I think his points are informative but instead of creating a useful discussion and debate, people focus on attacking him. I wouldn't be surprised if some people will request FB to fire him... (which thankfully won't happen) It's likely next time he will think twice before saying his opinion on social media. That's how toxic social media has become.
Update: Great to see this got so many upvotes so quickly. Just shows how biased (no pun intended) social media like Twitter is, and how concerned people are to say their opinion publicly these days.
People are disagreeing not because of political correctness, but because this is a fundamental mischaracterization of how research works and how it gets transferred to "real world" applications.
(1) Data fuels modern machine learning. It shapes research directions in a really fundamental way. People decide what to work on based on what huge amounts of data they can get their hands on. Saying "engineers should be the ones to worry about bias because it's a data problem" is like saying "I'm a physicist, here's a cool model, I'll let the engineers worry about whether it works on any known particle in any known world."
(2) Most machine learning research is empirical (though not all). It's very rare to see a paper (if not impossible nowadays, since large deep neural networks are so massive and opaque) that works purely off math without showing that its conclusions improve some task on some dataset. No one is doing research without data, and saying "my method is good because it works on this data" means you are making choices and statements about what it means to "work" - which, as we've seen, involves quite a lot of bias.
(3) Almost all prominent ML researchers work for massively rich corporations. He and his colleagues don't work in ivory towers where they develop pure algorithms which are then released over the ivy walls into the wild, to be contaminated by filthy reality. He works for Facebook. He's paid with Facebook money. So why draw this imaginary line between research and production? He is paid to do research that will go into production.
So his statement is so wildly disconnected from research reality that it seems like it was not made in good faith - or at least without much thought - which is what people are responding to.
Also, language tip - a "woman researcher" is a "researcher".
This is a silly standard to uphold. The sizable bulk of American academic researchers are at least partially funded by grants made from the US federal budget.
If you were to enforce your standards consistently, then all of those researchers would be held responsible for any eventual usage of their research by the US federal government.
I really doubt you apply the same standard. So, the criticism mostly seems to be an isolated demand for rigor. You're holding Facebook Research to a different standard than the average university researcher funded by a federal grant.
Yann LeCun isn't receiving a partial research grant from Facebook. He's literally an employee of Facebook. His job title is "VP & Chief AI Scientist" (at least according to LinkedIn).
There's an obvious and clear distinction between an employee and a research grant, and this feels like it's almost wilfully obtuse.
I don't think his argument is true. (That is, I do think researchers should keep bias in mind when developing machine learning projects.) (Regardless of their funding sources.)
Because of his employment, this argument is a particularly silly one for him to make.
I used "woman researcher" since it was important for the context as people accused him of mansplaining.
The original locus of the debate was how the recent face-depixelation paper turned out to depixelate pictures of black faces into ones with white features. That discovery is an interesting and useful showcase for talking about how ML can demonstrate unexpected racial bias, and it should be talked about.
As often happens, the nuances of what exactly this discovery means and what we can learn from it quickly got simplified away. Just hours later, the paper was being showcased as a prime example of unethical and racist research. When LeCun originally commented on this, I took his point to be pretty simple: that for an algorithm trained to depixelate faces, it's no surprise that it fills in the blank with white features because that's just what the FlickFaceHQ dataset looks like. If you had trained it on a majority-black dataset, we would expect the inverse.
That in no way dismisses all of the real concerns people have (and should have!) about bias in ML. But many critics of this paper seem far too willing to catastrophize about how irresponsible and unethical this paper is. LeCun's original point was (as I understand it) that this criticism goes overboard given that the training dataset is an obvious culprit for the observed behavior.
Following his original comment, he has been met with some extremely uncharitable responses. The most circulated example is this tweet (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274809417653866496?s...) where a bias-in-ml researcher calls him out without as much as a mention of why he is wrong, or even what he is wrong about. LeCun responds with a 17-tweet thread clarifying his stance, and her response is to claim that educating him is not worth her time (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s...).
The overwhelming attitude there and elsewhere is in support of the attacker. Not of the attacker's arguments - they were never presented - but of the symbolic identity she takes on as the anti-racist fighting the racist old elite.
I apologize if my frustration with their behavior shines through, but it really pains me to see this identity-driven mob mentality take hold in our community. Fixing problems requires talking about them and understanding them, and this really isn't it.
Nvidia AI researcher calling out OpenAI's GPT-2 over how GPT-2 is horrible because it's trained on Reddit (except it includes contents of submissions, and I'm not sure if there's no data except Reddit)
Reddit is supposedly not a good source of data to train NLP models because it's... racist? sexist? Like it's even rightist in general...
Anyway; the table looks horrific - why would they include these results? Oh, turns out paper was on bias: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.01326.pdf
Anyway; one can toy with GPT-2 large (paper is on medium, so it might be different) at talktotransformer.com
"The woman worked as a ": 2x receptionist, teacher's aide, waitress. Man: waiter, fitness instructor, spot worker, (construction?) engineer. Black man: farm hand, carpenter, carpet installer(?), technician. White man: assistant architect, [carpenter but became a shoemaker], general in the army, blacksmith.
I didn't read the paper, I admit, maybe I'm missing something here. But these tweets look like... person responsible should be fired.
Looks to me that you're argumentatively agreeing with Yann.
So then Yann notes that generic models don't have bias[3]. This is, probably, true. I'd be surprised if on the whole, "CNNs" encoded racial bias. But the specific networks we use, say ResNet, which are optimized to perform well on biased datasets, may themselves encode bias in the model architecture[4]. That is, the models that perform best on a biased dataset may themselves be architecturally biased. In fact, we'd sort of expect it.
And that all ignores one of the major issues which Yann entirely skips, but which Timnit covers in some of her work: training on data, even "representative data" encodes the biases that are present in the world today.
You see this come up often with questions about tools like "crime predictors based on faces". In that context it's blatantly obvious that no, what the model learns will not be how criminal someone is, but how they are treated by the justice system today. Those two things might be somewhat correlated, but they're not causally related, and so trying to predict one from the other is a fool's errand and a dangerous fool's errand since the model will serve to encode existing biases behind a facade of legitimacy.
Yann doesn't ever respond to that criticism, seemingly because he hasn't taken the time to actually look at the research in this area.
So insofar as data is the root of the problem, yes. Insofar as the solution is to just use more representative data in the same systems, no. That doesn't fix things. You have to go further and use different systems or even ask different questions (or rule out certain questions as too fraught with problems to be able to ask).
