"Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased."
Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit. You don't even need to go back a few hundred years; look at the number of people persecuted by the government (both through the courts and outside of it) for things like blasphemy, subversion, civil rights, sexual deviancy (homosexuality, among other things), etc. just a few decades ago. In the US burning the flag was illegal in many states until the late 80s when the SCOTUS declared it was legal under the 1st (and only by a 5-4 majority).
Yes, there are some developments I am not especially pleased with either, but it's also important to remember the historical context.
I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today?
What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's -- but because they're on the receiving end for once. This could be a good thing in the end, by leading us to a more complete model of civil discourse, but it's going to be painful for a while before that even has a chance to happen.
I think the problem with this argument is the free speech "is at an all time high if you zoom out a bit". This is much like the argument, "gun violence is at an all time low if you zoom out a bit" argument.
Both of these statements are true in the macro, but if you look at the trends, they point to a very disturbing line.
The call for the restriction of free speech on the right(1) and the left (2) have increased in very different ways and seem to be increasing, both legislatively and socially. The same can be said of gun violence. We reached an all time low in 2018 (I believe - it might have been 2017) but have been trending upwards ever since.
Most (reasonable) people agree that an effort should be made to curb gun violence, even if they can't agree on the best route to get there. The attack on free speech, however seems to have cheering sections from all sides. As far as the government is concerned, sanctions on the first amendment would be a boon, but the groundswell from the populace in the form of right and left "cancelation" (or whatever BS term you wish to call it) hasn't been seen since McCarthy. Given the rise in the public square with social media, and you have national feeding frenzies with public "witch trials" to take our minds off of inflation, oil prices, pollution and multiple global conflicts of questionable national interest.
The speed with which society is moving is also a factor.
Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any
epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.
I think Graham is slightly missing the point about our period. It's
not that heresy is on the up, so much as it's on the move. Outrage is
a homeless beast. We're in an Orwellian age where it changes with the
seasons, so what is heresy in one place and time is a tepid platitude
only next door the following week.
Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi
acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik. It would have once been
"dangerous" (at least in a fairly pedestrian job) to say that Google
is a crappy old search engine, Facebook is a threat to democracy and
Microsoft are corrupt criminals. Today it's practically de rigueur
to cock a snook at jaded icons. It's practically a credential.
In 1985 you could say “homosexuality is a disease and all gay should be locked up” and you wouldn’t have to be too worried about your employment. Today you can say “I’m gay” and don’t have to worry about being fired for it. I like today’s freedom of expression better.
Censorship is much more visible in modern social media because it happens after the publishing. Somebody publishes something, and then the platform reviews the material and decides to block it. In print media the filtering happened before material was published. Newspapers only print a tiny fraction of the "letters to the editor" they receive, but it doesn't feel like censorship.
The 90s was a strange ideological moment -- the eastern religion failed, so the western religion admitted pluralism within its own denominations. It was an interregnum in which the liberal democratic order was unchallenged.
It is, today, challenged from all sides. What PG et al. call "free speech" was just the peace of a political moment. In every other era "free speech" is a demand with costs; we should expect that to be the default.
> The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left.
This is an (aggressively?) conventional idea that I have an (I guess) heretical opinion about. I'm somewhat persuaded that there is a recent outbreak of intolerance for differing ideas and ideals (though I suspect every generation expresses a version of this opinion as they get older and become out of step with cultural evolution), but I don't think it has any particular political valence. I have to watch my tongue just as much around "aggressive conventionalists" on either side, they just have different conventions. It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right, to express opinions like "immigrants are good", "the 2020 US presidential election ran smoothly and had a clear victor who was duly inaugurated", "gender is a social construct", "people who are attracted to others of the same sex are normal and should have the same rights as anyone else", etc. etc.
Honestly I think this whole thing is as simple as, people just have different views and lots of people of all stripes don't want to agree to disagree with the people they spend most of their time with.
In that article, Popehat talks about the need to define cancel culture and understand how the free speech rights of the first speaker intersect with the free speech and association rights of people that respond.
I think the most useful aspect of PG's article is that he does actually define what he means by heresy:
> Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done
PG doesn't give any examples, but I do think that trying to be clear around definitions in order to be able to say "is this an example of heresy at work?" or "has this person been unfairly cancelled?" is a valuable exercise.
