hacker News.
| Naturally, one can only be a rebel if one wears the right
| uniform. Perhaps I'm not being independent-minded in the right
| way. But here's a prediction for you: "aggressively conventional-
| minded" is going to replace "virtue signaling" as the favorite
| dismissal of ideas that the independent-minded don't want to
| consider. And "independent-minded" will be the new "politically
| incorrect"; a way to blunt criticism of repugnant words and
| actions.
|
| (Did he really say that professors of engineering were
| independent-minded? Does he know any? I mean, real engineers, not
| 27-year-old senior software engineers. I mean, that's way outside
| my experience.)
| phkahler wrote:
| I feel like PG has neglected the literature with this one. The
| two axis are probably aligned with exisiting traits from the
| field of psychology (agreeableness seems relevant for starters).
| It's nice that he considered all this, but I think he did so in
| his own bubble.
|
| There can be benefits from reinventing things in your own way,
| but to completely overlook the existing work can be a mistake
| too. There is so much more out there on this stuff than analogies
| from junior high.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Conventional/independent mind axis is literally Openness of Big
| Five model. People really should study Big Five. I agree PG is
| reinventing the wheel.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| This is one of PG's weaker essays. He attempts to glide between
| psychology, history, politics, and philosophy without proper
| evidence or background in those areas. His construct is somewhat
| interesting on the surface but is only supported by his own
| feelings and his own anecdata, he doesn't point to anything
| relevant or similar written by actual experts.
| dhimes wrote:
| The essay is very good starting with this paragraph:
|
| _You 'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what
| a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There
| are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad"
| ideas._
|
| Everything above that is just setting up the rest.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Yeah but unless there's someone who is a domain expert, deeply
| affiliated with experts from other domains, willing to drop
| into HN to give free advice... gurus are what you get.
|
| As popular as HN is, there are surprisingly few people willing
| to do this.
| minikites wrote:
| Why would they even try on HN, a site that famously looks
| down on any subject that isn't STEM or closely adjacent?
| tmaly wrote:
| > When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always
| say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be
| a different, incompatible greater good each time
|
| I think its hard to imagine people on the other side of your
| positions and world view. If your team is winning, you do not
| stop to think of those on the opposite side of the coin. But
| circumstances change, you could be on that opposite side of the
| coin someday.
|
| > Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist,
| because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them
| in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer
| upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we
| get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that
| seems at all bannable ends up being banned.
|
| Free expression of ideas or something else filtered by those that
| own the platforms. Is that the choice we have?
| raverbashing wrote:
| At the notes, there is something that caught my attention:
|
| > Many professors are independent-minded -- especially in math,
| the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to
| succeed.
|
| And I disagree with it. You don't have to be independent-minded
| (from the group) to be "average" successful. Quite the opposite.
|
| Follow the lead, follow the procedures, always take the skeptical
| side and you'll just coast through it. A lot of people succeed
| doing exactly that.
|
| Research? Take the latest papers in an area, try a similar
| research (nothing too out of the consensus) and write a grant
| request for it.
|
| The hard nonconformists, those will have a hard time. And the sad
| part is that most of them won't be nonconformists "for good
| reasons" but rather they will be most likely quacks. And I say
| the percentage is high exactly because academia does not favor
| anything out of the beaten path and independent thought is
| shunned.
| croissants wrote:
| > You don't have to be independent-minded (from the group) to
| be "average" successful. Quite the opposite.
|
| If this is true, then what exactly separates successful faculty
| from unsuccessful faculty? There are lots of graduate students
| who want to be faculty, but only a small percentage do. What do
| you think the distinguishing factor is if not some kind of new
| ideas?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Conformist or not, resiliency and building relationships
| still play a part.
|
| Given faculty positions are (very) limited, it seems
| resiliency might be the most important factor.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| With the trajectory of this and the previous one, it honestly
| feels like we're only a handful of steps from praising the
| Intellectual Dark Web(tm) and saying that Charles Murray was
| misunderstood.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| People hate to think.
|
| It's painful.
|
| Passivity rules the world and the weak willed will always follow.
|
| It's is the deplorables that can save us from ourselves.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| It's scary to think. Truth is actually scary. Stories are way
| better for most people
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Isn't it funny how things like this are never written by the
| boring types? It's always those wild, maverick, enlightened types
| seeking to describe themselves and, along the way, describe
| others, but mostly to describe themselves in flattering terms,
| with just a light veneer of modesty. (The self-assessed MBTI
| INTJs are just _fantastically_ entertaining at this.)
|
| "All great ideas come from us," beams the self-described
| aggressively-independent-minded, "and if we aren't allowed to
| champion horrible ideas, why, the world just won't be able to get
| on without us."
|
| There are so many coarse assertions in this argument, without any
| solid foundations or evidence or even thoughtful observation.
| Right from the first sentence:
|
| > _One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the
| degree and aggressiveness of their conformism._
|
| "Arbitrary" ways. It's spelled "arbitrary". There are a plethora
| of categorical little boxes that people can try to fit other
| people into, and some of those have value sometimes, but they
| often also cause people to see other people as _only_ their
| boxes. [1]
|
| > _Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system..._
|
| Imagine never having seen /r/PoliticalCompassMemes [2]. As gross
| as it is, this kind of quadrant-categorization isn't new.
|
| > _There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far
| more conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So
| the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and the
| aggressively independent-minded the smallest._
|
| This is a setup for seeking minority status for free-thinkers.
| The problem with this is that "free" thought -- or "aggressively
| independent-minded" in PG parlance -- has no defined,
| characteristic ideas, by definition. A simple thought experiment
| here is the current political divide in the US. Are Trump voters
| the "aggressively independent-minded"? Are Democrats?
| Progressives? None of the above? If the definition of
| "aggressively independent-minded" contracts to, "me and a few
| people I like", then it's meaningless. _Everyone_ with a
| strongly-held political belief in the US right now sees
| themselves as belonging to the rebel outgroup.
|
| > _Since one 's quadrant depends more on one's personality than
| the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same
| quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society._
|
| This had to be the most astoundingly bad line in the whole essay.
| It rests upon a supernatural notion of some sense of "self" that
| is somehow independent of time and place; that the powerful
| formative forces of culture and society, especially throughout
| early childhood, would somehow not transform each and every one
| of us into utterly different people. There is no more polite way
| to say this than that that notion is, as far as I know, entirely
| unfounded in the field of human development.
|
| > _Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote..._
|
| Okay, do yourself a favor, and read Joseph Yannielli's really
| excellent article, hosted on Princeton's site, on Princeton's
| role in opposing abolition:
| https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-abolitio...
|
| It's long, and it's historical, and it's forthright, and it's
| introspective. It also includes many quotes from educated
| opponents to abolition that, if you squint just a little bit,
| sound suspiciously similar to a lot of the "unacceptable" ideas
| that so many people right now are crying that they're no longer
| supposed to talk about outside the komfortable konfines of their
| klans.
|
| Try and keep that Princeton article in mind, full and fresh, and
| then read this next part from Graham:
|
| > _For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively
| conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason,
| universities were the safest places to be._
|
| Princeton themselves disagrees. At length.
|
| This essay does not add to or resolve today's cultural conflicts
| in any amount. When the last thing you have left for an idea is
| that it's special because you're special and it's your idea, then
| it's time to consider the possibility that other people might
| have some pretty strong arguments against it.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA&feature=youtu.be...,
| the whole video is good though.
|
| [2]:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Po...,
| for the fortunately unaware.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Seems to me like you made your mind up before even reading it.
|
| > "Arbitrary" ways. It's spelled "arbitrary". There are a
| plethora of categorical little boxes that people can try to fit
| other people into, and some of those have value sometimes, but
| they often also cause people to see other people as only their
| boxes.
|
| I'm sure PG would agree with your last sentence. But your point
| is irrelevant here.
|
| > Imagine never having seen /r/PoliticalCompassMemes [2]. As
| gross as it is, this kind of quadrant-categorization isn't new.
|
| Imagine assuming someone has never seen something just because
| they use an appropriate example to introduce a reader to a
| concept.
|
| Also I don't see what's gross about the political compass.
|
| > This is a setup for seeking minority status for free-
| thinkers. The problem with this is that "free" thought -- or
| "aggressively independent-minded" in PG parlance -- has no
| defined, characteristic ideas, by definition. A simple thought
| experiment here is the current political divide in the US. Are
| Trump voters the "aggressively independent-minded"? Are
| Democrats? Progressives? None of the above? If the definition
| of "aggressively independent-minded" contracts to, "me and a
| few people I like", then it's meaningless. Everyone with a
| strongly-held political belief in the US right now sees
| themselves as belonging to the rebel outgroup.
|
| Whoever is loudly saying something that is unpopular is part of
| the "aggressively independent-minded" group. I think that
| should be pretty easy to understand. Note it does not mean they
| are right.
|
| > This had to be the most astoundingly bad line in the whole
| essay. It rests upon a supernatural notion of some sense of
| "self" that is somehow independent of time and place; that the
| powerful formative forces of culture and society, especially
| throughout early childhood, would somehow not transform each
| and every one of us into utterly different people. There is no
| more polite way to say this than that that notion is, as far as
| I know, entirely unfounded in the field of human development.
|
| Fair point, but I think one can assume that the probability of
| a person changing from one group to the other is symmetric, so
| in the end you'd get a similar distribution across the
| population regardless of where the individuals end up. The
| point he ultimately makes is still valid, most of them would
| have supported slavery.
|
| > Okay, do yourself a favor, and read Joseph Yannielli's really
| excellent article, hosted on Princeton's site, on Princeton's
| role in opposing abolition:
| https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-
| abolitio....
|
| > It's long, and it's historical, and it's forthright, and it's
| introspective. It also includes many quotes from educated
| opponents to abolition that, if you squint just a little bit,
| sound suspiciously similar to a lot of the "unacceptable" ideas
| that so many people right now are crying that they're no longer
| supposed to talk about outside the komfortable konfines of
| their klans.
|
| The main similarity to today I spotted was young students being
| violent towards people with opposing views.
|
| > Princeton themselves disagrees. At length.
|
| One counterexample does not disprove the point. Do you really
| disagree with the idea that independent thinkers tend to go to
| university?
|
| > This essay does not add to or resolve today's cultural
| conflicts in any amount.
|
| I disagree and think it does add something.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| > _Whoever is loudly saying something that is unpopular is
| part of the "aggressively independent-minded" group._
|
| Okay then.
|
| I hereby loudly proclaim that, in the interests of the health
| and well-being of society at large, we _must_ establish
| strong governmental oversight of online forums and
| communications, and immediately ban anything judged to be
| disinformation.
|
| You are, as you note, free to disagree with me. But you must
| now respect my idea, and by extension me, because now I too
| am "aggressively independent-minded", and without people like
| me, the world would not have any great new ideas.
|
| Furthermore, according to the larger point of PG's essay and
| your defense of it, you must not in any way interfere with my
| attempts to spread this message far and wide and enshrine it
| legislatively. If you do, you'll be showing yourself to be
| one of the conventional-minded people, standing in the way of
| my great idea and true progress for society, and the world
| certainly does not need more of those.
| jl2718 wrote:
| One essay written by one graduate on a contentious contemporary
| issue and the whole place is evil. The tone of the essay
| indicates it was a rhetorical exercise in dissent from a
| popular opinion. The modern judgement that such a thing is now
| abhorrent, is exactly the point.
|
| I think perhaps this criticism suffers from a lack of
| imagination. People that cannot understand another person's
| ideas are quick to label them evil.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| > _One essay written by one graduate..._
|
| This "one essay" is part of a larger, official project:
| https://slavery.princeton.edu/about/overview
|
| The author's bio reads:
|
| > _Joseph Yannielli received his PhD from Yale and was the
| Perkins Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Humanities
| Council. He is an expert on the history of slavery and
| abolition, with a special focus on America, West Africa, and
| the wider world during the nineteenth century. His other
| areas of interest include political and social movements,
| missionaries and religion, capitalism and globalization, and
| the United States in the world. At present, he is completing
| a book about the Mendi Mission and the role of Africa in the
| American abolition of slavery. He is the founding manager and
| lead developer of the Princeton & Slavery Project website and
| several other digital history projects._
|
| There are four other individuals involved at an
| organizational level for this project, and over 50 other
| students, advisors, and organizations involved in creating
| it.
|
| It is absolutely an official statement from the institution
| of Princeton University.
|
| But, please, continue to offhandedly dismiss things you don't
| like as lacking imagination and assume that other people
| simply lack the comprehension to understand the grand ideas
| in this essay. It's just such a compelling position to put
| yourself into, not having to defend bad ideas at all, because
| hey, only stupid people could think they'd be bad.
| mkloop wrote:
| Excellent essay. I've been asking similar questions myself in the
| past couple of months, but in terms of European history.
|
| If I see a conformist activist, the first thing I ask myself: In
| a real crisis, would this person be the next Oskar Schindler?
|
| The answer is almost always "no".
|
| If I see an aggressive activist, the question is: Would this
| person still be aggressive during an actual crisis.
|
| In some cases, the answer is "yes". But in the majority of cases
| I doubt it and think they would just switch sides.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Have you been watching what's happening in Portland? Where on
| the spectrum do you put those folks?
| TomMckenny wrote:
| [edit]
|
| I had a lengthy more thoughtful post here but it seems I had
| mistaken a pronouncement for a discussion. The near instant
| voting response made me realize that absurdity, especially in
| light of the fact that I am responding to the second of two posts
| by the site's governance where the college professors are singled
| out as a threat to freedom even as unmarked vans and secretive
| police round up people in Portland and other cities.
|
| I shall leave it to persons here devoted to maximizing short term
| profits from new products to explain how to "protect" society
| from intellectuals and liberalism.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Quick, someone make a political compass meme out of this!
| frasermince wrote:
| While I think there might be a grain of truth here I really
| disagree with how he states it. He seems to be really placing
| higher value on the isolated genius who does great things despite
| society being against him. This seems to be based on a lot of
| pretension and dismisses people who do not think like him.
|
| With how he defines conformity and nonconformity one could argue
| that the flatearther surrounded by non flatearthers could be a
| nonconformist. I would argue it's not conformity or lack there of
| that leads to effectiveness, but instead an indifference to
| conforming leading to a pursuit of the truth regardless of if it
| is mainstream or not. So I would say his quadrant system does not
| define the independent minded person he talks about later in the
| article.
|
| I think he is in the right ballpark when it comes to pointing to
| the clear eyed visionary who is willing to look past the orthodox
| of those around them. But I think his formulation of such an idea
| is reductionistic. People I would view as conformist have their
| own worldviews and often pride themselves as nonconformists.
| Worldviews are a complicated thing and if we write off the
| majority of people as "sheep" or just part of the problem we
| become part of a contempt culture that can be really toxic.
| GavinB wrote:
| Yes, flat-earthers would probably count as non-conformist. I
| think the point is that in order to have Galileo, you have to
| tolerate flat-earthers as well.