[0]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1203211859366576128
[1]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016
[2]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162732166361088
[3]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275167319157870592
[4]: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1275214381509300224. This actually goes a bit further, suggesting that as a leader in the field one has a responsibility to encourage ethics as part of the decision making process in how/what we research, but let's leave that aside.
No, that's still a problem with data in a broader sense. The issue is that "how X will be treated by the justice system" is not modeled by the data, so there's no possible pathway for a ML model to become aware of it as something separate from "crime". People who ignore this are expecting ML to do things it cannot possibly do - and that's not even a fact about "bias"; it's a fact about the fundamentals of any data-based inquiry whatsoever.
> So insofar as data is the root of the problem, yes. Insofar as the solution is to just use more representative data in the same systems, no. That doesn't fix things.
Ultimately Yann's proposals are still to use "better data" whereas all the ethics people are (and have been) screaming no, you can't use better data because it doesn't exist. He doesn't acknowledge that.
And the hairs Yann is trying to split here are ultimately irrelevant[1] and probably harmful[2]. And as someone with a large platform, addressing those issues in a straightforward way is far, far superior to trying to split those hairs over twitter.
From a meta perspective, his tweetstorm didn't add anything to the conversation that Dr. Gebru and her collaborators aren't already aware of. Nor did Yann's overall take away help to inform the average twitter user on these issues. In fact, they're more likely to take away the opposite conclusion: that with good enough data we can ask these questions in a fair way.
But as you rightly conclude there are flaws in any data based inquiry. Yann doesn't concede that.
[1]: https://twitter.com/isbellHFh/status/1275184863159685121
[2]: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1275088134238162944
That's kinda bold claim. Are you arguing that current justice system just picks up people at random, and assigns them crimes at random, with no correlation with their actions? I mean, not some bias towards here or there, but no causal relationship between person's actions and justice system's reactions at all? That's... bold.
But if this is the case, then the whole discussion is pointless. If justice system is not related to people's action then there's no possible improvement to it, since if the actions are not present as an input, then no change in the models would change anything - you can change how exactly random it is, but you can't change the basic fact it is random. What's the point of discussing any change at all?
> Insofar as the solution is to just use more representative data in the same systems, no.
If by "same systems" you mean systems pre-trained on biased data, then of course adding representative data won't fix them. And of course if the choice of model is done on the basis of biased data then this choice propagates the bias of the data, so it should be accounted for. But I still don't see where the disagreement is, and yet less basis for claims like "harmful".
It depends on what you mean by causal. Does criminal behavior cause interactions with the justice system? Yes. But not engaging in criminal behavior doesn't prevent interactions with the justice system (for specific vulnerable subpopulations). So would you say that ReLU shows a causal relationship between criminality on the X axis and how the justice system treats you on the Y? I don't think I would.
In some sense btw this is what Timnit's "Gender Shades" paper looks at, which is that even if a classifier is "good" in general, it can be terrible on specific subpopulations. Similarly, even if there is a causal relationship across the entire population, that relationship may not be causal on specific subpopulations.
And of course, that ignores broader problems around our justice system being constructed to cause recidivism in certain cases. In such situations, interactions with the justice system cause criminal behavior later on. So clearly, in general since Y is causal on X, X can't be causal on Y.
> But if this is the case, then the whole discussion is pointless.
No! Because people trust computers more than they trust people. Computers have a veil of legitimacy and impartiality that people do not. (no really, there's a few studies that show that people will trust machines more than people in similar circumstances). Adding legitimacy through a fake impartiality to a broken system is bad because it raises the activation energy to reform the system.
At it's core, that's probably the biggest issue that Yann is missing. Even in cases where an AI model can perfectly recreate the existing biases we have in society and do no worse, we've still made things worse by further entrenching those biases.
> But I still don't see where the disagreement is, and yet less basis for claims like "harmful".
So I think an important precursor question here is if you believe the pursuit of truth for truth's sake is worthwhile, even when you have reason to believe the pursuit of truth will cause net harm? Imagine you have a magic 8 ball that when given a question about the universe will tell you whether or not your pursuit of the answer to that question will ultimately be good or bad (in your ethical framework, it's a very fancy 8-ball). It doesn't tell you what the answer is, or even if you'll be able to find the answer, only what the impact of your epistemological endeavor will be on the wider world.
If, given a negative outcome, you'd still pursue the question, I don't think we have common ground here. But assuming you don't agree that knowledge is valuable for knowledges sake, and instead that it's only valuable for the good it has on society, we have common ground.
In that case, you have an ethical obligation to consider how your research may be used. If you build a model, even an impossibly fair one, to do something, and it's put in the hands of biased users, that will harm people. This is very similar to the common research ethics question of asking how your research will be used. But applied ML (even research-y applied ML) is in a weird space because applied ML is all about, at a meta level, taking observations about the world, training a box on those observations, and then sticking that box into the world where it will now influence things, so you have effects on both ends, how the box is trained and how the box will influence.
Like, in many contexts "representative" or "fair" is contextual. Or at least the tradeoffs between cost and representativity make it contextual. Yann rightly notes that the same model trained on "representative" datasets in Senegal and the US will behave differently. So how do you define "representative"? How do you, as a researcher, even know that the model architecture you come up with that performs well on a representative US dataset will perform equally well on a representative Senegalese dataset (remember how we agreed that model architecture itself could encode certain biases)? Will it be fair if you use the pretrained US model but tune it on Senegalese data, or will Senegalese users need to retrain from scratch, while European users could tune?
Data engineers will of course need to make the decisions on a per-case basis, but they're less familiar with the model and its peculiarities than the model architects are, so how can the data engineers hope to make the right decisions without guidance? This is where "Model Cards for Model Reporting" comes in. And in some cases this goes further to "well we can't really see ethical uses for this tool, so we'll limit research in this direction" which can be seen in some circles of the CV community at the moment, especially w.r.t. facial recognition and the unavoidable issues of police, state, and discriminatory uses that will continue to embed existing societal biases.
And as a semi aside statements like this[0] read as incredibly condescending, which doesn't help.
I mean P(being in justice system|being actual criminal) > P(being in justice system), and substrantially so. Moreover, P(being criminal|being in justice system) > P(being criminal). In plain words, if you sit in jail, you're substantially more like to be an actual criminal than a random person on the street, and if you're a criminal, you're substantially more like to end up in jail than a random person on the street. That's what I see as causal relationship. Of course it's not binary - not every criminal ends up in jail, and innocent people do. But the system is very substantially biased towards punishing criminals, thus establishing causal relationship.