FWIW, my main reason for commenting is that I find Popehat's article to be a valuable addition to the conversation because it's specifically addressing the "cancel culture" terminology rather than trying to swirl a new term (heresy) into the mix.
Has anyone considered this whole phenomenon from a materialist analysis? Global society is more interconnected than before. The public discourse on social media platforms is huge. It’s also hugely polarized for multitudes of reasons. People (on the Internet) are getting into arguments with more people than ever before, usually with strangers.
From that perspective, canceling/labeling heresy could potentially be thought of simply an act of automation. People identify reoccurring patterns of arguments, classify their adversary, and use a cached response. Thus, instead of spending the costly time and energy to respond to every argument in detail, you tag, use the appropriate function, and move on. And because modern society is so polarized, those functions tend to be fairly absolute- who wants to get dragged into another argument they’ve had before?
The problem is that modern discourse just can’t scale.
Totally. I have no idea about Paul Graham's upbringing, but back in the 80s and 90s I was a "fag" threatened with violence just for being a slightly effeminate nerd obsessed with computers and weird music, etc.. One didn't even have to be gay to be subject to homophobic hate and intolerance. I have teenagers now -- one self-identified queer high schooler and the other a middle schooler in a tiny rural school not unlike where I grew up -- and today's society is an amazingly tolerant dream compared to what I grew up with.
Even if people may disagree about the specific year, the initial upward and currently downward trend is unmistakable and visible also all over Western Europe.
The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and often destroy large amounts of healthy tissue and in some cases, entire organisms.
I don’t think his assertions are wrong but I don’t think castigating people as “aggressively conventional minded” is the right approach. In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It’s not enough to have an opinion, there has to be a bad guy or an evil group of people intent on destroying society.
I’m not sure how to solve this problem — open to suggestions and brainstorming, it’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.
One of my favourite short stories by Borges is "The Theologians"[1], which deals with a contest between two theologians in suppressing heresy. It's absolutely wonderful how Borges managed to turn dry scholastic debate into a fascinating and gripping narrative. It also contains this wonderfully ironic scene when one of the theologian's past writings which was used to eradicate a previous heresy but have since fallen out of fashion was unearthed. The poor fellow insisted that it was still orthodox but everyone except him have moved on and under the latest opinion the old writing now appeared hopelessly heretical.
I've extracted a paragraph below, but the whole story is quite short and well worth reading.
>Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones’ deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered by this crime obliged John’s judges to assume an unexceptionable severity. He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake.
I wish he would just give examples or at least speak slightly more plainly about his complaint. I would understand his complaint more (and be able to decide whether I agree with him, although I’m fairly sure I don’t) if he would just say something very plainly like “I liked it better in 1985 when you could say X and have zero risk of losing your job.”
There's a quotation that "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." I think the problem is that PG is determined to demonstrate that he has a great mind, and must therefore discuss only abstract ideas. Lowering the discourse to include events or people is not an option. Unfortunately, the essay isn't exactly about heresy, it's about accusations of heresy, who makes them, and if the incidence is rising. So the essay can't really get to its subject.
Which wrongthink is not the issue being discussed here and is beside the point. This is about principle. The issue is not being able to hold any wrongthink beliefs (and discuss them) while also holding a job. If you can't think of anything which may be true but also offensive enough to get someone fired for proclaiming it, you may be guilty of being a 'conventional thinker'.
I think what Paul is describing is blasphemy more than heresy. Blasphemy is a single public statement contrary to official doctrine while heresy is the public endorsement of a school of thought that contradicts official doctrine in some nontrivial way.
Paul's connotation for heresy is: A dismissing B due to a specific statement from B (blasphemy) that contradict A's canon of orthodox beliefs (religion).
But I think that incorrectly conflates individual opinion into an unforgivable sin, punishable only with excommunication or death. Historically, cases of heresy arose when someone like Gallileo proposed a viable model of the universe that contradicted dogma, not when they made a single isolated statement of dissonance. The latter were commonplace in secular writing even early in the Enlightenment. (Blasphemy did alienate freethinkers like Voltaire to the Church and Royalty; but it didn't get him imprisoned or killed. It was direct opposition to Royal dogma that did that, like Sir Thomas More's excommunication by Henry VIII).