|
| I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable,
| and would add that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is
| also not accurate or productive. They might be making stupid
| decisions, but they're not stupid people.
| bittercynic wrote:
| I disagree, and would count flat-earthers as highly
| conformist - it's just that they're conforming to an
| unconventional view.
| solmans wrote:
| To view the majority of human beings as livestock,
| metaphorically or not, really shows the kind of person he is.
| Everyone is for the most part unique and will have bouts of
| aggressive independent mindedness. No one is constantly
| questioning the system or breaking rules, Paul would like to
| think that's what he does but in reality he is more of a
| conformist than he thinks and if he saw himself this way he
| would probably not use the term 'sheep' to describe it.
| samuelbeniamin wrote:
| This article is distasteful with tiny number of facts and a lot
| of opinions. After all, there is a fact, that he ranked human
| beings into levels, some higher than the others, some are trouble
| makers and others are the angles with no fault to be found in
| them, some are "sheep" and others just "naughty". I do strongly
| believe that societies are in need for all types of people, some
| are conventional and some are unorthodox.
| [deleted]
| zests wrote:
| Let's pretend that such a projection exists and we can assign
| people to points on the cartesian plane. This begs the question,
| how do the points change over time?
|
| Mathematically speaking, we can add to our model by assuming
| there is some notion of a flow or a vector field on the quadrant
| that pulls individual people/points in directions. There are also
| people moving in their own directions either due to inherit
| personal characteristics or perhaps life events impacting them.
|
| How do we model this field? We could start by creating a bunch of
| "attractors" or points on the plane that people are attracted to.
| Think of an attractor like a very massive body and the
| gravitational pull it has on other bodies. If these attractors do
| exist, where are they on the compass?
|
| Some attractors might be "abstract ideals" that naturally draw
| people to each part of the quadrant but I'd say the biggest
| attractor is in fact other people. Human beings have tribal
| tendencies and so if/when a lot of people cluster on the compass
| it pulls even more people in. With our gravity analogy this is
| like a massive star absorbing all of the mass surrounding it.
|
| Some people have anti-conformist tendencies and don't like to
| belong to large groups of like minded people. Eventually large
| pockets of people become increasingly unstable and people
| radically disassociate with the big attractor. This is like a
| supernova radically expelling mass in all directions.
|
| I prefer the gravity analogy because it avoids moralizing
| specific "locations" on the compass. A gravitational well can
| occur anywhere and we can discuss them abstractly. I think what
| PG is saying is that it is not a good idea to let yourself be
| pulled in to the well. Just look at the wells that have occurred
| in the past. All of these statements can be made with respect to
| an abstract political context. Now apply them to the current
| context.
|
| Does this post make any sense or is it just the ravings of a mad
| lunatic? Do we believe these things because they are true or do
| we believe them because we agree with their conclusion? Do we
| disagree because we disagree with the conclusion?
|
| Is it really possible to introspect and judge the validity of our
| own conclusions? If anyone can answer this questions (preferably
| by reference to a third party source) I'd be appreciative.
| Kednicma wrote:
| Honestly, it's all too easy to read PG's "social" and
| "individual" as code words for "socially-planned markets" and
| "unregulated free markets", making his left-right axis actually
| the left-right axis of the political compass. And from there,
| it's easy enough to start unmasking the entire essay as a
| thinly-veiled apology for why neoliberalism, neoconservatism,
| and other upper-right ideologies on the standard political
| compass are, in fact, the Good Ideologies that are Better than
| everybody else's.
|
| Edit: Let's complete the analogy. In my framing, PG is calling
| lower-lefties "sheep", upper-lefties "tattletales", and lower-
| righties "dreamers". This clearly places PG in the upper right
| with bootlickers. From this framing, PG looks at the left as
| weak and enslaved to a state, with the "sheep" being unable to
| consider anything beyond what the state tells them and the
| "tattletales" enforcing the rules of the state. If only the
| "dreamers" could stop being so namby-pamby and be more
| "aggressive", then we could have a more "individual" state.
|
| PG gives zero examples when he says:
|
| > In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the
| customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened.
|
| Oh? _Which_ free inquiries, PG? Please, show us; what has poor
| PG been unable to talk about because of the mean old Twitter
| mob? To hear millionaires whine of not being able to simply get
| their way, you 'd think that they're in danger of being shipped
| to the gulag. In fact, though, PG is hilariously wealthy and
| can publish his words through a variety of platforms; in
| addition, he's never had those platforms taken away from him
| because of a line of inquiry that he's pursued. Can he show
| otherwise, or is he just being a whiner?
| anoncoward121 wrote:
| Perhaps he speaks on behalf of others, precisely because he
| is in the enviable position of still being able to speak out.
|
| If you work at Google and depend on your salary, you cannot
| say these things. Which is a pity, because "left" and "right"
| agree on a lot of things like state brutality. But if the
| "left" monopolizes that topic and vilifies others because of
| a lack of total obedience, working together is impossible.
| Kednicma wrote:
| Sounds like bullshit. I've worked at Google, and I spoke up
| loudly while I was there. I've spoken up while at other
| employers, too. We can't simply let ourselves be muzzled by
| corporate accusations of thoughtcrime.
|
| When we say the slogan, "it is hard to get somebody to
| realize something when their salary depends on it," we are
| talking about _cognitive_ impediments to understanding. We
| aren 't talking about the _lying_ that corporate
| spokespeople carry out.
|
| Which far-right state agrees with the idea of less state
| brutality? Could you name one? I'm only able to think of
| Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong
| Kong, Bhutan, and Thailand, and they all have quite a bit
| of state-sponsored brutality, in their own different ways.
| t_serpico wrote:
| that was a completely pointless analogy
| mywittyname wrote:
| > In the past, the way the independent-minded protected
| themselves was to congregate in a handful of places
|
| > That may not work this time though,
|
| Ah yes, the classic, "things used to be so much better" argument.
| Which yeah, if you ignore things like McCarthyism then it
| probably seems that way. I'm curious how many black, female
| professor feel that they would have faced less intolerance in
| American universities before the intolerance wave of the 1980s.
|
| I personally see tolerance as a trade-off in a lot of scenarios.
| Tolerating discrimination necessarily infringes on the freedoms
| and well-being of the victims. And tolerating anti-discrimination
| infringes on the freedoms of the aggressors. Both groups cannot
| be equally free in such a matter, because the freedom of one is
| at the expense of another.
| anonmidniteshpr wrote:
| I don't know what @pg means by aggressive or passive. In what
| respects? Maybe I don't understand what passive or rules-oriented
| are like because I live in a VW that has disco bar lights, a
| train horn, and I do basically whatever, wherever I want.
|
| _Rules are for fools._
| analbumcover wrote:
| > All successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded,
| but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies
| prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the
| conventional-minded at bay.
|
| This seems very conventional-minded, to use Graham's terminology.
| Thinking that technological innovation is the hallmark of a
| prosperous society is conventional thinking, at least in Western
| Society. As is espousal of capitalism, democracy, etc.
|
| I don't see aggressive independent-mindedness except in
| criminals, dissidents, and radicals. He repeatedly asserts that
| tech CEOs are independent-minded mavericks, but I just don't see
| any evidence of that.
| easymovet wrote:
| Sounds like you need an invite to Galt's Gulch
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Abundantly clear from his Twitter that like so many others that
| are used to having an unassailable platform of privilege to
| express themselves, PG has recognized that normal people now have
| a voice to push back and criticize opinions he has, and so he's
| joined those expressing "concern" about this.
|
| Instead of expressing in concrete terms his views to make them
| available for criticism, he talks about the dangers of "cancel
| culture" instead, presumably because he knows his views are now
| beyond community norms and they'd get him cancelled.
|
| This essay is a scaffolding effort to rebrand people that would
| seek to express intolerant opinions as "independent minded" and
| "free inqueryiers" so that they can escape criticism.
|
| Nah sorry not gonna work.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> an unassailable platform of privilege to express themselves_
|
| Anyone can start a website and post essays on it. If many more
| people read PG's essays than other people's, that's because he
| has done things that attract a wider audience.
| oisdk wrote:
| "Here's a taxonomy of people that I just made up. There are four
| types of people, classified by superficial characteristics.
| Actually, this classification is an extremely strong indicator
| for behaviour, certainly stronger than other indicators. How do I
| know this? I am very smart and I say so.
|
| Based on this fact, I notice that the social-justicy types of
| today bear some superficial and extremely tenuous resemblance to
| the pro-slavery types of yesterday. Really makes you think."
|
| I'm sorry but this comes across as total nonsense to me. Any
| "there are x types of people" stuff always reads as astrology for
| people with STEM degrees, especially when it's as ill-supported
| as the types given in this article.
|
| Also the article is pretty ahistorical: being "pro-slavery" was
| absolutely not the unanimous consensus that we like to pretend it
| was today. There was widespread opposition to slavery: many
| viewed it as an obvious moral evil. France banned slavery in
| 1315, for goodness' sake. People _knew_ it was wrong.
|
| In actual fact, the type of people arguing against abolition were
| people in a much more similar position to Graham: the Economist
| famously urged delay with regards to abolition, fearing what
| freed slaves might get up to. Graham's notion that "actually, I'm
| much more like the abolitionists than slaveowners because we're
| both such iconoclasts" is extremely weak and, on its face, a
| little ridiculous.
|
| (also: does Graham really think he's going against the grain with
| this stuff? Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and
| censorship is about as mainstream a position as there is. It
| would be hard to pick a more "conventionally-minded" opinion than
| "I think free speech is good")
| motorcycleman9 wrote:
| I think the exercise of considering which historical atrocities
| you would passively comply with is a good exercise for
| understanding the banality of evil. PG did little to argue his
| moral superiority from this perspective, rather highlighted how
| different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue
| (or lack thereof) of the norm itself. The many anti-slavery
| individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds
| of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed
| tides.
|
| You point out that he did have an axe to grind regarding cancel
| culture, and highlight that it's not particularly heroic. But
| in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-
| cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his
| point clearer.
|
| He could have made the same point regarding conformity by
| citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to. I'd be
| willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology
| studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to
| moral conformity. Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much
| of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits
| that predict future behavior nowadays.
| oisdk wrote:
| > different people conform to the norm, regardless of the
| virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself.
|
| But this is exactly what I'm disagreeing with: there was
| widespread and popular opposition to slavery from its
| invention. To act like "everyone was doing it, everyone
| thought it was ok" is absolutely just not true.
|
| The people in favour of slavery were largely the wealthy,
| powerful minority who _benefited_ from slavery.
|
| > The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely
| did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and
| material conditions changed tides.
|
| This is such a strange statement. "anti-slavery individuals
| did nothing"? Who do you think achieved abolition?! You seem
| to think that abolition was some passive force which happened
| as a result of "changing tides": I, on the other hand, seem
| to remember that there was a war fought about it (in the US
| at least).
|
| Furthermore, slavery didn't begin and end in the united
| states: abolition was achieved in many other places before it
| go to the US, in fact the US was something of a holdout for
| slavery in the west. There were countless slave rebellions,
| some quite successful, and political action absolutely
| achieved progress towards abolition in many places around the
| world.
|
| > But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the
| anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making
| his point clearer.
|
| The "anti-cancel-culture" crowd, by my estimation, makes up
| the vast majority of positions of power in the US. For god's
| sake the _president_ routinely decries cancel culture and a
| large part of his appeal is the fact that he 's "un-PC".
|
| > He could have made the same point regarding conformity by
| citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to
|
| The Stanford prison experiment was a complete fabrication and
| research fraud. (honestly: you should look up modern
| information on it. I had kind of thought it was common
| knowledge that it was bunk, but I suppose it did have a large
| cultural impact)
|
| > I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality
| psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality
| traits to moral conformity.
|
| I don't know, but my point is that Graham has clearly picked
| superficial personality traits that flatter him by
| associating his idea of himself with his idea of
| abolitionists. Regardless of whether the idea of "personality
| types" is valid or not, it's clear that what Graham is doing
| here isn't.
|
| > Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the
| opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that
| predict future behavior nowadays.
|
| Again, I would completely disagree. I don't know what the
| psychological consensus is, but from laypeople it seems clear
| that "personality traits are important" is an extremely
| mainstream view.
| motorcycleman9 wrote:
| To clarify my point on the slavery example-
|
| Slavery was present for hundreds or thousands of years. It
| was also obviously morally wrong for the entirety of it's
| existence. It's decline in the western world was relatively
| quick compared to the duration of it's existence. This
| decline came about as the western world became rich enough
| that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the
| inconvenience of replacing their labor. This change of
| material conditions gave enough cultural leeway for passive
| conformists to embrace legislative change.
|
| It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a
| complete fraud. Even with it's flaws it suggests that
| people are much much more likely to engage in immoral
| behavior when an authority figure endorses it. Historical
| atrocities confirm this.
|
| I don't think there's a productive way to argue about the
| cancel culture point. Data supporting which side is
| "winning" the cancel culture war is too cherry-pickable.
| The only ground I can stand on is that people such as
| Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.
|
| I do not think that the personality traits discussed are
| superficial. Other posters have provided more evidence,
| especially regarding openness and conscientiousness, that I
| speculated on earlier. I do not think that the purpose of
| PG's essay is to flatter himself.
| oisdk wrote:
| > This decline came about as the western world became
| rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was
| worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor.
|
| This is just not true, and certainly not the view of most
| historians. This is an important claim, and you have not
| backed it up with evidence.
|
| > It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment
| is a complete fraud.
|
| I'm sorry, but this is quite a strange statement to me.
| Let me put it this way: if I cited the Stanford prison
| experiment in a university paper, the paper would be
| failed. The experiment is widely criticised, outright
| fraud has been found in a number of cases, and its
| results have not been replicated.
|
| > The only ground I can stand on is that people such as
| Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.
|
| Again, Stephen Pinker is an extremely powerful
| individual. He's a multi-millionaire, a Harvard
| professor, I don't think I could come up with a better
| example of someone with a large platform. If he's been
| "cancelled" then he's an example of how insignificant and
| ineffectual "cancel culture" really is.
|
| (of course people looking into his association with
| Jeffrey Epstein is quite another thing, I certainly don't
| think that's a "cancelling")
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship
| is about as mainstream a position as there is
|
| Not at all. I am 40. My father and one of my brothers share
| that position with me, but every single one of my friends and
| acquaintances from universities and workplaces, in the USA and
| in the European country in which I grew up, if they make their
| position clear on social media, it is in line with the
| progressive left and thus implicitly at least supportive of
| "cancel culture" and censorship.
| indymike wrote:
| Participation in cancel culture and censorship is becoming
| mainstream. Part of what makes it work is that participation
| isn't acknowledged, especially by those federating together
| to cancel.
| oisdk wrote:
| > it is in line with the progressive left and thus implicitly
| at least supportive of "cancel culture" and censorship.
|
| It's very easy to say everyone is in favour of cancel culture
| if you say that _any_ support of the "progressive left"
| amounts to support for cancel culture.