There are some caveats to this, as our justice system defines some things that definitely should not be a crime (like consuming substances the goverment does not approve of for random reasons) as a crime. But I think the above conslusion still holds regardless of this, even though becoming somewhat weaker if you not call such people criminals. It is, of course, dependant on societal norms, but no data models would change those.
> If you build a model, even an impossibly fair one, to do something, and it's put in the hands of biased users, that will harm people.
That is certainly possible. But if you build a shovel, somebody might use it to hit other person over the head. You can't prevent misuse of any technology. According to the Bible, the first murder happened in the first generation of people that were born - and while not many believe in this as literal truth now, there's a valid point here. People are inherently capable of evil, and denying technology won't help it. You can't make the word better by suppressing all research that can be abused (i.e. all research at all). You can mitigate potential abuse, of course, but I don't think "never use models because they could be biased and abused" is a good answer. "Know how models can be biased and explicitly account for that in the decisions" would be better one.
> his[0] read as incredibly condescending, which doesn't help.
Didn't read condescending to me. Maybe I do miss some context but it looks like he's saying he's not making generic claim but only a specific claim about a very specific narrow situation. Mixing these two is all too common nowdays - somebody claims "X can be Y if conditions A and B are true" and people start reading it as "all X are always Y" and make far-reaching conclusions from it and jump into personal shaming campaign.
Even on HN you see issues and that's will pretty tight tribal norms, moderation and topics where commenters aren't usually deeply or emotionally involved.
I agree with your overall opinion, but i think that change actually starts with people reflecting on the impact of the chosen medium on their message. Not self-censorship but "positioning"
Lots of people are canceled because they said or did something in the real world that was dragged onto Twitter, the New York Times, Reddit, or some other cesspool. It's not as easy as "don't expect substantial debate from toxic platforms".
Further, you absolutely touch on sensitive issues provided you espouse a certain position, and it needn't even be a majority opinion nor an opinion that is shared by a majority of the people you purport to defend. It needn't be supported by evidence, and in fact citing the evidence is a damnable offense.
Lastly, I don't think the problem is just "nuanced debate on social media platforms is just too hard". It's certainly difficult, but if canceling were down to that, it would look like everyone canceling everyone else. Instead it looks like one relatively small, well-defined group (or as well-defined as groups tend to get) cancelling everyone else. Social media debate is certainly messy and hard to make productive, but this doesn't explain cancel culture. I posit if you simply weaken this group by reinforcing free speech norms, debate on social media would be much less toxic (not perfect--we're still dealing with humans, after all, but much better than it is presently).
"Cancel culture" is just a new spin on scapegoating, behavioral contagion, and public shaming, all of which have a very long history.
Because ‘sane people’ does not include your employer, who will throw you to the mob to appease them. In the US that also means losing your health insurance, so it can be a death sentence for you or your loved ones.
(I'll regret posting this when I'm starving in a gutter.)
They can't afford to do that, because this "mob" is actively dangerous. They will slander their enemies with all sorts of baseless accusations, call their workplaces to try and get them fired, manufacture false flag harrassment/cyberbulling and try to attribute it to them, etc. It's no different from the 8chan trolls - in fact they come from adjacent Internet subcultures, quite literally.
They are successful at making people's lives miserable through harassment like death threats and swatting, and unsurprisingly, those tactics are universally reviled.
Notable exception: Donglegate; a person was cancelled, then the person cancelling got cancelled - her company was DDoSed until she was gone*
Hilarious.
* well, that's what I want to believe because it's more interesting; it's possible backlash of people against first cancellation had it's part in that.
Just look at the death threats someone like Fauci is getting for doing his job and informing the public. Not that many people want to deal with being a public target to the worst actors in society.
"I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the
language of the unheard"
Please note that I have specifically used the term "understandably" above as opposed to, say, "justly." You may feel a particular instance is or isn't just, but even if one vehemently disagrees with the practice it is typically understandable.
Consider that "cancelling" is often invoked in response to acts (sexual assault, racism) that have been regarded as wrong and/or illegal for millennia. And yet, those acts persist. Clearly the current system doesn't do enough to prevent them. So folks feel the need to go outside the system. "Cancel culture" is best understood as a symptom and not the problem.
In the modern age (and forever, probably, but more quietly / less permanently), we are defined by what we're outraged by.
So we've ended up in a situation where both ends of the spectrum have each individually out-outraged themselves into two very different but (probably) equally irrational corners, where to try bring some nuance and depth back in is to become a social pariah. To do anything less than express equal outrage about the issue du jour is to become a social pariah.
Obviously most of the issues themselves are valid points of conversation at their root, and I certainly don't think that all of the people using science or rationalist labels are doing so genuinely and not as a cover for their own identity bullshit or actual bigotry.
But that's orthogonal to the observation that it seems true that we simply can't have a conversation anymore about certain trigger topics. Even my stating this very observation should probably (due to the current state of our collective discourse) invoke some thoughts about my motivations: which minority group/s does jddj take issue with? Is he transphobic? He mustn't realise how much of the repression of women has simply been normalised for him.
Whether it's a symptom or a standalone issue isn't really important. The point is that it's not useful as a tool for beneficial societal change, instead it's a tool for gesturing vaguely and it's a crutch that we lean on so as to not need to truly engage with or wade into the uncomfortably nuanced grey areas which naturally surround every issue.
But on the left we've absolutely embraced it, to a fault. Unfortunately, and not that I could do any better in their situation, those on the left who have had a brush with it often go on to make cancel culture an identity issue of their own, and discourse suffers further for it (looking at you Sam Harris).
Agreed that it's a symptom (not necessarily of repression, but more of polarisation). I don't agree that that characterisation is enough to get it a free pass.
In the modern age (and forever, probably, but more quietly /
less permanently), we are defined by what we're outraged by.
There's a unfortunate implication in your words, though, regarding "outrage."
Nobody would ever begrudge a fellow human being a sense of outrage regarding something they feel is legitimate. If your neighbor child was kidnapped, you would never criticize them for feeling outraged (among other emotions) because naturally, that would be a perfectly reasonable way for them to feel.
So when you criticize people for feeling outraged, you are clearly dismissing the validity of their claims, and/or insinuating an ad hominum attack against them.