BTW, 1918's Sedition Act was passed after the US entered WWI, as an emergency expedient intended to squelch open opposition to the war. It isn't really comparable to the concepts of heresy or blasphemy against a canon of beliefs, since Wilson's decision to go to war wasn't a persistent dogma that needed protection. The Act was a temporary martial law (like Lincoln's suppression of the Maryland government for the duration of the Civil War) to be lifted after the immediate threat to fighting a war had passed.
> Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.
> Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
I think that whether this is or true or not depends a lot on how you define your terms. If cancel culture only means "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights on TV and then lost my job", then yes, the window is narrower now than in 1985. But if it also includes "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights in a bar and then got beaten up," it is not.
This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence. Paul Graham tweets a lot about this issue, and cancel culture is something he is apparently very sensitive too. It makes me wonder what happened - as given his lack of evidence - it appears to be an emotional reaction rather than a logical one.
As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wondered if that might be due to a change in the cost of university education, which means universities are more akin to businesses servicing clients. And the first thing you’ll always hear in a client-facing business is…
_”Don’t piss off your customers”._
A sad commercial reality because a diversity of opinion in education is valuable.
I’ll point out that saying true statements but framing them in a racist or sexist way is an extremely common tactic. In fact, it’s the preferred tactic of many bad actors because it’s very easy to hide behind the “but it’s true!” defence.
Something can be true and also presented with racist or sexist intent.
> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion.
I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a women which very clearly was the polar opposite, or how all people with a certain enthnicity have a certain negative trait etc.
These people were not guilty of heresy they were insensitive assholes (when done on purpose) or at least ignorant.
In an honest discussion with someone about e.g. the differences between men and women, I never called someone a sexist, just because their ideas were outdated and flawed as long as it actually was an discussion. The thing is, that more often than not the goal of people spouting such things is not getting to the bottom of things, but validating their own opinion. This is of course out of insecurity, which is why calling someone sexist is not a good way to respond in such an situation. Better is to ask them what they mean and have them explain it to you. And if they realize themselves they are sounding a bit odd, you can just tell them this is not your experience.
This is an essay about what is largely a social media phenomenon. You can avoid the whole thing by just not participating. Seems like a waste of energy to even discuss vs just realizing that arguing publicly on a global scale is not a good use of your limited time on Earth.
> You can avoid the whole thing by just not participating.
No you can't. If someone records you saying something heretical, they can share it on social media and the cancel mob will get you fired from your job, even if you don't have social media yourself.
Except that the conversations on social media seeps into and spills over into other facets of real life and affects public discourse on traditional mass media and public policy in general.
When you say or do socially unacceptable things, there can be consequences. Is that “heresy”? I always associated that word with religion, myself, but it’s interesting that religion is so out of favor right now that you can use it as a comparison to argue that any action not explicitly illegal should be free of negative consequence.
> The clearest evidence of this [that some x-ist statements may be true] is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).
The behavior he's calling "heresy" here cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; these kinds of statements are all contextual, ESPECIALLY hinging on who is saying them. And the reason that is the case is because the consequences of saying something are different depending on who says them.
Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is judged in a harsher light because those words have a much stronger effect than if, say, some L2 software engineer on Twitter said them. If PG says something that _could_ be interpreted as racist, it threatens to normalize believing that in the minds of the people who follow him. If L2 says something that is on the fence, at worst some of their immediate friends will pile on to them about how uncool that was (barring the rare occasions of people going viral for bad takes, which is an outlier).
I think that's reasonable social policing to keep our discourse healthy. Having that influence over people demands a price in return. If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.
You have invented a “harm principle” to be used when evaluating truth, and the fact that you think this is a cogent argument is scarier than anything Paul Graham might have said.
One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.
> If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.
No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.
James Damore was a lowly software engineer and that did not save him from being canceled by the mob and losing his job. All the more outrageous because his working paper was an honest and forthright - and broadly accurate - response to an express request for feedback about how to improve working conditions. Shades of "let a thousand flowers bloom".
I mean, he didn’t say it, but this identity politics driven perspective is entirely the current thing wrong with the left. I say this as a moderate.
Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine.
This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis.
A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.
Is it a good thing that filters of all sorts are eradicated? Never before has a thought been able to travel as freely as it can now, 5 of the 8 billion people in the world have the internet, in a few seconds a thought you utter is potentially accessible to half of humanity. But this thought forgoes the chance to be interpreted, re-interpreted by mentors and participants in your community, your parents, peer-reviewed in some manner, honed, reconsidered before meeting the wider public.
Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.
I read it as he wants pushback—that he wants to engage in a back and forth discussion, almost like two people in a fight pushing each other, not a fight where people push each other for a minute and then the other pulls out a gun. I understood his definition of heresy as a tool for wanting to end debate, not deepen it.
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
"Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased."
Many people proclaim that "free speech is dead" and all of that, but it's still at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit. You don't even need to go back a few hundred years; look at the number of people persecuted by the government (both through the courts and outside of it) for things like blasphemy, subversion, civil rights, sexual deviancy (homosexuality, among other things), etc. just a few decades ago. In the US burning the flag was illegal in many states until the late 80s when the SCOTUS declared it was legal under the 1st (and only by a 5-4 majority).
Yes, there are some developments I am not especially pleased with either, but it's also important to remember the historical context.
Anyway, I liked this piece of nuance.
[+] [-] amalcon|3 years ago|reply
What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for vocally opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's -- but because they're on the receiving end for once. This could be a good thing in the end, by leading us to a more complete model of civil discourse, but it's going to be painful for a while before that even has a chance to happen.
[+] [-] UnpossibleJim|3 years ago|reply
Both of these statements are true in the macro, but if you look at the trends, they point to a very disturbing line.
The call for the restriction of free speech on the right(1) and the left (2) have increased in very different ways and seem to be increasing, both legislatively and socially. The same can be said of gun violence. We reached an all time low in 2018 (I believe - it might have been 2017) but have been trending upwards ever since.
Most (reasonable) people agree that an effort should be made to curb gun violence, even if they can't agree on the best route to get there. The attack on free speech, however seems to have cheering sections from all sides. As far as the government is concerned, sanctions on the first amendment would be a boon, but the groundswell from the populace in the form of right and left "cancelation" (or whatever BS term you wish to call it) hasn't been seen since McCarthy. Given the rise in the public square with social media, and you have national feeding frenzies with public "witch trials" to take our minds off of inflation, oil prices, pollution and multiple global conflicts of questionable national interest.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-free-speech-is-under-attack...
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/566119-for-the-left-a-...
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.
I think Graham is slightly missing the point about our period. It's not that heresy is on the up, so much as it's on the move. Outrage is a homeless beast. We're in an Orwellian age where it changes with the seasons, so what is heresy in one place and time is a tepid platitude only next door the following week.
Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment, but the fanboi acolytes or loyal minor apparatchik. It would have once been "dangerous" (at least in a fairly pedestrian job) to say that Google is a crappy old search engine, Facebook is a threat to democracy and Microsoft are corrupt criminals. Today it's practically de rigueur to cock a snook at jaded icons. It's practically a credential.
[+] [-] Ma8ee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goto11|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjburgess|3 years ago|reply
It is, today, challenged from all sides. What PG et al. call "free speech" was just the peace of a political moment. In every other era "free speech" is a demand with costs; we should expect that to be the default.
[+] [-] sanderjd|3 years ago|reply
This is an (aggressively?) conventional idea that I have an (I guess) heretical opinion about. I'm somewhat persuaded that there is a recent outbreak of intolerance for differing ideas and ideals (though I suspect every generation expresses a version of this opinion as they get older and become out of step with cultural evolution), but I don't think it has any particular political valence. I have to watch my tongue just as much around "aggressive conventionalists" on either side, they just have different conventions. It's just as disqualifying as the x-isms from the left, if you care about staying in the good graces of convention on the right, to express opinions like "immigrants are good", "the 2020 US presidential election ran smoothly and had a clear victor who was duly inaugurated", "gender is a social construct", "people who are attracted to others of the same sex are normal and should have the same rights as anyone else", etc. etc.
Honestly I think this whole thing is as simple as, people just have different views and lots of people of all stripes don't want to agree to disagree with the people they spend most of their time with.