| garbagetime wrote:
| > It would be hard to pick a more "conventionally-minded"
| opinion than "I think free speech is good"
|
| It's important to make the distinction between people who feel
| like they're in favour of freedom of speech, and people who are
| actually in favour of freedom of speech. It often seems to me
| that Americans belong to the former group but not the latter.
| I'll link a funny poll (from a long time ago, but I'd love to
| see a new one) where 96% of respondents said they were in
| favour of freedom of speech, but only 40% said they were in
| favour of radicals being allowed to hold meetings and express
| their views.
|
| https://news.gallup.com/vault/206465/gallup-vault-tolerance-...
| oisdk wrote:
| > It's important to make the distinction between people who
| feel like they're in favour of freedom of speech, and people
| who are actually in favour of freedom of speech.
|
| Exactly. I think it's clear which group Graham falls into.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Yes: the former.
|
| All of his recent screeds basically boil down to: I want
| free speech for the rich like me, and people who don't like
| that attitude should shut up because that's Cancel Culture
| and therefore bad.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Also, "here is a taxonomy I made up and coincidentally I just
| happen to be in the category that is the best. "
| DavidVoid wrote:
| It certainly comes across a bit like Peterson's "everything is
| either order or chaos and chaos is bad," but for tech people
| who claim to be independent thinkers while all reciting the
| same old anti-regulation ideas.
|
| I especially find PG's claim that "the people who run Silicon
| Valley are almost all independent-minded" to be questionable.
| [deleted]
| josefrichter wrote:
| The HN algorithm automatically puts everything from
| paulgraham.com to #1 :-)
| notacoward wrote:
| Worth noting that the "aggressively non-conformist" quadrant
| includes not just inventors and leaders but also criminals and
| trolls. For some reason the essay downplays that.
|
| Also, is it just me, or does it seem like most of pg's recent
| essays are attempts to "poison the well" against anyone who might
| try to hold him and his peers accountable for their contributions
| to the sorry state of our society? He doesn't _directly_ attack
| them, but he seems to be coming at a general "social pressure is
| bad" theme from multiple directions lately.
| User23 wrote:
| I know it's taboo to discuss votes here, so please interpret
| this generally and not as a cute attempt at recursive self-
| reference. I think it's actually germane and intellectually
| interesting in this specific limited context.
|
| Aggressively non-comformist comments are the most reliable way
| to get downvotes on HN, but sometimes they result in massive
| upvotes.
|
| Passively conformist comments are the most reliable way to get
| little to no votes whatsoever on HN.
|
| Aggressively conformist comments are the most reliable way to
| get moderate upvotes on HN.
|
| Passively non-conformist comments virtually don't exist on HN.
|
| Supposing these observations are accurate, it's interesting to
| consider why they might be so.
| designium wrote:
| I think you can apply his quadrant to usage of mask during
| Covid and the result speaks for themselves:
|
| Let's play this out for mask wearing:
|
| Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks
|
| Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks
|
| Bottom Right: People who occasionally use masks, or
| alternatives, bandanas, etc.
|
| Top Right: People who don't want to use masks because of
| freedom.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Go into a conservative areas the the top quadrants flip.
| Where the Top Left are the People who don't wear masks accost
| others for doing so and the top right are those wearing the
| mask in spite of the harassment.
|
| Being an enforcer or a rule breaker is very much dependent
| upon what the rules are.
| war1025 wrote:
| > Being an enforcer or a rule breaker is very much
| dependent upon what the rules are.
|
| This gets left out of so many conversations, and is a very
| important point.
|
| The essay touches on it a little with the slavery bit, but
| I feel like the rest of the essay downplays it.
| defen wrote:
| That seemed like the whole point of the essay to me and
| not a side note. His claim is that rule-orientation and
| assertiveness are present already in childhood (which I
| think is true), and that those are what determine
| people's behavior toward rules, not the specifics of the
| rules themselves.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > and that those are what determine people's behavior
| toward rules, not the specifics of the rules themselves.
|
| Maybe abstract, theoretical sense. But adults already
| hold pretty concrete opinions on most rules and an
| aggressive person's obedience or defiance is dictated by
| the person's agreement. Also, humans can be opportunists
| and see enforcement or defiance as a means of grabbing or
| welding power & influence.
|
| There's ample evidence of this in action. The police
| selectively enforce laws all the time. Or the neighbor
| that calls the city to complain that you're violating
| zoning by having too many cars while they, themselves
| have an illegal fence and refuse to deal with it.
| Authoritarians by nature do not like it when the rules
| apply to them, but love enforcing them on others.
| pdonis wrote:
| I would describe mask wearing somewhat differently:
|
| Top Left: People who want to throw anyone who isn't wearing a
| mask in jail.
|
| Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks everywhere,
| including situations where it doesn't make sense to, because
| that's what the rules say.
|
| Bottom Right: People who wear masks when it makes sense to
| wear them, and don't wear masks when it makes sense not to,
| even if that isn't what the rules say (for example, not
| wearing a mask when taking a walk outdoors where you can
| easily social distance, even if the letter of the rules in
| your area say to wear a mask whenever you leave your house).
|
| Top Right: People who insist on pointing out that the rules
| on mask wearing are arbitrary and don't allow for common
| sense, even as they wear masks when common sense says you
| ought to.
| flyflyFenix wrote:
| > Top Right: People who insist on pointing out that the
| rules on mask wearing are arbitrary and don't allow for
| common sense, even as they wear masks when common sense
| says you ought to.
|
| You mean "... as they don't wear masks ..." , correct?
| Otherwise I think you are leaving out the people who reject
| masks at every opportunity.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You mean "... as they don't wear masks ..." ,
| correct?_
|
| No. Wearing masks when common sense says you ought to, in
| the current situation, is independent-minded, not
| conformist. (For example, consider: the same person would
| have been wearing a mask _before_ any guidance or rules
| were issued about it at all, since it took quite a while
| for such guidance and rules to catch up with the actual
| situation. A Bottom Left person would have been waiting
| for some guidance or rules to be issued. A Top Left
| person would have been calling out the mask wearer for
| overreacting, after all, things can 't possibly be that
| bad if no guidance or rules have been issued requiring
| people to wear masks, right?)
|
| _> I think you are leaving out the people who reject
| masks at every opportunity._
|
| Strictly speaking, yes, those could also count as Top
| Right, but I wanted to emphasize the fact that Top Right
| does not require stupidity.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| That's because social pressure is bad? I think it is generally
| agreed that court of public opinion is bad court.
| notacoward wrote:
| Do you realize that you just used an appeal to popularity in
| your argument against popularity?
|
| When (or whether) social pressure is good is a very highly
| debatable point, and in that debate it's important not to
| conflate kinds/levels of social pressure. Calling someone out
| for using the N-word is one thing. Throwing someone in jail
| for having the wrong political views is quite another. If
| you, or pg, or anyone else wants to discuss good and bad
| forms of social pressure, the intellectually honest thing to
| do would be to make a direct case, not engage in these
| pigeonholing and semantic exercises to cast others' views in
| a bad light.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| "I'm not a psychopath/sociopath, I'm aggressively non-
| conformist!"
| pnathan wrote:
| > does it seem like most of pg's recent essays are attempts to
| "poison the well" against anyone who might try to hold him and
| his peers accountable for their contributions to the sorry
| state of our society?
|
| I'm wondering what kind of wack opinion he has that he doesn't
| want to talk about, and these essays are providing cover for.
|
| I'm _extremely_ loathe to blame specific individuals for the
| state of systems.
|
| I do think that there is a broad limiting of discourse in the
| intelligensia in any particular circle. The metaidea is that
| certain approaches are the local way, don't question them;
| questioning bounces you to a different circle with its norms.
| Maybe this is just what happens, and people are noticing it
| more, but I'm skeptical.
| defen wrote:
| > I'm wondering what kind of wack opinion he has that he
| doesn't want to talk about, and these essays are providing
| cover for.
|
| This is the exact thing the essays are about, though! To use
| a question from a previous pg essay - I'm not even asking you
| to share it, just asking if it exists - do you hold any
| opinions that you believe to be true, yet you dare not share
| with anyone for fear that you would lose your job and all
| social connections if you were to reveal that you held that
| opinion?
| pnathan wrote:
| I don't _think_ so.
|
| I think there are certain research areas which are
| interesting, but research outcomes are so potentially
| misused or politically incendiary that there are no
| research done by people of good will.
|
| If you're curious what those are, that would be any root of
| an arbitrary topic that is contentious in the US culture
| wars.
| defen wrote:
| So going back to the Robert George quote from the essay -
| imagine you had been born a white male into a southern
| slave-holding family in 1750. What basis do you have for
| believing you would have been against chattel slavery? It
| seems like your only two options are "I just wouldn't
| have had an opinion on it" or "My opinions TODAY are
| uniquely correct for all time going forward". Unless you
| like to imagine future-you persecuting current-you.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| > I'm not even asking you to share it, just asking if it
| exists - do you hold any opinions that you believe to be
| true, yet you dare not share with anyone for fear that you
| would lose your job and all social connections if you were
| to reveal that you held that opinion?
|
| This just seems like a trick question to me. If you say
| yes, then you agree with him; if you say no, you admit
| you're just a sheep with no independent thoughts.
|
| The idea of a lone free thinker who's come up with a
| forbidden truth also seems silly. The stuff people are
| getting "cancelled" for are not independent unique
| thoughts; they're stuff a huge group agrees with, including
| the current US president and ruling party. You also won't
| get shunned by all of your social connections for
| expressing it, you'll retreat back to the same group of
| people that reinforced those opinions to the status of
| "truth" in the first place, to reassure each other about
| how persecuted you all are.
| defen wrote:
| It's not meant to be a trick question - more of a prompt
| that attempts to trigger someone to have one of the
| following thoughts "maybe I should be more charitable
| towards people who have unorthodox ideas, and should
| encourage other people to be charitable" OR "maybe I'm
| living in Plato's cave". I'm not trying to get anyone to
| agree to any particular heresy. Just to acknowledge the
| fact that every single thing that is taken for granted
| today (by goodthinkers) was a heresy at some point in the
| past. It doesn't mean we can't enforce social norms about
| what is acceptable; but rather that maybe we shouldn't
| necessarily be _so_ enthusiastic about persecuting
| badthinkers. Note also that I 'm talking about speech
| here and not criminal behavior.
|
| > The stuff people are getting "cancelled" for are not
| independent unique thoughts; they're stuff a huge group
| agrees with, including the current US president and
| ruling party.
|
| First of all I don't care about "cancel culture", and I
| don't think I'm persecuted, but also if you think the
| President and the GOP are the "ruling party" of America
| then I suspect there might be an unbridgeable gap in
| understanding. That's only true if you completely ignore
| the role of schools and universities, elite/prestige
| media, NGOs, the intelligence services, the judiciary...
| ggreer wrote:
| I enjoyed this essay, but I think PG missed one aspect of the
| recent cultural changes: Even though startups are founded by the
| aggressively independent-minded, they have _insane_ amounts of
| ideological conformity.
|
| Many people with beliefs that are widespread in the US (pro-life,
| pro-gun, Republican, etc) are now "in the closet" in the Bay
| Area. Don't believe me? 10% of San Franciscans voted for Trump in
| 2016. Yet of all the people I've worked with in the past four
| years, not a single one of them has publicly admitted to doing
| so. 14 percent of Californians own guns, but again, nobody I've
| worked with is "out of the closet" as a gun owner. That is an
| amazing coincidence. Let's say I've worked closely with 50 people
| in the past 4 years (the actual number is higher). If each one
| has a 10% chance of voting for Trump, there is a 99.5% chance
| that I've worked directly with a Trump voter. It's a 99.95%
| chance that I've worked with a gun owner. Yet based on everything
| I hear at work, you'd never suspect that such people exist.
| They're like dark matter.
|
| If that's what life is like at companies founded by people who
| are aggressively independent-minded, I shudder to think how bad
| it is at companies run by the aggressively conventional-minded.
| tfehring wrote:
| SSC famously made and extended this argument a few years ago
| [0]. I like that essay's example of creationists even better,
| because it's a shockingly huge group of people - over 40% of
| Americans literally believe that the Earth was created in its
| present form in the last 10,000 years or so - and for all
| intents and purposes its overlap with the readership of PG, HN,
| SSC, or whatever is 0.
|
| [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-
| anythin...
| projektfu wrote:
| Coming from where I live, it's surprising to think of any of
| those (pro-life, pro-gun, or Trump voter) being quiet about it,
| so my feeling is that they are nonexistent in your circles, not
| quiet. But perhaps they are indeed closeted there.
|
| FWIW, I also thought that SV (though not SF) was full of
| firearm enthusiasts and prepper types, but that's probably an
| uninformed view from the other side of the country.
| soundnote wrote:
| Nah, if you look at the third picture here:
| https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1286315129953452033
| aerosmile wrote:
| The amount of negativity in the comments is astonishing (and has
| been with regards to all of his recent essays). Which is perverse
| on a couple of levels:
|
| 1. PG's essay outlines a theory that the majority of the world is
| conventionally-minded and doesn't like to discuss new ideas. The
| comments here perfectly resemble that theory. PG wins. (Edit: at
| the time of writing, the comments were exclusively negative. This
| has changed since.)
|
| 2. If you don't like his writing and his world view (the brave
| startup founder is the hero), then why come to HN? Why support
| someone's website and accelerator/fund if you think they are so
| wrong?
|
| 3. While recognizing the limitations of this framework (see
| below), let's recognize that PG became very wealthy by employing
| the brave founder thesis. There's got to be a lot of truth there.
|
| If there's anything wrong with PG's writing, it's that he doesn't
| spell out the truth for you - which is that in 99% of the cases,
| you're not the target audience. This essay is the perfect
| example. The quadrant he's romanticizing about is the smallest
| one, and of course most people are not going to see themselves
| resembling those characteristics. Many other essays have this
| quality - it's easy to walk away realizing that you're either not
| young enough, or not hard-working enough, or not smart enough, or
| not in a position to take the required risks to be the target
| audience. And that hurts, because it's true. Just don't shoot the
| messenger.
|
| For clarification, all you get from being a part of PG's target
| audience is having a certain set of traits which are good for one
| thing, but would also disqualify you from being an astronaut and
| pursuing many other desirable careers.
| jfarmer wrote:
| > 3. It's futile to fight a war of words over who is right or
| wrong - let's instead use the economic success as a proxy for
| truth. With few exceptions, you're definitionally going to be
| less economically successful than PG. Do you think he would
| have pulled it off if the brave startup founder thesis was
| fundamentally wrong?
|
| This is so...weird.
|
| All this says is his model draws no conclusions which (1) he
| acts on and (2) make it impossible for him to generate
| sufficient economic returns.
|
| What does his model have to say about becoming an expert chess
| player? A world-class author? An amazing athlete? A successful
| therapist? If there are people who are successful along those
| dimensions whose models contradict pg's, then what?
|
| Your statement is almost a tautology.
| designium wrote:
| "It's futile to fight a war of words over who is right or wrong
| - let's instead use the economic success as a proxy for truth."
|
| Even though, that's the one of the core tenets of capitalism, I
| could show you that is not always the way it seems. Think about
| big corporations located in developing world like Brazil (where
| I came from), where corruption and bribes run amok. Saying that
| people and companies that are successful financially and
| economically is equal to truth and the right path to go, it's
| dismissing a lot of other context based on "other truth".
|
| The world is much bigger than North America and the PG's text
| may not apply for different countries and culture. Imagine the
| same ideal applying to North Korean and Russia, what
| conclusions do you get from it?
| woopwoop wrote:
| I don't think the sort of ad hominem you are engaging in here
| is very useful, or convincing. Ad hominem is exactly what it
| is: you aren't arguing that the negative comments are wrong,
| just that the sort of people who make them are dumb conformists
| in (1), hypocrites in (2), and losers in (3).