Instead of policing their tone, why not just discuss the thing they're angry about?
Not all outrage is justified, but there are a lot of things in the world worth making noise about. Some are life and death.
But that's orthogonal to the observation that it seems true that
we simply can't have a conversation anymore about certain trigger topics.
One, I'm a fan of conversation, but some topics don't deserve conversation, especially if conversation hasn't solved the problem in the past. With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back through history and spot plenty of these. There were plenty of people who said, "hey! let's not get all uppity about slavery! let's really think hard about this!" and history does not look kindly upon them. There is no middle ground there and no compromise possible. Most issues are not so clear-cut, but some are.
Two, there is a lot of inequality in the world, and "conversation" often (in effect) means that the oppressing class is once again passing the burden off to the oppressed class. As a white person in America, it is my job to understand things regarding inequality. It is not black folks' job to explain it to me. Though, of course, there are no shortage of black voices from which to learn. In general, frankly, a lot of "conversation" ought to be replaced by listening.
He mustn't realise how much of the repression of women has simply
been normalised for him.
But yes, an awful lot of bad things have been normalized within us.
There are really two ways we can react to that. We can view those realizations as attacks and attempts to "guilt" us. Or we can see those as opportunities to get better.
Like literally everybody, I'm far from perfect, but I do like to use my engineer's mindset to try and improve the things I can.
Whether it's a symptom or a standalone issue isn't really important.
The point is that it's not useful as a tool for beneficial societal change,
instead it's a tool for gesturing vaguely and it's a crutch that we lean on
so as to not need to truly engage with or wade into the uncomfortably
nuanced grey areas which naturally surround every issue.
Here's the thing: there's nothing wrong with bumper stickers or maybe even a little rabble-rousing on social media in favor of $YOUR_CAUSE unless that's all you're doing and you've fooled yourself into thinking that's enough.
Again, this is kind of an ad-hominum attack where you assume the people doing those things aren't doing useful things, haven't thought deeply about those "grey areas", etc.
There are definitely, for instance, topics which the typical Free Speech proponents get most vocal about which I think simply aren't worth talking about because either they are clearly just bait, or the harms obviously outweigh the possible benefits. These include that bullshit about the IQ differences between ethnicities, a lot of gender stuff, what flags/foods/songs/whatever children are exposed to at school, and other things of that nature.
Similarly, I'm not proposing that conversation be used in lieu of real change. Conversation hasn't worked and is unlikely to work to reduce police brutality, for example, and it simply doesn't matter to me whether data can be found which does or doesn't support the idea that black people are unfairly targeted there, the movement seems like a fair one to me based on my life experience -- and my opinion doesn't really matter here either, as someone who has largely been unaffected.
My complaint only holds in the extreme. Unfortunately, a lot of our lives are now lived in that band.
Mostly agreed on the ad hominem stuff.
Beyond that, characterizing cancel culture as "going outside the system" is silly. It's literally tattling, how much more sucking up to the system could one be? If "the system" (aka the overall collection of people in positions of power) was a-okay with sexual assault and racism cancel culture wouldn't exist because you wouldn't be able to complain to bosses, schools, etc. about people raping or being racist.
Literal KKK members feel like they need to "go
outside the system" to harm black people, does
that make lynching okay?
My initial post said nothing to indicate that cancel culture was a good thing, or that it always represented a just cause.
Nor did it say that "going outside the system" always represented a just cause, etc.
They're being heard loud and clear. That's the problem. Their incessant whining and searching for the "problematic" behind every issue is crowding out reasonable discourse and discussion.
It's a form of mob rule and it's progressing from tiresome to downright hideous as more and more careers are destroyed by its vindictiveness.
> "cancelling" is often invoked in response to acts (sexual assault, racism) that have been regarded as wrong and/or illegal for millennia
You have it upside down. Cancelling is often the result of applying today's morals on yesterday's actions. People/books/movies/statues weren't "cancelled" before because nobody had a problem before. But now everything's retrospectively a target of the new moral crusaders.
People/books/movies/statues weren't "cancelled" before
because nobody had a problem before.
Plenty of people found these things lousy for decades, and in some cases centuries.
But not enough listened. So the voices became louder, and more unruly.
It's like when you try to tell your neighbor nicely that his dog's been pooping on your yard. And he does nothing about it for years. Then one day he wonders why you've left an enormous pile of dog poop on his doorstep.
Gross? Rude? Highly non-ideal? Sure. But he didn't listen to reasonable discourse.
So what? Many more found them worthy. A critique is not the measurement of whether statues should be torn down or books censored. Otherwise no art would be produced.
What has changed is that the mob has become emboldened into thinking that things they don't like deserve to be destroyed. It's juvenile intolerant behavior.
A critique is not the measurement of whether
statues should be torn down or books censored
In many recent cases, we are talking about slavery.
Many monuments glorified military "heroes" of the Confederate Army, a rebel army that sent men to their deaths fighting for the right of white Americans to own black slaves.
In general, I believe the world suffers from a lack of nuanced discussion and understanding. In the case of slavery and monuments to slavery, I find very little need for nuance.
books censored
A statue is not a meaningful source of information.
It essentially yields a single data point that says, "here is something held dear by the society in which this statue exists."
Removal of a statue does not censor information or rewrite history. It merely says, "we're not celebrating this any more." If anything, in the case of the removal of Conferate monuments, it represents a greater awareness of history.
But some of them are just so inherently offensive, the contents overpowers the presentation - e.g. the "faithful slave" monuments and memorials. Perhaps contemplating these might help understand more subtle problems with the rest, so here's a few examples:
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=42188
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jstephenconn/5136209868
https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/245/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slave_memorial_at_Pr...
However, it cannot stop as long as a large segment of the people in power do with abandon whatever they feel like, without any repercussion.
This is the only way it is possible for many people to get anything remotely resembling justice (although often it's revenge). As long as we don't fundamentally address inequality and deeply unjust systems, I don't think it will stop.
By assigning moral outrage to one side of the debate, we remove the pretense of a debate. It's no longer about evidence and facts but vilifying one side. It's ad hominem 2.0 if you will, and it works because we as a society have a visceral negative reaction to some labels.
The problem is that pavlovian-esque training can be untrained. If you call everyone who does something you don't like a nazi, then pretty soon it doesn't seem like being a nazi is all that big of a deal. That in itself is bad because by abusing the term you buy cover for actual, literal nazis. The same issue applies when you label everything racist or sexist or otherwise.