[+] [-] dangoor|3 years ago|reply
In that article, Popehat talks about the need to define cancel culture and understand how the free speech rights of the first speaker intersect with the free speech and association rights of people that respond.
I think the most useful aspect of PG's article is that he does actually define what he means by heresy:
> Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done
PG doesn't give any examples, but I do think that trying to be clear around definitions in order to be able to say "is this an example of heresy at work?" or "has this person been unfairly cancelled?" is a valuable exercise.
FWIW, my main reason for commenting is that I find Popehat's article to be a valuable addition to the conversation because it's specifically addressing the "cancel culture" terminology rather than trying to swirl a new term (heresy) into the mix.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|3 years ago|reply
From that perspective, canceling/labeling heresy could potentially be thought of simply an act of automation. People identify reoccurring patterns of arguments, classify their adversary, and use a cached response. Thus, instead of spending the costly time and energy to respond to every argument in detail, you tag, use the appropriate function, and move on. And because modern society is so polarized, those functions tend to be fairly absolute- who wants to get dragged into another argument they’ve had before?
The problem is that modern discourse just can’t scale.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|3 years ago|reply
There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture that you didn’t defy very easily.
I'm a bit surprised how easily people forget these things.
[+] [-] Avshalom|3 years ago|reply
just sayin'. maybe 1985 sucked a lot for a lot of people that weren't paul graham.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|3 years ago|reply
Have you considered the possibility that oppressing gay people and firing people with unpopular opinions are both wrong and should be opposed?
[+] [-] Skiiing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jounker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blub|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithwhor|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think his assertions are wrong but I don’t think castigating people as “aggressively conventional minded” is the right approach. In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It’s not enough to have an opinion, there has to be a bad guy or an evil group of people intent on destroying society.
I’m not sure how to solve this problem — open to suggestions and brainstorming, it’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.
[+] [-] Aidevah|3 years ago|reply
I've extracted a paragraph below, but the whole story is quite short and well worth reading.
>Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones’ deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered by this crime obliged John’s judges to assume an unexceptionable severity. He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake.
[1] https://matiane.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/jorge-luis-borges-t...
[+] [-] neumann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tshaddox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmm6o|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dbsmith83|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidOrTaken|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] randcraw|3 years ago|reply
Paul's connotation for heresy is: A dismissing B due to a specific statement from B (blasphemy) that contradict A's canon of orthodox beliefs (religion).
But I think that incorrectly conflates individual opinion into an unforgivable sin, punishable only with excommunication or death. Historically, cases of heresy arose when someone like Gallileo proposed a viable model of the universe that contradicted dogma, not when they made a single isolated statement of dissonance. The latter were commonplace in secular writing even early in the Enlightenment. (Blasphemy did alienate freethinkers like Voltaire to the Church and Royalty; but it didn't get him imprisoned or killed. It was direct opposition to Royal dogma that did that, like Sir Thomas More's excommunication by Henry VIII).
BTW, 1918's Sedition Act was passed after the US entered WWI, as an emergency expedient intended to squelch open opposition to the war. It isn't really comparable to the concepts of heresy or blasphemy against a canon of beliefs, since Wilson's decision to go to war wasn't a persistent dogma that needed protection. The Act was a temporary martial law (like Lincoln's suppression of the Maryland government for the duration of the Civil War) to be lifted after the immediate threat to fighting a war had passed.
[+] [-] jounker|3 years ago|reply
In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.
[+] [-] ineptech|3 years ago|reply
I think that whether this is or true or not depends a lot on how you define your terms. If cancel culture only means "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights on TV and then lost my job", then yes, the window is narrower now than in 1985. But if it also includes "I expressed an unpopular opinion about gay rights in a bar and then got beaten up," it is not.
[+] [-] Biologist123|3 years ago|reply
As an aside, most examples of people being fired for expressing opinions seem to come from academia. I’ve wondered if that might be due to a change in the cost of university education, which means universities are more akin to businesses servicing clients. And the first thing you’ll always hear in a client-facing business is…
_”Don’t piss off your customers”._
A sad commercial reality because a diversity of opinion in education is valuable.