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| The most economically successful company in the world is Saudi
| ARAMCO so what does that say about PG's startup founder thesis?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| It proves divine right of kings in general, and House of Saud
| in particular. Sounds right to me.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| "let's instead use the economic success as a proxy for truth."
|
| This is why I think Mark Zuckerberg is always right.
| zucker42 wrote:
| > If you don't like his writing and his world view (the brave
| startup founder is the hero), then why come to HN? Why support
| someone's website and accelerator/fund if you think they are so
| wrong?
|
| Simple. I'm trying to do exactly what Paul Graham encourages
| (and what I believe in), and engage fruitfully with people with
| different ideologies and ways of thinking than me. Plus, there
| are sometimes interesting technical articles posted here.
|
| > The comments here perfectly resemble that theory
|
| Really? I don't see this, so maybe some examples would help.
| Mostly I see people disagreeing with Graham in unique ways.
| That doesn't seem like conformism. Would it be better if only
| people who accepted his premise commented. Isn't that exactly
| the opposite of what Graham wants (respect for his ideas among
| people who disagree with him)?
|
| Your third point begs the question.
| henning wrote:
| The idea that you can be independently minded as a quant or at a
| startup is absurd.
|
| If you don't parrot the same bullshit as everyone else as a
| startup employee, you get fired without feedback because you
| aren't a "good culture fit." You have two choices: conform, or
| work somewhere else.
| kutorio wrote:
| "worked at a startup" and "founded a (non-trivial) startup" can
| be quite different.
| ericsoderstrom wrote:
| His point is that the founders and underlying ideas for
| startups and quantitative trading companies need to be
| unconventional in order to succeed. Otherwise the returns will
| already have been captured by the market (in the case of
| trading) or the product will already have been built (in the
| case of a startup)
| getpost wrote:
| I suggest not putting people into quadrants and making an us-vs-
| them argument. Everyone is exactly the same and also completely
| unique. At times, some people appear to catalyze change, but it's
| everyone else that actually makes the change.
|
| There has always been an "immune" reaction to new ideas. That is
| not going to change for the foreseeable future. Don't worry about
| it, just keep innovating.
| [deleted]
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Does a voting and flagging system on a discussion board reward
| the aggressively conventional or the aggressively independent to
| a greater extent?
|
| Which group does such a system punish to a greater extent?
| chippy wrote:
| In HN people often flag submissions to keep the identity and
| content more coherent and to reduce flame. (e.g. flagging
| advertisements, political and culture war submissions)
|
| Perhaps it's the passive ones that flag submissions, but
| downvoting comments occurs by more aggressive conventional
| ones? I'd love to see statistics.
| breuleux wrote:
| I'm a bit uncomfortable with how he romanticizes the
| "aggressively independent" quadrant as being the quadrant of
| startup founders, great innovators and Galileo (those with good
| ideas), even though that quadrant also clearly contains anti-vax
| leaders, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler (those with bad ideas).
| I'm sorry I had to go there, but it's true. People in both
| aggressive quadrants are extremely dangerous.
|
| I'm also uncomfortable with his defence of free will because of
| how... _conventional_ it is. It 's nothing I haven't read a
| million times before. Like it or not, "free speech is good" is
| one of the most conventional statements one could make in current
| society, and it is consequently pushed by a lot of aggressively
| conventional people. Whether they are right or not is besides the
| point here. The point is that it is not, as portrayed, a fight
| between the independent-minded and the conventional-minded. It is
| perfectly reasonable for independent-minded people to question
| it, as they would question any other widespread norm, and a lot
| of its staunchest proponents are conventional-minded.
| tgflynn wrote:
| You could probably measure the extent to which HN users are
| aggressively-conventional minded by how often they downvote
| comments without replying to them.
| Balgair wrote:
| In my experience, Universities in the US aren't the place to
| place your bets on.
|
| It's hard to explain in a short HN comment, so my apologies here
| if it's a bit gripe-y and disjointed.
|
| I've just gotten the feeling that the Universities, very much
| including the STEM departments, are all about funding. Since the
| funding is largely controlled by other professors in the field
| (via Study Sessions), you have to get on the good side of many
| people. The after-talk drinking sessions at major conferences are
| a _key_ way to do this.
|
| If you're 'likable' and a 'big' name, then committees send
| funding your way. After all, at that level, every proposal is
| pretty much gold anyways. I remember a _Nature_ editor telling a
| class once that they could shut down the submissions portal at
| about noon January 1st and see no drop in the quality of what
| they published for the year. Still, _Nature_ and funding
| committees have to dole out things. So, when given the choices of
| people you know and people you don 't, you tend to go with people
| you know (academic pedigree is also super important here).
|
| So 'rocking the boat' is very much discouraged, your mortgage
| depends on you not doing that. Then the same issues that we see
| on Twitter occur as well. The louder voices tend to get more
| 'views', as long as the voice is stating the orthodox opinions.
| In STEM fields, it's less bad in terms of the research (facts
| _very_ much matter), but the underlying culture is just the same
| as with all humans.
|
| If you get into the replication crisis issues, then it's the
| funding crunch on steroids. Those fields tend to be all about
| 'name', as the facts have become so difficult to obtain that no
| one could 'fact check' even if they wanted to (nutrition, bio,
| psych, fMRI, etc). I'm still surprised that particle physics
| hasn't fallen down this hole and I think that their 'culture' is
| one to look into.
|
| Again, apologies on the rant here. Still, heterodox opinions (not
| facts, to be clear) are not the place for Universities in the US
| anymore.
|
| I'd look at where all the Burners went after about 2012 to find
| the better places to deal with the aggressively independent
| minded. Ephemerisle is a thought, but those guys are a bit wacko
| in terms of covid-19 safety, though that may just be a side
| effect. Maybe the Rainbow gatherings?
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| > ...the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It
| began in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but
| it has recently flared up again with the arrival of social media.
|
| > the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities..
|
| Are there some examples of what this might refer to?
| f0ff wrote:
| Take Peterson for example.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| People are intolerant of Peterson because of Peterson's
| intolerance though.
| motorcycleman9 wrote:
| Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as
| intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded
| and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen
| the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles.
| When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative
| lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a
| conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to
| personal risk of worse outcomes.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the
| opposition to bill C-16. A bill he claimed to oppose
| because of its free-speech implications, when all the
| bill actually did was extend _existing_ legal protections
| of identifiable groups to also include gender identity
| and gender expression. Those exact same protections
| already existed on the basis of race, religion, national
| or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, and
| mental or physical disability. If Peterson 's gripe is
| with compelled speech then how come he didn't strongly
| criticize the existing legislation for other identifiable
| groups, but instead just singled out the new protections
| for transgender individuals?
|
| > straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but
| subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.
|
| Which is a baseless and _very_ questionable claim to
| make.
|
| > Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as
| intolerant.
|
| Peterson is a Christian conservative with some fairly
| patriarchal ideas [1,2], so I think characterizing him as
| intolerant is pretty fair.
|
| [1] "[Western feminists avoid criticizing Islam because
| of] their unconscious wish for brutal male domination." h
| ttps://twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi/status/10011640428562718
| 74
|
| [2] It is "hypocritical" for a woman to wear makeup in
| the workplace if she doesn't want to be sexually
| harassed.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTglME9rvQ&t=7m12s
| motorcycleman9 wrote:
| You are explicitly mischaracterizing his arguments.
| Peterson has spent more time than you or I arguing about
| the pros and cons of patriarchal hierarchies. The fact
| that he is willing to admit to their merits and demerits
| is evidence that he is more open-minded, and arguing at a
| higher level of abstraction, than most people in the
| political debate.
|
| Peterson opposed C-16 on genuine and extremely reasonable
| free-speech grounds. He was speaking as an individual
| that endorses the value of free speech. Hate speech laws
| obviously limit free speech, have a chilling effect on
| genuine debates, and can even hurt our ability to think
| straight.
| defnotashton2 wrote:
| Peterson was an academic and decided to fight c16 because
| it became an an issue in his university and he disagreed
| with how their policies were going to in fact compel him
| to speech.
|
| It wasn't as if he was sitting in a room somewhere
| looking for bills to fight compelled speech..
| tome wrote:
| As I understand it (and maybe I'm wrong) his objection
| was that the law would compel his speech (in particular
| to call a transwoman a woman). Is that claim false? Is
| there any existing similar compelled speech under the
| existing legislation? If not then that seems to explain
| why he hadn't previously criticized the legislation.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| It would compel that speech in the same way that you are
| compelled to call me "Joshua" and not "asshole" when we
| are engaging in a conversation at work.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| No-platforming, amongst other things, I'd guess. And firing
| people for having the wrong views.
| kwistzhaderach wrote:
| Noah Carl?
| hkt wrote:
| This does somewhat come off as cod philosophy. There have been
| ample studies in group psychology and minority influence dating
| back to the mid 20th century, and the fact is that independent
| thinkers have massive influence wherever they go. See here for a
| reasonable primer, key thinkers are Asch and Moscovici:
|
| https://www.simplypsychology.org/minority-influence.html
|
| So, the whole "rules to restrain the conformist sheeple" thing
| doesn't really apply. The author has created a category, put
| himself in it, then heaped praise on it. Neither edifying nor
| tasteful. Sorry.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| The missing dimension in PG's analysis is power, particularly
| power imbalance.
|
| PG writes that his "aggressively conventional" category are
| "responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the
| world" and "have been handed a tool" via social media with the
| result that "customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened."
|
| This is bollocks.
|
| Prior to social media, there have been hierarchies- in terms of
| people organization at workplaces and in the political arena, and
| in terms of information distribution- that prevented those with
| power from being subjected to the inquiries from those without.
|
| The notion of "free inquiry" was limited to those topics that
| were considered to be of interest to those in power, which often
| explicitly excluded topics around justice and power imbalance.
|
| Populists were those organizers who were able to formulate a
| message and leverage those powerless voices into a voice that
| succeeded in demanding answers from power.
|
| Now, social media have created platforms where voices from
| groups/individuals who otherwise are powerless can amplify their
| individual voices.
|
| But it also is a platform that enables augmentation of the voices
| that are speaking from places of power, perhaps even to a greater
| degree, because power has access to automation and the levers of
| the amplification algorithm.
|
| In the US we are facing an unprecedented (for the US) physically
| aggressive and dangerous assertion of federal power, under the
| leadership of a cognitively diminished, corrupt, and according to
| some dimensions of national interest, traitorous, sociopath. This
| leadership is also by any measure failing, to a criminal degree,
| in its most important role- to act in the interest of those for
| whom it was elected to serve- in the pandemic.
|
| To complain that "free inquiry"-say, of the sort that Tom Cotton
| wished to engage in- is being limited- because his OpEd in the
| NYT led to a backlash and to the OpEd leader resigning- is to
| completely miss the fundamental power dynamic.
|
| Cotton spoke in service of the same forces that are engaging in
| state-sanctioned violence, while also failing at leadership. When
| that happened in other countries, we would call Cotton a
| propagandist and would see it as the responsibility of
| journalists to not engage with his arguments, because of the
| violence that accompanies them.
|
| As AOC heroically pointed out- violent acts are not separate and
| apart from violent speech. When a party in power engages in
| violent acts, their violent speech should be considered one and
| the same.
|
| To say it out loud is banal but necessary- those without power
| are dying and having their lives destroyed by the forces holding
| the reins of legal, policing, and military power in the US. For
| there to be "free inquiry" this assertion of actual violence on
| the part of the state must stop.
|
| The "aggressively conventional" group that has completely slipped
| PG's mind in his analysis is the state, which is in literal terms
| aggressively and violently engaging, both in speech and act. This
| is fundamentally unacceptable in a nation under rule of law.
|
| Social media is the only vehicle the weak have to organize and
| amplify, and, yes, while there are a few casualties from an
| intellectual perspective- the OpEd head at the NYT lost his job-
| these pale in any moral sense in comparison to the actual
| casualties at the hands of those in power.
|
| So- PG, some advice: why don't you give away your wealth, get a
| job as an uber driver or an "essential" food delivery worker, and
| see what you think about social media and cancel culture then.
| I'll wait.
|
| More directly- PG has blocked me on twitter, because I dared to
| criticize some earlier comments he made there. Forgive me for
| offending, dear leader. I was only intending to engage in free
| inquiry.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| As a (mildly) aggressive non-conformist, I prefer the motto "non
| serviam"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam
| sgentle wrote:
| Never thought I'd see the day that a pg essay crosses over with
| /r/politicalcompassmemes
|
| The problem with "discussing ideas" as a framing is that it
| exists in opposition to something. What is that something?
|
| Those whose position favours the status quo would read it in
| opposition to "not discussing ideas", which is obviously bad.
| However, to those who find the status quo untenable, the opposite
| position is "acting on ideas".
|
| Following pg's example, let us consider the following classic
| debate topic: "is slavery good?" A plantation owner might find
| themselves tickled by a lively discussion on the subject, replete
| with a cornucopia of Enlightenment principles and classical
| liberalism and such. A slave might find this discussion less
| interesting, because no outcome would lead to their freedom.
|
| It is perhaps telling that slavery was not abolished through free
| inquiry or the discussion of ideas. It was abolished through acts
| of state power and, ultimately, violence. Are we to believe in an
| alternate history where the South was debated out of its peculiar
| institution? The discussion of ideas gave way to acting on those
| ideas. The alternative would be a society of endless, meaningless
| rambling.
|
| Today, if you were still debating "is slavery good?", you would
| not be a brave free-thinking iconoclast, you would be either an
| idiot or a very devoted racist. You would get uninvited from
| lectures and yelled at on Twitter, not because your ideas are too
| advanced, but because they're too far behind. The debate is over,
| and the actual free-thinkers have moved on.
|
| It's sad to say, but I think the real lesson of this essay is
| that political ideas are just like music taste. Whatever your
| parents were listening to is outdated and embarrassing, whatever
| the kids are listening to is just angry noise, and miraculously
| your generation was the only one to stumble upon that which is
| profoundly, timelessly good.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Following pg's example, let us consider the following classic
| debate topic: "is slavery good?" A plantation owner might find
| themselves tickled by a lively discussion on the subject,
| replete with a cornucopia of Enlightenment principles and
| classical liberalism and such.