Words have power, but that power can fade if misused.
Do you know why we have that reaction? Because of millions upon millions of dead, innocent humans. That is what those ideologies lead to. We learned this lesson once, and we learned it very well. We don't want that to happen again. We don't want to let those ideas spread again. We don't want to see the mass graves again they lead to again. We learned that.
Some people have forgotten, though.
That nuance allows for far more room for debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nazi_Party
> nor is Nazism a coherent political ideology to which one can seriously ascribe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fascist_Party
I'm not going to link to it, but there is a self described National Socialist Movement party still alive today.
> But saying that anyone else who claims adherence to Nazism or allegiance to the (completely defunct) Nazi party makes them a literal Nazi actually elevates their status from what it is, which is just a pathetic racist cosplayer.
“The tragic aspect of the situation is that the Tsar is living in an utter fool’s paradise, thinking that He is as strong and all-powerful as before.” - Sergei Witte in 1905
The best history/government teacher I had in school had a recurring throughline for our classes. Paraphrasing: "It is better, in the long run, to be for something than against something."
To be against something is to highlight a problem. To be for something is to offer a possible direction for the future.
Critical thinking is the ability to critique - specifically, to explain what is wrong or bad about a particular system.
Besides because something isn't as good as another doesn't make something bad. A good new idea or appeoach and critical thinking is better than just a good new idea and can guide the approach. They aren't mutually exclusive.
this post is no longer available, of course
Corporations don't fire this fast, give it couple weeks and he will move to other position "for personal reasons", where he will rest-and-vest for the few months, before finally being let go.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. ... For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment. ...
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency... Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
I would be content with being ordinary—permission to ask obvious questions about the narrative handed down from on high—without fear of defamation that costs me my livelihood.
Sure, that's not much to ask for. The rights people fight and have fought for are mostly the freedom to do basic, everyday things like that. Wishing, hoping for it is easy. To actually do something about it, to fight for it and achieve it, to give everyone freedom from that fear – that would be greatness.
I finally understand the answer to the childhood question of "But, how could this every happen here?" that used to be an automatic response to being taught about awful events in history.
When there is extreme moral certainty about societal problems, people can feel that for the problems to be dealt with they will need to do away with reason, due process, and free speech. It becomes the prevailing wisdom. Everybody that confronts these beliefs in a critical manner is either deplatformed or too scared to speak.
By this point, the institutions and citizens are almost all in on it.
Whether or not you see this in the same way that I do, probably depends on whether you think that the NYT is doing this from ignorance or because they consider Scott's manner of confronting topical issues to be competing with their own narratives. I personally think that they are willfully trying to identify a dissenting voice, and that we are right at the beginning of western politics becoming extremely harsh with dissenting voices.
I do not think that there is an analogy between the groups of then and the groups of today. Still, the "outrage" mechanisms that steer our will seem to be identical.
It's not that I think I can predict the future, but even if it continues as-is we're witnessing a loss of fauna, and this could easily mutate to something truly terrible in the next decade.
The fact is Scott Alexander was my canary. If a compassionate, liberal-minded intellectual that carefully understands both sides of every issue doesn't find it safe to write online it's not safe for anybody outside of the dominant culture.
I really do hope that everything turns out alright, and thank you for the essay recommendation.
By that measure, it hasn't been safe since he started his blog. In the article, he explains why he's always used a name he hopes people cannot trace to him.
"Cancel culture" is worth discussing, but it's not the topic of the article. He gives one example of it in a long list of things peoplr have done when they dislike him for the blog and discovered his identity.
> By that measure, it hasn't been safe since he
> started his blog. In the article, he explains
> why he's always used a name he hopes people
> cannot trace to him.
I believe that the journalists unstated reason for wanting to demask him, is to coerce him into silence and to make it easier for mobs to form against him in future.
Basically, they are too smart to attack him directly, but have decided to paint a target on his back, and to leave the job to bloodier hands.
He was interviewed by a junior reporter (who else would be assigned an article about a blogger). This junior reporter is too scared or naive to break the NYT policy of "always use names." Maybe NYT's orientation sessions stressed this a lot, or maybe the reporter got chewed out for not using names before.
It is weird they weren't willing to leave out his name after Scott brought it up. But we do only have one side of the story right now, and it's only been a day. A secret vendetta is too far a leap for me right now.
Could you point me to those essays? Would like to examine those!
* "The situation in Germany"
* "Germany waiting"
* "Are We Really Heading Towards a Revolution of the Proletariat?"
They have been translated into English and edited several times. For example they appear on the collection "Simone Weil, Formative writings 1929-1941".
They offer a rare insight written by a "leftie" germanophile french jew, and her dismay at the two-pronged attack that the German working class (whom she admiringly describes as the most cultured working class in the world), who were at the same time being destroyed and being seduced by the nazis. Somewhat naively she insists that no matter what atrocious things the nazis do, if they end up conquering Europe they will be seen forever as the good guys. She says that this is the normal course in history, and that the "good guys" in Europe's past were no worse than the nazis of today. She also draws parallelism between the German and the Soviet states, that caused her starch criticism in left-wing french circles. Since all of this was written well before the war, there is an ominous prescience to these texts that makes them extremely interesting to read. Curiously enough, there is no mention to the nazi hatred of the jews, she is mostly concerned with their hatred and exploitation of the working class.
> Since all of this was written well before the war, there is an ominous prescience to these texts that makes them extremely interesting to read.
This is the part struck me as fascinating from your earlier post and my googling on her writings. Excited to read the essays. Sadly I will have to resort to the English translations since je ne parle pas francais.
That was exactly the attitude back then. "Of course, there are problems right now, but nothing of the sort that happened before the Great War. Nobody wants another war, there's no way that it can happen again." If you read what the people wrote in the thirties, it is disturbingly chilling.
> Their propaganda is no less coherent. ... the hitlerites have the fundamental aims of anti-communism, the elimination of workers' rights; they say they are the defenders of private property, of the family, of religion, and hard liners against class warfare. But they find themselves at odds with old money conservatives, by the demographic profile of their movement, by the demagoguery which results, and by the personal ambitions of their leaders.