[+] [-] chasing|3 years ago|reply
Something can be true and also presented with racist or sexist intent.
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a women which very clearly was the polar opposite, or how all people with a certain enthnicity have a certain negative trait etc.
These people were not guilty of heresy they were insensitive assholes (when done on purpose) or at least ignorant.
In an honest discussion with someone about e.g. the differences between men and women, I never called someone a sexist, just because their ideas were outdated and flawed as long as it actually was an discussion. The thing is, that more often than not the goal of people spouting such things is not getting to the bottom of things, but validating their own opinion. This is of course out of insecurity, which is why calling someone sexist is not a good way to respond in such an situation. Better is to ask them what they mean and have them explain it to you. And if they realize themselves they are sounding a bit odd, you can just tell them this is not your experience.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|3 years ago|reply
If that's how Graham reads such statements, isn't he basically saying "It's heresy to call a statement x-ist" in his presence?
What am I missing, this seems totally hypocritical given the rest of his argument?
[+] [-] fassssst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr0|3 years ago|reply
Which isn't to say that Twitter is important to the United States' future, but also is to say that it's not unimportant.
Commons sway votes, which sway policy in a democracy.
[+] [-] josephcsible|3 years ago|reply
No you can't. If someone records you saying something heretical, they can share it on social media and the cancel mob will get you fired from your job, even if you don't have social media yourself.
[+] [-] FerociousTimes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derevaunseraun|3 years ago|reply
Except when people don't participate they get nothing out of the exchange and there's no discussion or progress
[+] [-] pkulak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afc|3 years ago|reply
The argument doesn't support it's conclusion: it _could_ be that all potentially x-ist statements are false, but they are only x-ist when certain people say them. In other words, whether they are x-ist depends on who says them, but they may still be all false (regardless of who says them).
[+] [-] Osmose|3 years ago|reply
Paul Graham is wealthy and influential, and actively tries to influence folks with essays like this. So when he says something, it is judged in a harsher light because those words have a much stronger effect than if, say, some L2 software engineer on Twitter said them. If PG says something that _could_ be interpreted as racist, it threatens to normalize believing that in the minds of the people who follow him. If L2 says something that is on the fence, at worst some of their immediate friends will pile on to them about how uncool that was (barring the rare occasions of people going viral for bad takes, which is an outlier).
I think that's reasonable social policing to keep our discourse healthy. Having that influence over people demands a price in return. If PG wanted to stop getting pushback for approaching what society thinks is an acceptable line, he totally can, he just needs to rebrand and get out of the startup game.
[+] [-] teakettle42|3 years ago|reply
One’s right to say something isn’t curtailed just because their saying it might intrude on your dogma more strongly than if it was said by someone with less social power.
[+] [-] kspacewalk2|3 years ago|reply
No he doesn't. He can also opt to continue being exactly the brand that he is, remain firmly in the startup game, same push back against the self-appointed "social police", who only get away with their "policing" because people usually roll over.
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faichai|3 years ago|reply
Rather than fall back on broad principles like free speech, you concoct evermore Byzantine rules about who can say what, given their race, gender, position of power or wealth. It’s unsustainable. It’s the Terror, but using cancellation rather than guillotine.
This approach doesn’t scale. In order to do as you say, everyone apparently needs to have a constantly updated internal graph, categorising people across an ever increasing number of categories and defining an ever number of allowable or disallowable viewpoints. It’s way too complex. It starts to sound like some kind of a psychosis.
A healthy principle, like Free Speech, espoused in a few words wins by being universally understandable. It just comes with a flip side that you will hear things that offend you. I think this is an OK price to pay.
[+] [-] pen2l|3 years ago|reply
Tech, reddit/fb/etc enables this in its propensity to reduce friction in the path of information's travel, to make sharing possible with the least amount of clicks and obstructions, this gives way to instinctive and emotional thinking over deliberate and logical thought, and indeed the proliferation of those thoughts. One would be remiss to look over the role that these new-fangled tools play in a discussion of these topics, particularly, the formalization of what constitutes as heresy and resulting actions of galvanized crowds or institutions when being met with heresy.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|3 years ago|reply
No one appointed you, or some random Twitter mob, to speak for "society".
[+] [-] jimkleiber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pen2l|3 years ago|reply