|
| Historically, the Southern states (which were politically
| dominated by slaveholders) outlawed all abolitionist literature
| because they feared that free discussion of ideas would
| undermine the system.
|
| > It is perhaps telling that slavery was not abolished through
| free inquiry or the discussion of ideas.
|
| 90% of the work was done through free inquiry and discourse,
| ranging from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the publishing of
| books like Uncle Tom's Cabin. The attempts to solve the problem
| violently (e.g. John Brown at Harper's Ferry) failed.
|
| It was only when the slave states refused to accept the outcome
| of a free election and started the civil war that violence
| became necessary.
|
| > The debate is over, and the actual free-thinkers have moved
| on.
|
| You've cherry-picked a specific example that fits that
| narrative.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| I think you are wrong about the abolition of slavery.
|
| Slavery had existed in almost every society throughout history
| (and beyond, no doubt). The word _slave_ comes from the _Slavs_
| of eastern Europe, who were captured and enslaved by the Turks
| and Barbary pirates.
|
| Then there was a unique event: Protestant (many non-conformist)
| groups in the wealthiest democratic country (Britain), decided
| to campaign on a fundamental principle of Enlightenment and
| Christian human rights. It was a vivid debate of ideals and
| economic practicalities, conducted in the Mother of
| Parliaments, and on the streets outside.
|
| Britain was a major beneficiary of slavery in the American
| colonies and the Caribbean. It would have renounced the trade,
| and the practice, in the late 18th century, but the military
| and economic imperatives of the French Revolution, American
| Revolution and Napoleonic Wars intervened. So the British slave
| trade was not abolished until 1807, and the practice of slavery
| itself in 1833.
|
| Britain also had the largest navy in the world at that time. It
| not just passed laws for its empire, but also actively
| blockaded Atlantic ports and intercepted the slave trade from
| Africa to Spanish and Portuguese colonies (both Catholic, not a
| coincidence). It was later joined by the northern _Yankee_ navy
| in the Atlantic and on the Barbary coast of N.Africa. Slavery
| was abolished in the US and Russia (serfdom) about the same
| time in the 1860s, but it lingered in Cuba and Brazil toward
| the end of the 19th century.
|
| T.E.Lawrence commented on the slavery he found in Saudi Arabia
| during World War 1 (1916) _[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]._ The
| practice of legal slavery continued into the 1970s in the Gulf
| States, and the indentured servitude practiced there today is
| little different (long working hours in difficult conditions,
| physical isolation, confiscation of passports, non-payment of
| wages, no rights in the legal system, sexual abuse of women,
| etc.). The fact that these countries are undemocratic
| unenlightened Arabs is also not a coincidence (Arabs seem to
| have an extra cultural level of racist arrogance, over and
| above the intolerance of other Muslims in non-Arab countries,
| such as, say, Iran or Indonesia).
| joshuamorton wrote:
| France outlawed slavery in 1315 (later leaders undid this,
| but it was illegal for a time). Spain did as well in the
| 1500s. The Catholic Church condemned the slave trade in the
| 1600s.
|
| So by the time the "non-conformists" were openly discussing
| whether or not slavery should be banned, the Conformists (the
| catholic church) had already stated it was bad.
|
| > The fact that these countries are undemocratic
| unenlightened Arabs is also not a coincidence (Arabs seem to
| have an extra cultural level of racist arrogance, over and
| above the intolerance of other Muslims in non-Arab countries,
| such as, say, Iran or Indonesia).
|
| Yiiiiiiiiiikes.
| jes wrote:
| A simple graphic of the four quadrants would have improved my
| experience in reading this article. I was surprised to not find
| one.
| areoform wrote:
| There are many ways to parse this essay, but it is emotionally
| challenging to give feedback, lest the charge of being
| conventional minded is levied against you. However, I doubt that
| is pg's intention. This comment is my good faith attempt at a
| measured response.
|
| pg mentions universities multiple times, with the implicit and
| explicit statement that they were centers of revolution and non-
| conformist thought. While that is partly true, it's not the whole
| truth. History remembers a different, more complicated reality.
|
| Lise Meitner was the second woman in the world to gain a
| doctorate in physics. When she started, women weren't allowed to
| go to college, one of humanity's greatest minds spent her youth
| as a teacher. It was the only career available to her. When she
| tried to start doing research, she was refused,
|
| > The only difficulty was that Hahn told me in the course of our
| conversation that he had been given a place in the institute
| directed by Emil Fischer, and that Emil Fischer did not allow any
| women students into his lectures or into his institute. So Hahn
| had to ask Fischer whether he would agree to our starting work
| together. And after Hahn had spoken to Fischer, I went to him to
| hear his decision and he told me his reluctance to accept women
| students stemmed from an unfortunate experience he had had with a
| Russian student because he had always been worried lest her
| rather exotic hairstyle result in her hair catching alight on the
| Bunsen burner.
|
| - https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
|
| Fischer relented with pressure from Hahn, but in some cases, it
| took nearly half a decade for people to allow her to work with
| them. She lost years banging her head against the wall. What else
| could she have discovered had she gotten the right resources from
| the start?
|
| She prevailed against these barriers, but she was never
| recognized as an equal. Recognition eluded her. Lise and Otto
| discovered fission together, Hahn got the Nobel, she didn't.
|
| Decades afterwards, the first Pulsar was detected by Jocelyn Bell
| Burnell. She helped build the array that made the discovery. She
| spent her nights looking at the data. She noticed the anomaly.
| She championed it when her supervisor dismissed it as a glitch.
| Her persistence paid off, and her supervisor got the Nobel.
|
| Women have never been accepted as equal. Even at universities.
| How radical and non-conformist could they be when they repeated
| the same mistakes as the societies around them? They excluded
| people for being Jewish, for being born with the wrong sex
| organs, for having the wrong skin color, for being the wrong
| person. They were radical along some axes, but conformist along
| others.
|
| Things are better today, but women continue to be overlooked
| broadly and in academia. Women are discriminated against for
| "reasonable concerns" when it comes to pregnancies, leaves,
| healthcare needs... Systemic reviews have shown that doctors take
| reports of pain from women less seriously than they do from men.
| By a factor that gets multiplied if you're black or queer. Some
| people still have to work twice as hard to get half as much. They
| were just dealt with a shitty card.
|
| It is happening now, against someone as we speak. At prestigious
| teaching and research hospitals across the country, prejudice and
| the status quo are dealing out a crap hand to someone not counted
| as lucky few. Someone who will have to live with this moment for
| the rest of their life. My favorite anecdote is relayed by a
| woman who went in after a knitting accident; she was worried
| about losing dexterity and told her doctor that. The doctor
| assured her nothing would go wrong and started to patch her up.
| By happenstance, one of the woman's students happened to wander
| by and greeted her with the words, "Professor". And the doctor
| stopped. He asked her if she was a professor at the prestigious
| local university. She said yes. And before she could ask why she
| was wheeled into surgery to ensure she wouldn't lose dexterity.
| What cards would an ordinary black woman would have been dealt
| had she presented with the same problems?
|
| Young people on campuses see these shitty cards. Why is it a
| surprise that they seek to rebel? Universities have always been
| the hallmark of radicals, and these are the new radicals. It is
| simple to 'both sides' this, but their anger - magnified and
| disproportionate it may be - comes from a legitimate place. It
| comes from the rebukes of the past and present. The big and small
| injustices that make the world. And it is their clumsy attempt to
| create a better world.
|
| With all due respect to pg, the problem with the essay and this
| scale is that it is not well calibrated. Conformist along which
| directions? Aggressive in what ways? To what ends? To what
| degree? To what measure?
|
| At times it seems pg puts the (admittedly foolish) yale
| undergrads going on about cultural appropriation in the same
| bucket as the Kim Davis, anti-women's rights and 'religious
| rights' crowd. The former is an overreaction by the young and
| hot-headed. The latter is an enormous, organized effort to take
| rights away from others and to force everyone else to conform to
| their rules of society. The former a miasma in civil discourse.
| The latter an organized attempt to strip women of their right to
| determine what's right for their bodies.
|
| On what scale are we equating the two? By what means of
| calibration are these in the same quadrant and to the same
| degree?
|
| The idea in this essay is valuable. The insight is valid. And I
| believe that it is a good faith attempt to understand the world.
| However, it fails to resonate for me. It fails to track as it
| appears to be made for a world I am not a part of. No one invited
| me to the party.
| kutorio wrote:
| Initially I wondered if pg was insinuating that startup hubs
| could replace universities as the new haven of independent
| thinking:
|
| > "People who would have become professors 50 years ago have
| other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups."
|
| > "If existing institutions are compromised, they'll create new
| ones."
|
| However, after reading through the essay a second time, I'm more
| pessimistic about the positive conclusion of the essay. If
| startups succeed by "make stuff people want", and given there are
| "far more conventional-minded people than independent-minded
| ones", then perhaps independent-minded CEOs making tools for
| conventional-minded people is not a rare accident, but rather an
| inevitability.
| peteretep wrote:
| One of the things I dislike about _celebrity_ is the idea that
| because I care what pg thinks about startups, that I should also
| care what he thinks about almost anything else. His Twitter
| account is starting to make me think he's becoming Scott Adams.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| HN has a 'hide' button. You're free to make use of it.
| drekembe wrote:
| You're free to not care what he thinks about some topics, but
| he's also free to still write about them and has no obligation
| to write only about the things you care about.
| paedubucher wrote:
| I think the example with the soccer field is great. People think
| and speak differently if they know that there are taboos.
| davnicwil wrote:
| In one of his previous essays (can't find the specific one, but
| it talks about Cambridge) pg talks about how he thinks in the
| future startups might come more and more directly out of
| university towns because people with ideas already tend to
| congregate there, and mostly get drawn to hubs like Silicon
| Valley because of funding. As it gets cheaper to start a startup
| and need for funding decreases, this might not be so necessary
| any more.
|
| Towards the end of this essay he talks about the possibility that
| people with ideas might start to congregate around other
| institutions than universities in the future. He does explicitly
| say that he can't predict how this will play out, but it would be
| really interesting to read his thoughts on what he thinks those
| institutions could look like, or just what features they might
| have in broad terms.
|
| pg, if you're reading this, that would be a great future essay
| I'd love to read!
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Paul Graham has done it again -- vastly oversimplified things and
| cast himself and his peers as intellectually
| superior/nobler/braver.
| eat_veggies wrote:
| that's VC as a whole
| zucker42 wrote:
| It's certainly an interesting framework for thinking about
| things, and some of the thoughts seem aligned with my ideas on
| this issues. The problem is that I think everybody, including and
| especially people who view themselves as independently-minded, is
| susceptible to conformism and a lack of ideological independence.
| It seems to me like a basic fact of our biology, or at least very
| ingrained in our culture, that we develop ideas based on
| identification and solidarity with groups we belong to. It's true
| of politicians, VC firm leaders, tech workers, economists, and
| even the most earnest scientists. The idea that there is a class
| of people who are "independently-minded" and therefore somehow
| more intellectually useful is flawed because people tend to have
| interesting, unique ideas in some areas and ideas which amount to
| little more than parroting a group belief in others.
|
| Along these lines, the article argues that conformism is
| independent of rules (and it implies also independent of
| context), but I don't think it gives sufficient evidence for this
| point. It also doesn't agree with my experience; I was a bit of
| "goody-two-shoes" in K-12 (i.e. a passive conformist), but now my
| political outlook is niche, I try to think scientifically about
| the world, and I'd self-judge to be passive independently-minded
| person.
|
| > Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all
| independent-minded
|
| This reads as extremely overconfident, and in my judgement it is
| probably false. I think tech as an industry faces the same issues
| with group-think that any large-enough community is bound to
| face, and I don't think Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of
| enlightened, humanist society. The whole article to some extent
| reads like "if more people were more like Paul Graham, the world
| would be better". Obviously, that's the not the argument of the
| article (and to be fair, it's probably true the world would be
| better with more Paul Grahams), but its interesting I got an
| impression of that sentiment in an article about the _dangers_ of
| conformism. And it 's also interesting that it's not the first
| time I've read a very similar argument in recent weeks.
|
| In case I seem overly harsh, I want to clarify it was a thought-
| provoking article I enjoyed reading.
| [deleted]
| bob33212 wrote:
| I agree that within some groups like humanities departments,
| twitter and liberal companies the social justice movement is out
| of control. Just promoting a white male employee, or calling the
| police in a black person you see commiting a crime would make you
| fear for your job in some of those circles.
|
| On the other side there was a member of Congress who called a
| female member of Congress a "fucking bitch" and also the
| president has said plenty of sexist and racist things recently
| without either person losing their job.
|
| The fact that both of these can exist in the same country is the
| troubling thing to me. They not even remotely trying to
| understand each other.
| [deleted]
| devdas wrote:
| Calling the cops has turned out to be a death sentence for
| Black people too often.
| steveeq1 wrote:
| It's overplayed: https://i.stack.imgur.com/WogKi.png
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| BLM isn't specifically about white people killing black
| people, its about the systemic disadvantage of black people
| in the US. The US had segregationist senators until the
| 2000s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond], San
| Leandro California, a bay area suburb where lots of folks
| in on this board live, had an FBI injunction in the 80's
| because they still had segregationist housing policy. Our
| communities now are more segregated today than they were in
| 1890. Modern medicine has an insane mount of racial bias
| baked into it today
| [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2021693].
| Everything from illness diagnosis to painkiller
| prescription, to prenatal care is very much tilted against
| black people getting equivalent treatment to white people.
| This is due to the bias of caregivers at point of care. The
| whole point is that race matters, we need to respect that,
| and understand that.
| bob33212 wrote:
| I don't think your are well informed here. They are
| protesting the systemic racism that makes some cops feel
| like they can get away with leaving their knee on a black
| man's neck for 8 minutes killing him.
|
| Maybe you don't think that systemic racism is a major
| problem or maybe you think that people should focus on
| other issues instead? But your graph is incorrect.
| steveeq1 wrote:
| I feel that the "systemic racist" is overplayed, yes. And
| the graph is sourced.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Neither of those sources prove that BLM is only about
| white on black murder. Check out this source if you are
| interested in learning about the goals of BLM
| https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
| defnotashton2 wrote:
| But it's nuanced and more than can be defined on a page
| with vast sub cultures and groups all lobbying for power.
|
| As is any social movement, I think there are some
| problems inherent with it, like the inability to
| criticize aspects of the movement without being
| considered a racist.
| jkraker wrote:
| While I agree with some of this, there's a hubris in it that I
| find a bit distasteful. It seems to claim that there's only one
| type of person needed for society to thrive. Not surprisingly,
| it's the type that most aligns with who he identifies himself to
| be.