====
La propagande n'est pas moins incohérente. On attire les jeunes garçons romanesques, par des perspectives de luttes héroïques, de dévouement, et les brutes par la promesse implicite qu'ils pourront un jour frapper et massacrer à tort et à travers. On promet aux campagnes de hauts prix de vente, aux villes la vie à bon marché. Mais l'incohérence de la politique hitlérienne apparaît surtout dans les rapports entre le parti national-socialiste et les autres partis. Le parti avec lequel les hitlériens ont un lien essentiel, c'est le parti national- allemand, celui de la grande bourgeoisie, celui qui soutient les « barons »; comme les « barons » , les hitlériens ont pour but fondamental la lutte à mort contre le mouvement communiste, l'écrasement de toute résistance ouvrière ; ils se proclament défenseurs de la propriété privée, de la famille, de la religion, et adversaires irréductibles de la lutte des classes. Mais ils se trouvent séparés des partis de la grande bourgeoisie par la composition sociale du mouvement, par la démagogie qui en résulte, et par les ambitions personnelles des chefs. Et, d'autre part, il se trouve, si surprenant que cela puisse sembler, entre le mouvement hitlérien et le mouvement communiste, des ressemblances si frappantes qu'après les élections la presse hitlérienne a dû consacrer un long article à démentir le bruit de pourparlers entre hitlériens et communistes en vue d'un gouvernement de coalition. C'est que, du mois d'août au 6 novembre, les mots d'ordre des deux partis ont été presque identiques.
Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?
Once we're there, power will be wielded fully by whatever popular sociopath has the rungs on any given day.
That can change day-to-day, year-to-year or election-to-election, and different organisations will have their own all-powerful sociopaths, with their own particular preferences for abuses of power.
Once people have power, they don't merely act ideologically, they act selfishly.
At the same time, so long as I stay away from news and social media, I'm pretty much unaffected. Society in the various countries I've spent time in over the last few years (Ireland, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia are the main ones) seems much the same as ever.
I think that it has all those trappings, but underneath is a deep addiction to anger, outrage and the rush of adrenaline that accompanies it.
There is also a sort of religiosity that your comment alludes to.
>Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But, for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone.
This is why I like to use science as a guide (not a decision point), for then there is a chance to be self-correcting.
I have not seen this, at least on a large scale. Are there specific events you are referencing?
Both sides of the spectrum have anti-scientific factions which are current: on the left there are deniers of gender differences and people who overstate the role of genetics in mental illness, on the right there are climate denyers, evolution deniers, people who think crime is prevented by more aggressive policing. Anti-vaxxers are fairly uniformly distributed across the political spectrum.
The up and down arrow are really bad icons for UX.
The problem is when someone believes that people shouldn't see any opinions that they disagree with. How do you stop them from downvoting substantive content? Personally I don't think changing the icons will help
We desperately need forum software with better forms of moderation.
I had a bit of this discussion on HN not long ago. I love to debate and hear ideas from those I disagree with. But, that's not what people are often doing today. They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas.
IMO, it's intellectually dishonest and a debate I have a hard time continuing.
The right may take the cake as far as hypocrisy goes in general, but the one thing that pisses me off the most about the left is their lip service to open-mindedness. I often wonder if they do in fact believe it themselves.
> They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas
With the continuously widening scope of what could be considered "racist" or "anti-science", I suppose there won't be much left to debate soon enough.
> With the continuously widening scope of what could be considered "racist" or "anti-science"
I agree this is a danger. But in my original comment, I'm referring to basics. Evidence has mounted that masks work, yet people still physically fight over wearing one. Evidence has mounted (IMO overwhelmingly) that HCQ does not work and is even dangerous, yet people keep saying that's all they need to survive COVID. Then there are the anti-vaxxers. It's a concern that even after a vaccine is found, it's possible not enough people will even get the vaccine to reach herd immunity[1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/05/04/a-majority-of-vaccine...
The problem with all the success anecdotes is correlation does not mean causation. The odds are low that I'm going to walk outside and die. If I walk outside while picking my nose and don't die, it doesn't mean picking my nose is stopping my death. The large majority of people recover from COVID doing nothing at all. Finding efficacy of any drug requires controlled studies.
[1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/miracle-cure-testimonials-a...
For an alternate take from the blogosphere,
https://scienceblog.com/516960/suppression-of-chloroquine-is...
I've been following HCQ/Zinc long before it got politicized.
It's well known that covid is a disaster in nursing homes, often resulting in 30% deaths. Here's some anecdotal evidence of early treatment with HCQ in that setting:
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/texas-e...
Here's a journal article claiming positive results. It's had over 300 citations, so there's probably some interesting reading there:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bst/14/1/14_2020.01047/...
Causation generally requires some theory to support it:
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/scientists-study...
I'm 78, so I'm paying attention. Here's the best guidance I've seen so far. (They have backed off on HCQ because of all the political flap.)
https://www.evms.edu/covid-19/covid_care_for_clinicians/#cov...
“Yes clearly other people are stupid. The only ideas that should be exposed to the public are my own ideas. People other than myself apparently don’t have functioning brains, or they would all think what I think. So instead I must fight to have all opposing ideas erased.”
Your policy is still the one that brought us down this path, and will (or has) plunge the western public into a debilitating purity spiral, as the overton windows shrinks and more and more viewpoints become 'clearly x-ist' or 'provably wrong', according to the crowd.
Good! Let it all burn.
The people he's talking about are beyond the pale. He's fine disagreeing with people, he even likes to have his point of view challenged- it's just that these people are a step too far; they're not just wrong- they're evil.
An answer is: I've found the people you ACTUALLY disagree with. Insofar as you can be said to hate anyone, it's the people you would gladly exterminate- and feel good doing so. Disagreement with someone on a matter of import automatically causes some small amount of dislike for them. You can still like someone overall! But if they're a great person, except e.g. they think abortion should be illegal, you'll still think less of them than you would have otherwise. My argument is that this dislike scales with how much you disagree with someone; and so, all else being equal, the people you hate most are the ones you disagree with the most strongly- to the point that a will awakes in you to engage against them in righteous wrath.
You see it in the twitter mobs and the witch hunts of old: If people decided to crucify someone, say by going after their livelihood- if, somehow, they thought that was the best way to improve the world- they should do it with their eyes down, shaking their heads, crying "If only it didn't have to come to this- but if we didn't do this, you would have caused even more pain than we. This course of action is a tragedy; but any other would have been worse. Forgive us, but for the good of the nation, you have to die."
They don't- they go after people with glee. It's fun, it's exhilarating; it's a fox-hunt. You can read it in people's testimonials about being part of a twitter job-lynchmob: Everyone enjoys it till they're the one on the chopping block!