|
| I think that the article is using caricatured descriptions of two
| categories that are more broad (people who are oriented toward
| change and those who are oriented toward stability) and
| highlighting only the good of the preferred group (his own) and
| the bad within the "other". The truth is, there are beneficial
| and destructive individuals in both groups, and there are
| perspectives from each that we need. I would argue that what
| society really needs is not the ascendancy of one group above the
| other but mutual respect and discussion of ideas between groups.
|
| Which is kind of where he was going with the discussion of ideas.
| He just didn't have a big enough tent.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I didn't think about it until I read your comment, but I really
| got a eureka moment from reading this, so thank you, and this
| is what I love about HN's comment sections.
|
| The irony shouldn't be lost that pg is primarily arguing for
| freer discussion of ideas, while at the same time showing the
| same traits of "other-ing" (i.e., folks not in your group are
| somehow defective) that I believe is the most important reason
| that free discourse seems to be in decline.
| clomond wrote:
| I did not interpret it as hubris.
|
| Rather, I viewed it as the differences in deliverers of
| progress versus orthodoxy.
|
| "Classic progressivism" / "Enlightenment" principles have
| across the globe been under attack from all over the place,
| including from within the depths of the worlds leading
| institutions.
|
| Given that so much of the peace, prosperity and progress (both
| socially and technologically) have been driven by safe
| environments for the "aggressive independents" - I view this
| essay as a call out for us to do better.
|
| Those who value stability are an important part to ground the
| bad new ideas from taking hold in the vein of progress, but
| traditionalists are by very definition not how progress is
| actually made.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I did not interpret it as hubris.
|
| I mean, he refers to the "passively conventional minded" as
| "sheep". Whether or not that's true, it's still dripping with
| condescension.
|
| I agree with the parent commenter. I largely agree with PG's
| essay, but it's also telling that he doesn't see (or at
| least, doesn't comment) on any potential negatives from
| "aggressive independently minded" folks. If anything, a lot
| of the current backlash I see in the technology realm is
| where entrepreneurs and "visionaries" promised us
| enlightenment and the world, but it didn't quite work out
| that way. The pitch for social media was that it was supposed
| to bring the world closer and let people develop more and
| stronger relationships. Yeah, how'd that turn out...
| Qworg wrote:
| Also, there are wolves in both of the "aggressive" camps -
| people who would acquire power by any means necessary, no
| matter the costs to others. It is very hard to draw the
| line between "failed visionary" and "power hungry
| manipulator".
| clomond wrote:
| Very good point, missed that.
|
| I suppose re: your social media point (I have long ago
| soured on most of it personally) that, rather than ridding
| away and decrying the negatives with tech and social media
| as a result of progress, really what needs to happen is
| social media needs its own set of reforms in order to have
| its "supposed vision" be actualized.
|
| The route of addicting users for increased "engagement"
| while optimizing for nothing else has successfully poisoned
| the well of good intentions (and possibilities). But still,
| and this relates to the heart of the essay itself: I
| believe the path to solve this is by moving forward, making
| the systems better (or providing new ones). Rather than
| rejecting them outright. But maybe that is the raging
| optimist in me talking.
| divbzero wrote:
| aggressively conventional-minded | aggressively independent-
| minded ---------------------------------+------------------
| -------------- passively conventional-minded |
| passively independent-minded
| mchusma wrote:
| I love PGs essays, but his take on Robert George is the opposite
| of what Robert George was saying.
|
| PG: "He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't."
|
| Robert George from the quoted tweet: "Of course, this is
| nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us,
| would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free
| the slaves. Most of them--and us--would have gone along. Many
| would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from
| it."
|
| https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/1278529694355292161
|
| It doesn't change PG's point, but its just odd he used the quote
| in this way.
| projektfu wrote:
| Quoting:
|
| Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
| "I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would
| have been had they been white and living in the South before
| abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists!
| They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and
| worked tirelessly against it."
|
| He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And
| indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his
| students would, on average, have behaved the same way people
| did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively
| conventional-minded today would have been aggressively
| conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not
| only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been
| among its staunchest defenders.
| projektfu wrote:
| They're saying the same thing, but PG added the "He's too
| polite..." bit as though he didn't read past /1 in the
| thread.
| thom wrote:
| Good grief man, if you can only detect new ideas when they erupt
| from the mouths of startup CEOs, and you can't credit things like
| social justice and equality as anything but conformist (despite
| having been denied millions if not billions of people), then
| you're not 'independent', you're just incredibly narrow minded.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What's ironic about it is that Y Combinator has been accused of
| becoming yet another badge of being the right kind of person.
|
| There are so many people out there who want to say they were
| part of "Y Co" but aren't really interested in making or doing
| anything. Bossing people around and having status has some
| appeal to them, but taking some actual stand is just too
| dangerous. Some rich dude like like Paul Graham might reject
| them, they wouldn't want people to think they were S1W's or
| anything
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHyCIDu6dSY
|
| I think Mr. Graham needs some diversity in his life. Maybe he
| should spend a night in a hotel in Marin County or Gilroy would
| open up his vistas.
|
| (Oh, but you know Y Co wouldn't be effective at all if it was
| moved across the street from where it is -- if Altman and
| Graham had any self conciousness or thought where their
| arguments lead they'd realize they are arguing for 100% local
| taxation on themselves because the only value behind Y Co is
| the holy land which is the only place where rich people will
| let you have an exit... Except for China)
| wdwecewc wrote:
| Looking at Paul's twitter it is clear he only really respects
| those who are as rich as him or present some viewpoint he
| agrees with. It almost makes me think that his writing on
| what type of person not to be is just projection.
| chippy wrote:
| The ideas of social justice and equality spring from the
| independent quadrant. These ideas have become the rules that
| conventional quadrant follow and expose.
|
| This doesn't seem to contradict itself.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Well what about if the rules of the conventional quadrant
| become "Anyone who says or implies 'Crush <outgroup>!' is bad
| and should never be listened to"?
| [deleted]
| chippy wrote:
| turtles all the way down
| Miner49er wrote:
| Social justice and true equality aren't conformist ideas
| though. We live at a time when wealth inequality is around
| the highest since our country has kept track and you think
| equality is a mainstream conformist idea?
| wrren wrote:
| The current practices and thought-processes of social
| justice advocates are hyper-conformist in my opinion.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Many people have been so misled by education and media
| consumption that they have no idea what is going on. It is
| a commonplace that conformists will profess to beliefs that
| they regularly undermine. E.g., the people who "support the
| protests" but still whinge about how they're too
| "confrontational" and "violent".
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Or they recognize that people have a right to protest but
| don't appreciate the small minority who use it as an
| opportunity to incite violence.
| jessaustin wrote:
| They're protesting the policing of minorities, and you
| stand at the ready to police their protesting... by
| asserting their minority status! In lots of protests this
| isn't a "small minority". Please think more carefully.
| The author of TFA would not appreciate your aggressive
| conformity.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Hey man, I agree completely that the police suck. But
| what I think is happening is there are two groups here:
|
| * Protestors of police brutality who are in the main
| completely peaceful and capable of self-policing. These
| people tend to do normal protest things like blocking the
| streets, yelling at cars, holding signs, and similar.
| That's totally fine and should be protected by law. Their
| leaders are often seen keeping the rest of the group from
| pushing up against barricades and otherwise inciting
| violence.
|
| * Small groups of what I can only describe as fringe
| counterculture people who are hiding in these protest
| groups waiting for an opportunity to incite violence.
| These people use the mask laws in many localities to hide
| their identity, and are doing things like dropping piles
| of bricks off in protest zones, throwing molotov
| cocktails into fast food restaurants and running,
| breaking windows and looting stores, and pushing the
| peaceful protestors into the riot control police. These
| are most certainly non-conformists, but we should not
| tolerate these behaviors if we want to live in a civil
| society. And the peaceful protestors are getting caught
| up in the dragnets.
|
| The police make no effort to distinguish between the two
| groups in most cases. During protests in the 60's there's
| ample evidence that the police were part of the second
| group. So it's probable the violence is being incited by
| certain groups who are interested in silencing the
| peaceful protestors.
|
| If that makes me an aggressive conformist to hold those
| views, then I will gladly be one. Non-conformity should
| not be the goal. And frankly if this is how it's defined,
| it's a stupid label.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Eventually there will be "ample evidence" that police are
| also members of _this_ "second group". A Minneapolis cop
| vandalizing a business was identified on Facebook
| already. (Don't link to the police denials; rational
| observers take those as proof.) City governments have a
| lot easier access to pallets of bricks and the equipment
| to transport same than poor kids have. Authoritarians do
| the same thing over and over again because it works over
| and over again.
|
| None of that matters. The point of the protests, to
| combat USA racism in general and also the specific racism
| of violent USA police, is more important than the form of
| the protests. If we truly do support these goals, we
| won't be sidetracked by potential insurance claims of
| large corporations. Instead we will interrogate myths
| we've accepted by dint of constant media gaslighting. MLK
| did _not_ oppose destructive protest in general.
| Destructive protests are _not_ counterproductive; in many
| instances they have had far more significant positive
| effect than any number of candlelit vigils. The police
| don 't work for us (even if "us" means "us white folks");
| they work for wealthy property owners. Many black
| Americans _do_ support effective protests, even if the
| only black Americans allowed on cable news are very
| worried about "white anarchists". Much of the
| destruction you fear is the rational action of black
| citizens who've had to deal with this shit for a really
| long time.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If we truly do support these goals, we won 't be
| sidetracked by potential insurance claims of large
| corporations._
|
| The victims of violence aren't large corporations;
| they're individual people whose homes and neighborhoods
| and businesses are not safe. The very people that the
| protesters claim to be protesting on behalf of.
|
| The valid claim of the protesters that the rule of law is
| not applied equally to everyone, as it should be, is
| undermined when people use the protests as a cover to
| violate the rule of law themselves.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Many effective protests do destroy property, and that's
| mostly the property of large corporations. Violence
| against individual humans is a separate issue. There are
| some indications that such violence has increased by a
| finite amount since the start of the COVID-19 shutdown.
| You're free to assume that this has nothing to do with
| the public health and economic situation (and self-
| interested voluntary decisions of police) and may be
| blamed entirely on protests, but you're announcing a deep
| personal bias by doing so. Wondering aloud about how the
| message may be undermined is mere concern trolling. We
| recognize it when racist troglodytes do it, and we also
| recognize it when "good liberals" do it.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Many effective protests do destroy property, and that
| 's mostly the property of large corporations._
|
| The property being destroyed by rioters and looters in
| the current wave largely belongs to individuals and small
| businesses, although there have been some large
| corporations affected (e.g., Macy's in NYC was looted).
|
| _> Violence against individual humans is a separate
| issue._
|
| I agree that it is worse to harm or kill a human directly
| than to harm or destroy their property. However, since
| many people's property is essential to their livelihood,
| harming or destroying property is still a very serious
| matter and should not be condoned.
|
| _> You 're free to assume that this has nothing to do
| with the public health and economic situation (and self-
| interested voluntary decisions of police) and may be
| blamed entirely on protests_
|
| Rioting and looting is not a valid response to the
| COVID-19 situation any more than it is a valid response
| to inequality before the law and corruption on the part
| of the police (and the local governments that are
| responsible for police corruption).
| [deleted]
| jschwartzi wrote:
| The problem I have with violence is that there will
| always be people who are caught in the crossfire.
| Violence begets violence and you have to be prepared to
| lay down arms at some point or you will always be at war.
| My fear is mainly that when people resort to violence,
| the same people who hide out in the peaceful groups come
| out of the woodwork, and they take advantage of the
| situation to their own ends.
|
| Violence is ugly, and it's hard to control, especially
| when it's group-on-group violence. It's surprisingly easy
| for the oppressed to become the oppressor when the smoke
| settles. If you have a way to avoid that, then go right
| ahead.
| jessaustin wrote:
| This fear is overblown. We've had racist violence from
| USA police for their entire existence. Nothing that has
| been tried so far has eliminated it. Now, let's try
| something else. I would refer you to NFAC, who have
| performed several armed public actions without causing an
| escalation in violence.
| elliekelly wrote:
| They're just equal opportunity conformists... if you
| conform to both sides you never have to risk independent
| thinking!
| chippy wrote:
| Following on from the essay, the ideas are adopted by
| aggressively conventional minded even if they are "non
| conformist".
|
| Other aggressively conventional minded people believe in
| the the rules of ever explosive growth, exploitation and
| free market capitalism.
|
| The ideas do conflict with each other obviously.
|
| The essay gives the example of abolitionism that some
| aggressively conventional minds back in history would be in
| support of slavery and other aggressively conventional mind
| would be opposing slavery.
|
| Within the concept of the essay what does non conformist
| really mean? Are social justice and true equality ideas
| that belong only on the independent side of the quadrant?
| Miner49er wrote:
| This is a good point. It shows the problem with the whole
| article. I think many people don't view themselves as
| "conformist" no matter who they are. PG certainly doesn't
| view himself as conformist. Everyone likes to think they
| that are independent thinkers, but most people, by
| definition, aren't. If a person thinks they're an
| independent thinker, then they'll simply think that
| anyone who thinks like them are also independent
| thinkers. In reality, they're just conforming, but maybe
| in a way that's different than other conformists.
|
| PG seems to be calling out "cancel culture" with this
| essay, but I think the people on both sides of that
| argument are conforming. The independent thinkers are
| busy with things that actually matter and aren't paying
| attention.
|
| I can't think of many people that I would label truly
| independent thinkers. The first that comes to my mind is
| maybe Richard Stallman, but that's about it.
| chippy wrote:
| Agreed. I think the "opposing" aggressively conventional
| people would be believing in the rule of law, authority
| of the police and social and cultural conservatism.
| These, 10 years ago, would be seen as mainstream ideas.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Virtually all intelligent people take "equality" to mean
| equality of opportunity. The type of equality you seem to
| mean is where individual personalities, talents and desires
| don't exist. In other words, where everyone is the same
| person. What a boring world. I just don't think inequality
| matters as long as the poorest in society are never cold or
| hungry. That's pretty much where we are today.
| jahaja wrote:
| > That's pretty much where we are today.
|
| What on earth makes you think that?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Oh, well obviously there are hungry and cold people in
| the world, but I was talking about within a developed
| country like the UK. People who go on about equality are
| concerned with making themselves richer because of
| billionaires. They are not concerned with making
| themselves poorer because of hungry and cold people in
| other countries.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I think you are right in a subculture sense.
|
| Many great progressive ideas and movements have been taken
| over by aggressive conformists. The ideas get perverted into
| something far less useful and overly specific.
|
| Lets move the discussion into something less political!
|
| In tech this happens too. Cargo cult engineering anyone?
| Agile methodology and OOP are two huge examples: they started
| as radical, useful ideas too. But often today people argue
| overly specific rules of implementation rather than asking
| why these things exist, where they came from and where they
| fit.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > and you can't credit things like social justice and equality
| as anything but conformist
|
| As I'm sure you know, people like PG, and me, and the many,
| many other people who share many common beliefs with the
| progressive left, do not criticize social justice and equality.