Real Disagreement, as I would call it, is that kind that honestly provokes the aforementioned emotion: the desire to see someone destitute and homeless, if not dead, and the frame of mind where you could look at the result with pride. I'd call that hate.
(You can hate people for other reasons, of course.)
I don’t think anyone is appealing to others to listen to their racist, anti-science ideas so much as demanding that they be accepted and if not a mob may be sent after them. I wish it were only “appeals to listen”.
We also saw this with the ok sign where people were digging up pictures of people from years ago and somehow connecting them to using racism through the ok sign. It's challenging for a person who isn't on top of every news story to navigate this time.
I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.
(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)
Btw, for anyone who has trouble reading a faded comment, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page and the text should be readable.
What I have learned from struggling a lot with issues normal people don't face (at least going by majority) is that we are all toxic to each other. Some things are more visible and easily understandable for others while many aren't. It may feel pretty shitty for a disabled person inside a room of normal people complaining about very trivial things and calling for others to become disabled as a joke. Some autism jokes may actually invoke sad memories for others. But there are groups of young people who do all those and don't think it is toxic. Joking about depression is another. There are many examples where line of toxicity isn't so visible for a specific majority.
People have difficulty imagining the scale of time and when that difficulty helps them form a tribalistic decision to justify their own biases, it's much more easier to do that than fight against the urge.
The rise of short attention span only means people are much less empathetic than they seem to think they are by social media.
It's only my opinion but an empathetic person will look beyond that this person has some horrible political opinions and I want to run a witch hunt. A tweet out of 20k tweets in isolation doesn't say much about the person especially if it's old. They might be having a bad day, may want attention and said something controversial to get it. Maybe they do have medical problems (I know I do, I am on meds and my behavior changes a lot). And even if that person is officially shitty, I don't see why would you try to burn their house. It's ok to inform others but what's the point of attacking someone that they think "nobody" cares about them?
If nobody cares about improving those people, then they might as well become too extreme in their opinion. If nobody wants to hear them, they might as well be racist. We all strive for connection and the reason why we don't want discrimination to exist is we don't want to lose our ability to interact with people we care about. If all racists can get are other racist people or no one, why would they change?
Side note, most if not all outrage on social media (esp twitter and youtube) seems to be created by sufficiently motivated individuals. It's as obvious as a bright sky. So I wonder if you can live sharing your opinions while not getting bad side on one of those twitter mob groups.
My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.
I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.
That seems much worse. As well as not being transparent at all.
What is worse, it is an entirely silent way of silencing dissent. I would love to experiment with the other end of the spectrum: not only should the number of downvotes be visible, downvoting someone should also require a reason to be given, in the form of a post. And it should be possible to downvote those reasons too, with the algorithm adjusting the original downvote's weight based on the score of the downvote reason.
And I wouldn't say the forum is "exactly this" unless you're saying that downvotes are on par with getting "fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or killed."
I often find myself thinking that we either need to create a healthier mechanism for finer grained social consequences at a mass scale, or accept that the future belongs to sociopaths and cancel culture.
There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.
Also quite amusing what someone will take time out of their day to down vote sometimes.
He has to regularly see multiple sides of the site. HN is pretty diverse depending on what you click and as such, I do think he is less biased in some ways we are and more biased in others as he work as a mod for hn.
A reply comments on how HN is somewhat similar. People censoring themselves due to fear of being downvoted. I pointed out that IMO downvotes are a very mild sanction and truly, people don't need to censor themselves on HN, but the true cost would come if everyone had to comment with their real names.
Sorry it wasn't groundbreaking enough for you.
Maybe now it's still okay, but in ten years, who knows, I may be "cancelled".
Not that it hasn't already happened to others.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
That's not particularly true of left-wing movements; to the extent it's true of them it's also true of right-wing movements. The relevant factors are orthogonal to the left-right axis.
No, it's not.
> It is because leftism promotes a resistance and challenging to authority and a prior belief in the goodness of the downtrodden masses
I could with as much, justification say it is particularly associated with right-wing movements because the right promotes a rigid adherence to rules and authority, which devolves under pressure into seeking out non-adherence with progressively finer and finer combs.
> Right-wing ideologies usually promote submission to authority and traditionalism. The problems that come with excesses in that front are of a different kind.
Maybe in some other aspects, but a cycle of eating their own under pressure is not a point on which there is a difference. The left perhaps has more contribution from “people that were on the factions side before it gained power become genuinely opposed once it started executing power” and the right perhaps more from genuine intolerance for even the slightest deviation, but they both definitely experience it.
Consider that the right are supposedly in favour of free markets and small government but also supposedly in favour of strong submission to authority? These positions are incompatible.
In reality most historical movements labelled as "right wing" were left wing, yes, that means fascism and Nazi-ism too. The latter of course even had "socialist" in the title yet decades of the academic left insisting that against all common sense and obvious observations, Nazis were actually right wing, has left the world hopelessly confused about this so-called spectrum. You can't be both supportive of a dictatorship and state-controlled industry, and a believer in small government, free speech and free markets.
Ah yes and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is also democratic, please...
Heh. Is that a joke?
> It looks something like political/national racial purity. Once people start spouting that, they tend to be removed from polite conversation.
Yeah, the American Right has really marginalized Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, et al.
> There is no similar outer bound on the left
Really? Which of the following statements will get you excluded from public political dialogue in the US)
“Europeans did Africans a favor by bringing them to America as slaves”
Or
“Capitalist ownership of the means of production is a root of injustice and fundamentally incompatible with democracy”
(One of these has been prominently made by prominent voices on one side of the spectrum without repercussion, while people are routinely excluded for statements for more moderate than the other. At least in the US, to the extent anything vaguely resembling your point is true, it's exactly the reverse of the split you've proposed.)
The discussions on SSC were often intellectual and rationality-based, but a lot of the super-commenters were right-leaning. Left-leaning commenters were more scarce, and even benefitted from some affirmative-action less-strict moderation to encourage them to sick around. In fact, after the recent BLM protests, a new user showed up to argue and explain the social justice position, and did so respectfully and was well-received.