| What we are finding extraordinarily problematic currently is
| the people on the progressive left who are the most vocal
| champions of social justice and equality, in particular their
| intolerance, deplatforming, certainty that their's is the only
| true view, etc.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I think PG's a product of his world. He isn't an expert in
| personality or psychology, so he looks to other tech leaders as
| thought leaders and independent saviors, and he is
| regurgitating commonly held views about Left and Right to fit
| his construct. He does so with extremely scant evidence,
| because his task is to make a snappy essay, not a coherent
| theory with strong evidence.
| walleeee wrote:
| The regurgitation bit is even more ironic in the context of
| this piece.
| bambax wrote:
| Exactly. Conformism in PG's world is praising "merit",
| "innovation" and inequality.
| lincolnq wrote:
| Could you unpack this? The only social justice-related example
| in the piece was a positive one (antebellum abolitionism). It
| seems like you might be reading into the piece more than was
| intended.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Graham is in the bay area and he knows he'd get the smackdown
| from LGBT activists if he said what he meant, so he is using
| coded speech. The breathless tone that there is something
| wrong on college campuses these days (without being specific)
| is a dead giveaway.
| nickpp wrote:
| PG is living in England, with his wife and kids.
| ggreer wrote:
| Paul Graham moved back to the UK years ago. He hasn't run Y
| Combinator since 2014. Of course he still has many social
| and professional connections to the bay area, but he
| doesn't have to worry about what some activists in SF will
| do.
| __alexs wrote:
| Maybe he should get a real job again then? Might help him
| get back in touch with reality.
| dencodev wrote:
| Is there a single instance of a hundred
| millionaire/billionaire having a "real job"? With "real
| job" defined as doing something you'd otherwise not do if
| it wasn't for the pressure of having a place to live and
| food to eat.
| luckylion wrote:
| > so he is using coded speech
|
| Please give us the decoder, because "it's code for whatever
| I feel like it is" is really not helpful.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Those Girard books that Peter Thiel wants you to buy
| because (1) Thiel got a commission and (2) Thiel doesn't
| know anything academic that didn't happen at Stanford.
|
| Girard seemed to think that the great cultural problem of
| the world was "The Court of Versailles" where nobles who
| have no real problems just compete to be the same as each
| other. It's a compelling problem if you're a vendor who
| makes fancy stuff for the palace (e.g. one of those
| mirror makers who got assassinated to protect the secret
| of making mirrors) but for the 99% of people who grow
| rice, wheat, corn whatever it is that supports the life
| of most people and the vendors who serve the palace, it
| is just designed to erase your perception of your own
| life and make it a pale shadow of someone else's
| narcissism.
| luckylion wrote:
| Sorry, I meant the decoder of what you feel he's _really_
| trying to say through some obfuscated means. I suppose
| you 've attributed some ideas to him, otherwise why the
| talk about the "smackdown from LGBT activists", but you
| just alluded to it instead of writing "he says this,
| this, and that, but he's using the following code: ..."
|
| That's hardly useful, because it's more mysticism, and
| there's no testing your opinion, and so it also can't be
| rejected .
| thom wrote:
| The recent history of PG's twitter outpourings has been about
| the danger posed by political correctness and progressives
| more generally, in the face of criticism of things like AI
| bias.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I think he argues that progressives are a misnomer,
| political correctness a compromise with orthodoxy.
|
| Progressives don't necessarily agree with other
| progressives. At least a subgroup wouldn't self describe as
| such.
|
| This was tried to communicate very often, for example with
| reference to diversity of opinion. It was, perhaps with
| some reason, seen as an argument against diversity of skin
| colors.
| newacct583 wrote:
| I can only read the discussion of "aggressive conformism" at
| the end as a giant subtweet of cancel culture. There's a
| real, and sudden, movement in the political center against
| this idea (c.f. the Harpers letter), and pg is clearly
| picking a side.
|
| Which is fine, I guess. I personally didn't think the letter
| was so awful. It's hardly the worst problem in a world where
| we have federal paramilitary units being deployed to pick
| fights with hippies, but there are excesses (David Shor for
| sure shouldn't have been fired).
|
| The problem is there's a baby vs. bathwater issue with the
| reasoning. The same people who spit bile about Shor are the
| ones who just pushed BLM from a fringe idea that couldn't get
| purchase into something approaching social consensus. Did
| anyone see the ballgame last night? What's your position on
| Kaepernick now?
| zucker42 wrote:
| The Harper's letter was hardly from the political center as
| most people conceive; Noam Chomsky signed that letter.
| newacct583 wrote:
| It's complicated. There's for sure a generational skew
| here, most of the signers were older established
| voices[1]. While there was some diversity, there were
| very few truly progressive voices, and what ones there
| were tended to come out later expressing that they were
| mislead about the way the letter would be presented.
|
| The text of the letter is hard to argue against. The
| context in which it was presented, and especially the way
| it was leveraged on the right as an "a-ha!" moment to
| disparage many of the demographics that were supposed to
| have "signed" it was quite different.
|
| Republicans view that letter as an admission of guilt on
| the part of the left, when the intent was to call back
| absolutist rhetoric everywhere. It didn't work.
|
| [1] From the perspective of the activist left: the
| powerful looking to suppress checks on their power from
| new voices.
| happy-go-lucky wrote:
| You refuse to conform to conventions because you're independent-
| minded. As a business owner, to what extent would you allow your
| workers to be nonconformist?
|
| By the way, I belong to the right upper quadrant, and I cannot
| answer my own question without being hypocritical.
| solmans wrote:
| We'd all like to think we belong to Paul's upper right quadrant
| (which, mind you, isn't even very well defined) but in truth
| you, me, and even Paul himself are more conformist than we
| think and recognising that is an important step in being
| intelligent and not shielding yourself from criticism.
|
| For example, I don't think wanting to go and pursue a business
| idea is independent minded. The overwhelming majority of people
| would like to do this, even your employees. Actually putting in
| the effort isn't very independent minded either since it's
| mostly a matter of how much capital, free time, and social
| safety nets you have, not how much of a free radical you are.
| MikeOfAu wrote:
| I don't like his analysis. I don't think it models what's going
| on currently. And because of that, it doesn't allow us to think
| about the problem correctly.
|
| IMO, the key thing that's happened since 2010 is that there has
| been a coup on "the progressive side" of politics, with
| "Classical Social Justice" (MLK-like) being replaced with
| "Critical Social Justice". It has been a mostly silent coup,
| until recently.
|
| There's been a dramatic change, and most people on the left don't
| even realise it has happened, much less what it means. The shift
| is from empiricism, universalism, justice, equality of
| opportunity, and liberalism to ... frankly, pretty much the
| opposite of those values: lived experience, identity groups
| competing with winners and losers, maoist group-think, purity
| spirals, etc. The profoundness of the change can't be overstated.
|
| IMO, the good people of the Left (classic liberals) have to take
| it back from those that have stolen it (the Critical Social
| Justic people). But, I'm not even sure that's even possible now.
| It has gone too far--what a disaster.
|
| And because "classic liberals" want the left to go back to how it
| was ... they have almost become "the conservatives of the left"
| and they have been forced weirdly towards the centre - except
| those to the left of them are now more facist than those to their
| right. So weird.
|
| Bottom line: the illiberal, Clitical Methods Left now holds sway
| (Newspapers, Hollywood, Universities) and it isn't going anywhere
| in a hurry.
|
| The worst part about this is: the current sensemaking apparatus
| (newspapers, etc) has been hollowed out by the Internet. And they
| aren't even capable of analysis any more ... just activism (as a
| business model ... a way of generating clicks). How can a
| democracy function when the population is not informed? I really
| like Eric Wienstien's analogy for this: the Media has now become
| like Iago in Othello, whispering madness into the ear of those
| that will listen (on both sides).
|
| All very broken. Suddenly.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Since one 's quadrant depends more on one's personality than
| the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same
| quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society_
|
| This contains a strong assumption of nature over nurture. I push
| back on that. (A point of evidence being salivary cortisol
| correlations with high-stress childhoods and even prenatal
| environments.)
|
| Independent-minded cultures produce more independent thinkers. A
| culture that censors raises children by rewarding convention-
| seeking behaviour and sharply punishing non-conformance.
|
| (Counterpoint: Did the children of circa 1920s academics become
| academics at a greater frequency than those of postwar academics?
| Anecdotally, I think so. A lot of them, as PG hypothesises,
| became founders. That suggests an innate quality that seeks its
| environment.)
|
| This might also be content-dependent. When I was young, I
| oscillated between tattletelling and rampant rulebreaking, with a
| memorable drive to stand out from my peer group. Notably, an
| inflection point, to my memory and, surprisingly, to my discovery
| a few years ago after reading childhood notes, was when my family
| immigrated to America. To-day, I'm passively conformist with the
| law, but moderately independent when it comes to personal social,
| political and broader commercial activities, enjoying standing
| out even if it means being quirky or disliked. I don't imagine
| I'd have been the same in Switzerland or in India.
| frjalex wrote:
| This is a fair point. To say that personality can be purely
| characterized in full using a few adjectives is grossly over-
| generalizing. It seems like a better model of "the four
| quadrants" would be to add a dimension, the dimension of
| personality when it comes to dealing with different things in
| life. For instance, while one can be passively conformist in a
| particular area, say, following the rules of society, one can
| be aggressively independent in one's own discipline or
| expertise.
|
| For instance, you could expect a brilliant academic to be
| socially conformist, while academically aggressive and
| independent. Some sort of criminal or outlaw would be
| aggressively independent when it comes to following the laws of
| society, and maybe conformist when it comes to following the
| criminal discipline (this is when you have mobs and gangs ---
| outlaws find each other and form groups, too).
|
| And it is a combination of these different styles that make up
| the overall personality profile.
| novok wrote:
| After seeing how different an adopted child acted compared to
| the non adopted ones in a close family member's family, I
| believe a lot more in nature causing big differences in
| behavior vs. nurture. Even when you have your own kids,
| children born 1 or 2 years apart in the same family can have
| very different personalities.
|
| People don't like it, because it's used to justify fatalistic
| write offs of people. I agree it's wrong to do that because
| people are often wrong in writing off people, especially the
| aggressively independent :)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Adopted and second children still represent different
| environments. If the adopted child wasn't adopted at birth,
| their formative years would greatly impact what is perceived
| as nature. Its a meme that parents are generally more
| cavalier and relaxed with later children than they are with
| the first, and that is a significant environmental variable.
|
| Nature definitely hardwires in some baseline chemistry, but
| those first couple of years have a huge impact on how a child
| will deal with that chemistry.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| The part of the essay that made me the most introspective was:
|
| " Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
| I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would
| have been had they been white and living in the South before
| abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists!
| They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and
| worked tirelessly against it. "
|
| I had to stop and ask myself that question.
| naveen99 wrote:
| It's a weakly specified / trick question. Do you get to keep
| your knowledge of the world as it is today ? if not how are you
| different than people 200 years ago ? So you can just ask what
| your ancestor's position would have been. Which we already know
| the answer to.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| The question forced to me ask myself if my values and
| convictions remain strong in the absence of knowledge. Do I
| know that slavery is terrible or do I believe in equality of
| humans? In the first case it's memorization, which is very
| specific to context. If I believe in the equality of humans,
| I can apply that belief across contexts and still reach
| unconventional conclusions.
|
| Personally, I know I would not have been much different
| because I'm not much different today.
| tfehring wrote:
| It's pretty clear that you don't get to keep your knowledge
| of the world as it is today - if you did, the question would
| collapse to "Do you support slavery?" which is much less
| interesting.
|
| Asking what your ancestors believed is also a bit of a miss.
| My ancestors in the US were all German-American, and German-
| Americans overwhelmingly opposed slavery, so my ancestors
| probably opposed it, and I probably would have opposed it too
| if I had been part of that population, but that's obviously a
| total cop-out.
|
| So take the framing of, say you were born into a white slave-
| owning family in the antebellum American South. Would you
| have freed your slaves and joined the abolitionist movement?
| The actual people in that situation weren't _entirely_ a
| monolith - surely at least a few of them actually did that.
| But if the actual share who did so was, say, 1% of the
| population, then you have to think you 're in the top 1% in
| terms of some combination of empathy, racial tolerance,
| forward-thinkingness, etc. to claim that you would. The
| question is useful _because_ we 're not different than people
| 200 years ago, no matter how much we like to think we are.
|
| I think the obvious and more explicit follow-up question is
| even better though - "What beliefs do you hold today that
| will be viewed as negatively 200 years from now as slavery is
| today?" If the answer is "none," we must be in such a utopia
| to have finally reached the end-state of human moral
| development.
| projektfu wrote:
| It's an interesting question for a lot of reasons. I live in
| the South, so perhaps if I had been living in the South in
| 1859 I would have supported slavery. But my ancestors were
| living in the North, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and fought in
| the Civil War on the side of the Union, so presumably they
| opposed slavery. So if I had been reared by those ancestors,
| I likely would have opposed slavery. But then again, I'm a
| bit of a contrarian by personality, so I may have had the
| opposite viewpoint from my surroundings. Perhaps not opposing
| slavery in the South, but opposing fighting to preserve it.
| Perhaps not supporting slavery in the North, but opposing a
| destructive war and supporting the rights of individual
| states to determine their own fate and secede. Or personal
| things could be involved. Suppose as a northerner I saw an
| opportunity to join the family of a wealthy Southern planter.
| Or as a southerner, I wished that certain slaves who were
| friends could be free. So it goes down to what your
| environment is and what person you are in that environment.
| chippy wrote:
| People don't want to admit that evil is done by people like
| ourselves. Asking what your dead evil ancestors would do is
| different from asking what you would do.
|
| If you were born back then, with no knowledge of the future,
| you would be a Good Person no matter the conditions, right?
| himinlomax wrote:
| Very interesting take. This reminds me of Bob Altemeyer's work.
| He summed up his decades of research on authoritarianism in a
| free ebook at https://www.theauthoritarians.org/ .
|
| I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important
| work of political science / social psychology I've ever read.
|
| Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social
| dominant" map to Graham's "passively conventional" and
| "aggressively conventional." The latter also tends to correspond
| to what psychiatrists would describe as narcissist, anti-social
| and possibly psychopathic traits.
|
| For example, he conducted experiments as role playing games, like
| a model United Nations. When he removed the few "social
| dominants" from the player pool, the game ran smoothly, there was
| peace and everyone went to Alpha Centauri or something.
|
| But when he _added_ a few social dominants, things went to hell
| quick, and nuclear war broke out. Note that social dominants /
| narcissists are typically at most a few percents of the
| population.
|
| I'm sure many people have noticed the phenomenon in any
| organisation: when a narcissist gets a modicum of power, they can
| destroy an organisation from within.
| soundnote wrote:
| Altemeyer should be viewed with some suspicion: He thinks left-
| wing authoritarianism is a "Loch Ness monster", and in talks
| with David Friedman couldn't comprehend why eg. labor unions
| could constitute an authority to a person - he viewed union
| membership purely in transactional terms with little
| ideological content.
|
| His scale may identify a certain kind of authoritarian, but his
| work is almost assuredly blind as a bat to others and not a
| comprehensive take.
| erichocean wrote:
| > _when a narcissist gets a modicum of power, they can destroy
| an organisation from within_
|
| Or, as with Hitler, they can take over a formerly-democratic
| country and plunge them into war.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I believe Steve Jobs was a narcissist or had some of those
| traits, but he did just the opposite. It's not necessarily true
| that narcissists are destructive. I think they are a mixed bag.
| Sometimes they are constructive and work within the system to
| improve things, even if it's ultimately to improve their own
| standing in the world.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This dude has to get out more and hang out with people who aren't
| like Peter Thiel. (Thiel burns me up. I feel stupid because he
| fooled me into buying a Girard book.)
|
| He's got an open invitation to stay in my treehouse but he seems
| to refuse to go anywhere that has weather. Maybe he melts like a
| witch when it rains or something.
| kwistzhaderach wrote:
| What's wrong with Girard's ideas?
| tome wrote:
| > he seems to refuse to go anywhere that has weather. Maybe he
| melts like a witch when it rains or something.
|
| It seems to be _de rigeur_ in this thread to point out that he
| now resides in the UK.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| When you ad hominem, you immediately tap out of the discussion.
| darepublic wrote:
| So one quadrant upvotes the posts they like, and downvotes the
| ones they don't like, another quadrant simply upvotes the posts
| they like, another tries to find a middle ground and mend rifts,
| another has no account, lurks and laughs inside.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely
| independent-minded, but aggressively so.
|
| > So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same
| way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite
|
| Which is it?
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| I read almost all of the essay assuming that the _conventional-
| minded people_ meant the woke cultural Marxists. They are the
| conventional wisdom today. He should have used the word
| _conservative:_
|
| [1] _On (The Future Of) Conservatism_
|
| .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w
|
| Most young Western people seem to be _conventional_ in the
| progressive tradition, because they were indoctrinated at school
| and university by ex-hippies from the 1960s, who couldn 't
| actually _do_ anything, so they all became teachers. Sixty years
| is more than enough to become the conventional wisdom.
|
| Marx proposed a keen and mesmerizing analysis of Capitalism, a
| plausible (but wrong) diagnosis, then a completely ridiculous and
| laughably naive solution. Real class-based Marxism was proved
| wrong many times over, so the Frankfurt School and 1960s French
| philosophers decided to switch the dialectic, from class-based
| polarization, to group identity politics and the anti-scientific
| relativism of non-truths. _Struggle by any other name would smell
| as sweet._
|
| America is now in the middle of its Maoist _Cultural Revolution._
| Let 's see what happens. The world is watching. Does the
| Enlightenment survive? It's certainly up for grabs at this point.
|
| The precedent is not good. China was utterly laid waste for
| decades by Mao. Tens of millions died, leaving a legacy of
| intellectual, historical and economic impoverishment.
|
| It is hard to imagine anyone more evil than Mao, because his
| fear-mongering catastrophes and casual genocides were so
| routinely inflicted against his own people, his supportive party
| colleagues, his family, his (ex)wives, and even his children:
|
| [2] _Mao: The Unknown Story,_ Jung Chang & Jon Halliday.
|
| [3] _Nine Commentaries on the (Chinese) Communist Party_
|
| .... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLED64004A96BE76FA
|
| [4] _Evolution Of Evil: Mao Zedong_
|
| .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxaWmqgmJxs
|
| Let us see what happens in America ...
| alexashka wrote:
| Paul Graham continues to re-invent what others have pointed out
| in more succinct and clever ways.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
|
| You can almost guess what Paul is going to write about - just see
| what cliche is being discussed on Twitter and come up with the
| laziest thought that an average programmer will find 'insightful'
| - that's Paul Graham's next 'essay' :)
| cjfd wrote:
| Regarding the use of the 'aggressively conventional minded'. When
| I was younger I would think that these kind of people were mostly
| just detrimental to society but I have come to see that they
| sometimes have a use. It is this kind of people who were the
| first to see that immigration and multiculturalism have their
| limits. For instance, salafism cannot just be seen as just
| another opinion that people can have. Of course, the 'agressively
| conventional minded' would put it in a bit more stark words than
| 'have their limits' and would also extend their warning messages
| to far greater groups than actually warranted but the other three
| types of people might just close their eyes to the whole problem.
| Generally, the 'aggressively conventional minded' can be helpful
| when a society is in danger of degrading into lawlessnes. They
| will be the first to sound the alarm and sometimes they are
| right.
| devdas wrote:
| The Salafists are just the Islamic version of the evangelical
| churches in America.
| mantap wrote:
| Salafism itself is aggressive conventional-mindednessness. I'm
| sure they would say that it is the west that is sliding into
| lawlessness. The laws are very different but the thinking is
| the same.
| [deleted]
| GCA10 wrote:
| Lots of great ideas here -- but in keeping with all top-vintage
| Paul Graham essays, he takes his best points to about 130% of
| their validity.
|
| So I'd like to weigh in on this assertion: "To be a successful
| scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You
| have to be right when everyone else is wrong."
|
| Not so. To be a successful scientist, you need to be orderly,
| fast and well-connected in finding all the rest of the Next
| Rights, once a few of your peers (or you) have opened up a whole
| new river of truth by finding the first right. (See James Watson,
| Ernest Lawrence, etc.)
|
| You can see this in the evolution of practically every exciting
| field, whether it's subatomic physics, molecular biology,
| paleontology, etc.
|
| This dynamic requires a fifth state in Graham's admirably simple
| 2x2 grid. We need to recognize people that can be defiant non-
| conformists when the moment presents itself -- and then work
| within the system to make the most of their second and third-
| order insights as the world embraces their big idea.
|
| The concept of the brilliant, isolated, irritable genius is a
| mainstay of a certain kind of movie or novel. But in real life,
| the most effective disrupters are just as good at forming large
| teams that lead the charge toward the next right (once they've
| found their breakthrough idea) as in coming up with that
| breathtakingly strange new idea in the first place.
| reginaldo wrote:
| I also stopped on the assertion about the successful scientist,
| but instead of outright disagreeing, I took it to mean that the
| definition of successful scientists for pg includes mostly the
| starters of new paradigms, regardless of the ideas being
| accepted during their lifetimes or not.
| [deleted]
| vikramkr wrote:
| I'm unsure about your example of James Watson as a successful
| scientist. He was successful, yes, and was a scientist. But I
| don't think he was successful as a scientist. Rosalind Franklin
| made the key scientific insights crucial to figuring out DNA's
| structure. She wasn't even actually the person that took Photo
| 51, that was her student. She was, however, the one who
| presented her insights that the phosphate backbone is on the
| outside of the molecule, one of the most crucial insights to
| figuring out how DNA works since prior to that watson crick et
| al thought the backbone was on the inside. That goes beyond
| just "contributing" the photo, that's actually generating the
| scientific insights that unlocked the structure of the molecule
| before being derided as an assistant incapable of understanding
| her own data by watson and then dying without a nobel. In light
| of that, I don't see how watson can get credit as a successful
| scientist. Crick went on to make other contributions such as
| codifying the central dogma, watson not so much.
| logicslave wrote:
| By successful scientist he means someone who changes a
| scientific paradigm, creates a new field, or really pushes the
| field forwards. Incremental discoveries are not under this
| umbrella
| clairity wrote:
| > "This dynamic requires a fifth state in Graham's admirably
| simple 2x2 grid. We need to recognize people that can be
| defiant non-conformists when the moment presents itself..."
|
| to be aggressively non-conformist, that's the _critical_
| mistake pg makes: we 're dynamic, complicated creatures
| embedded in an infinitely complex system. who we are in a given
| moment is not who we are at another moment. to define ourselves
| as "being" one type or the other is a gross error of static
| categorization. we're each of them at different moments in our
| lives, frittering among them, and beyond them, constantly.
|
| put succinctly: fuck labels.
|
| that's not to say the conceptual framework isn't useful, but
| his static application of it is in error.
| [deleted]
| kristianc wrote:
| > For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely
| independent-minded, but aggressively so.
|
| Luckily there's an easy way to verify this - how many of the
| current YC cohort are B2B SaaS startups?
|
| Today's collection of startup CEOs are the very opposite of
| aggressively independent minded - they're people who 15 years ago
| would have done an MBA or gone into finance.
| dencodev wrote:
| I'm not sure I find much meaning in this essay because everyone's
| definition of "conventional" and "independent" depends on their
| own bias. PG's own definition of independently minded seems to be
| "they have all the new ideas". If that's the case, then
| universities are absolutely a place of independently minded
| people when compared to the baby boomers and older generations.
|
| Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that
| overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I
| consider "conventionally minded" and definitely counts as a "new
| idea" when viewing it through the lens of racism and homophobia
| in America since its inception. As others posted, it's not clear
| to me what PG is referring to as conventionally minded at
| universities, but the issues I mentioned are typically at the
| forefront of political issues at schools these days.
|
| Here's what I find conventionally minded thinking: supporting
| capitalism and accumulating ridiculous amounts of wealth without
| guilt. If you're the type of person who sees an abnormally high
| level of sociopaths in non-profits[1] and honestly believes the
| "defining quality of nonprofits is to make no profit, not to do
| good" has any significant basis in reality, perhaps that says
| more about your bias against non-profits than it does about the
| people in it. And that bias, to me, reeks of conformity.
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040
| philwelch wrote:
| > Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues
| that overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not
| what I consider "conventionally minded"
|
| It's so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500
| corporation has done so in unison.
|
| I think there's a part of pg's essay that's doing a lot more
| work than people realize, because everyone keeps missing it:
|
| " When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with
| respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For
| younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get
| older, the source of rules becomes their peers. _So a pack of
| teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not
| independent-minded; rather the opposite._ "
| dencodev wrote:
| >It's so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500
| corporation has done so in unison.
|
| For literally the first time in history, and most of the
| Fortune 500 "speaking out" is just empty words without any
| real action. Look how progressive Amazon is, putting the BLM
| banner on their homepage for a couple weeks. Meanwhile Bezos
| is still perpetuating awful working conditions that
| disproportionately impact his POC employees.
|
| I'm in my 30s and rules in my life are not set by my peers.
| They're set by the older generations who overwhelmingly feel
| and act like "Fuck you, got mine". My life is overwhelmingly
| dictated by the rich and powerful and privileged, everywhere
| from where I live and how I live to where I work and how I
| work. I have very little say in how my life works, and it's
| rare that I ever see someone my age having any impact on
| that.
|
| Also, people (and university students) don't live in a
| bubble. It is absolutely independently minded to grow up
| around parents and teachers that all have the same beliefs
| and then to be able to form your own beliefs that diverge
| largely from theirs. Just because you have people around you
| that made the same step doesn't make you conformist.
| philwelch wrote:
| So you have an external locus of control, that sounds like
| a personal problem but let's roll with it. Maybe you're
| right and the rules aren't set by your peers, but that
| wasn't the point of the example. The point was
| conventional-minded people can often feel rebellious by
| following a certain garden path of "conventional rebellion"
| that has been specifically laid out for them. That doesn't
| actually make them independent-minded. In fact, you're even
| worse off than you think because both the society that you
| live in and the specific way in which you choose to rebel
| against it are both completely outside your control and
| presented to you as closed systems that you have no input
| or contribution to.
| dencodev wrote:
| What is conventional rebellion? I label myself as anti-
| capitalist which is pretty uncommon in the US, but
| communism as a concept is not in any way unique or new
| and there have been millions of supporters of communism
| throughout history.
|
| If I identify with values that less than 1% of the
| population identifies with, am I conformist?
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Ah, conventional minded people are those who insist that those
| who break the rules are bad, worthless in society, and should be
| punished.
|
| Then Mr. Graham goes on to say that the rules of civilized,
| successful, wealthy societies are that everyone should be free to
| debate even the worst of ideas, and the people who prevent this
| or disagree with this are bad, never become entrepreneurs (a
| laughable thought), are not worth considering, and are in fact
| responsible for all bad things in the world (well, they and the
| leaders who appeal to them, only those two groups of people!)
|
| It's laughably puerile... I mean how does he think this way? Has
| he any idea that one of the most valuable companies in the entire
| world is from a wealthy, civilized (in terms of lack of crime and
| lots of social etiquette only), successful country which has no
| concept of free expression (ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia)?
|
| How do intelligent people end up reducing the world into such
| obviously untrue caricatures? How does he think that convention
| is the enemy of new ideas? Following convention is also the same
| thing as learning from the past or standing on the shoulders of
| giants. Without regard for convention at some level, the
| "geniuses" Mr. Graham praises would have been reinventing the
| wheel over and over and over again!
| hashbig wrote:
| ARAMCO and Saudi Arabia by extension were not built because of
| innovation. PG is talking about the importance of discussing
| idea regardless of how unorthodox they are, because the
| majority of successful companies are built, believe it or not,
| using ideas and not oil.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Yes they were built by innovation. Creation of a new country
| no matter how it happens is an innovation. Creation of a new
| company, no matter how it happens, is an innovation.
|
| Growing a company also is an innovation. You can only grow by
| venturing into new areas. If you think ARAMCO has never made
| any improvements in petroleum engineering, cyber security,
| logistics, etc, then you are daft. If all they had was oil
| fields they wouldn't make so much money. It's a combination
| of having them, knowing how to extract wealth from them,
| knowing how to identify more, and knowing how to reduce
| competition (OPEC is an example of constant innovation, there
| is no precedent to follow in setting the prices for a
| commodity like oil which humans have never relied on as
| extensively as they do now).
| peteretep wrote:
| > How do intelligent people end up reducing the world into such
| obviously untrue caricatures?
|
| Hot take: as a function of increasing age
| MH15 wrote:
| Ooh this is one I haven't heard before. Now I'm thinking.
| t_serpico wrote:
| that, hubris, and intellectual dishonesty
| jmeister wrote:
| The only rebuttal to PG in your comment is ARAMCO, which was a
| state-run org till recently, and is nothing like the companies
| PG is talking about.
|
| Try again.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| There are at least 2 others. Reread and see if you can find
| them.
|
| Also, being state run doesn't mean you aren't innovative.
| It's a different game but still requires innovation.
| Companies don't grow and grow and grow without any innovation
| at all.
| philwelch wrote:
| ARAMCO is wealthy because they own all the oil in Saudi
| Arabia.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Since this is claimed to come down to personality types, it would
| make sense to look at research on personality types. There is a
| model of personality types that seems relate-able where people
| are characterized as upholder, rebel, questioner, or obliger [1].
| The aggressive ones line up at least:
|
| upholder = tattletales, rebel = naughty ones
|
| I don't think that equating the passive category to personality
| types in this model works, but it would be:
|
| questioner = dreamy ones, obliger = sheep
|
| The reason being that obliger is characterized more by
| relationships with others (aggressive/passive) than by being
| conventional or independent minded.
|
| [1] https://psychcentral.com/blog/4-personality-types-the-
| uphold...
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