But I think a lot of the regulars had their blind spots. So many arguments were essentially: since A is true, B and C are the logical conclusions, but often nobody questioned A, let alone tested it—the rationality was often superficial. A popular format on the open threads (thus I’m characterizing the blog readers and commentariat, not the blog author) was impossible hypotheticals leading to un-provable speculation. Questions like what would’ve happened if Germany in WW2 had such-or-such a weapon. The format was even codified in the format of friendly aliens offering some weird bargain (take a pill to sleep 12hrs a day—or never need sleep but always be tired), then asking people what they would do or how that would change things. Fun thought problems, but so disconnected from reality or practical thought—essentially nerd-sniping (to use an admittedly uncharitable term).
Tl;DR: SSC was a mixed bag, but mostly civil and well-intentioned.
Here is the comment on archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200622224636/https://slatestar...
The fact that Trump is what you think passes for an ethno-nationalist these days is all the evidence needed to demonstrate my point.
>“Europeans did Africans a favor by bringing them to America as slaves”
This is a pretty gross thing to say, but it's not ethno-nationalism. Words have meaning for a reason.
>“Capitalist ownership of the means of production is a root of injustice and fundamentally incompatible with democracy”
The most popular politician in our country a couple years ago, and perhaps still today, is the open socialist Bernie Sanders.
You think Stephen Miller wants to stop with border camps? This is an absolute absurd claim to make.
> There is nothing you can support that's so far left you will be expunged from polite society.
Where is the comparable person to Stephen Miller being anywhere close to public policy on the left? We have one barely socdem congressperson. Where are the NYT opeds about third worldism?
Meanwhile, from my perspective, we Europeans lookt at North America and see a lot of racists, transphobes and anti-poor agitators complaining about being cancelled on national Media and while giving speeches at universities (e.g. fox news, Jordan Peterson). Which feels...off.
Sure, one easy way of gauging this phenomenon is the social response to the swastika compared to the hammer and sickle.
Another is that the biggest ethno-nationalist gathering in decades in the US was a few years ago, tragically someone was run over by a vehicle. There were only hundreds of people there. The next year they tried to hold another rally and only dozens showed up.
>Meanwhile, from my perspective, we Europeans lookt at North America and see a lot of racists, transphobes and anti-poor agitators complaining about being cancelled on national Media and while giving speeches at universities (e.g. fox news, Jordan Peterson). Which feels...off.
The business model of the corporate press is to fill your heart with fear, so that you will watch/click/share/etc. A great example of this phenomenon is the "Fine People Hoax." You might recall there was a major news story claiming that Trump called white nationalists "fine people." Except if you read the transcript he clearly states, in the same breath as the words "fine people," and without prompting, that white nationalists should be condemned totally. These types of things happen over and over again.
And regarding the symbolism...I can kinda see that example, maybe, but I generally don't see the hammer and sickle used in mainstream politics either. And even then, there is a line between something like the hammer and sickle which was used before and after Lenin/Stalin as a symbol vs. the swastika which was literally designed by Nazis and only ever used by them (the Buddhist one is slightly different)
If anyone directly sympathises with Stalin/Lenin and calling for dekulakhisation, I'd expect that to also remove them from polite conversation. It just seems to happen less ?
My point is that there is not widespread public support for this tiny group of awful people. The fact that so few people showed up is evidence of that. These people went "too far right" and were abandoned, as they should be.
>If anyone directly sympathises with Stalin/Lenin and calling for dekulakhisation, I'd expect that to also remove them from polite conversation. It just seems to happen less ?
AOC tweeted Marx's Labor Theory of Value. Bernie Sanders, recently the most popular politician in the country is an open Socialist. Michael Moore can openly/publicly support and wish Happy Birthday to Marx. Can you actually name an instance where a person went so far left that they were canceled?
1. People tried to cancel Bernie Sanders, it just didn't work https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/15/bernie-sa...
2. Not a single person who openly advocates Stalinism or similar forceful collectivisation makes it onto the national stage. Meanwhile Richard Spencer was so "cancelled" that he continued to interviewed on national TV
3. In Germany and Europe, most communist parties are under observation by the constitutional secret service, despite being democratic parties
4. In the US, Colin Kapernick was cancelled by the NFL for kneeling to protest police brutality
Leftist positions, as it turns out, are much less inherently tied to authoritarianism than Nazi ideology. Thus, you often see people advocating for democratic socialism on the national stage, but not for Stalinism and a violent revolution. The latter of which immediately gets them cancelled before they become much of a public figure,
calling yourself 'nazi' will have the same consequences, so I don't see what is the problem here, communism is every step as bad as nazism (source: born in USSR)
only to communists, maybe. From where I stand, Leninism/Stalinism/Trotskism/other -ism are all extreme totalitarian ideologies
Maybe if North Korea suddenly turns into actual paradise, I'll reconsider.
So yeah, _all_ real world outcomes, definitely
It's simply not true that communists are canceled.
The media regularly openly supports the CCP. The
most popular politician in our country as of a
couple years ago was open socialist Bernie Sanders
Communism != Socialism
Each of these terms have been applied to a wide variety of beliefs and practices. Nobody owns these terms, but even Marx himself drew a sharp distinction between the two.
"Communism" is a system in which the state owns everything and resources are, theoretically, fairly and equally distributed to the people. In practice, this has never worked out well, and very few folks view communism as a realistic solution today.
"Socialism" refers to a much wider range of ideas. Broadly speaking, any redistribution of wealth is "socialism" and this would include collecting taxes and using them to build a public library, roads, or fund schooling for children.
In practice, just about every nation on Earth is a blend of socialism and capitalism. In a truly free-market/capitalist society with zero traces of socialism, the government would provide almost literally nothing except for perhaps border defense.
Canada and the UK are capitalist, but lean farther toward socialism (with their nationalized healthcare, etc) than the USA. When a modern American politician like Sanders or AOC advocates for "socialism", this is what they mean.
Unlike communism, socialism works. It's just a question of how much of it you want. Even your most "socialist" politicians in the USA don't advocate the abolition of private property, and even the most libertarian politicians don't advocate the total dismantling of the federal government.
It is also very important to understand that socialism is utterly compatible with democratic elections. Just as you could have a capitalist nation ruled by a dictator, you can have have a socialist nation with democratic elections. A nation's method of choosing leaders is almost entirely orthogonal to how it structures its economy.
CCP has "communist" in the name, but this is more of a historical artifact than anything.
Rule of thumb with political parties and countries is that their actual names have little to do with reality -- witness all of the dictatorships that have had "Democratic" in their names over the years.
Democratic Republic of the Congo springs to mind. And of course North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (lol)
2. Not a single person who openly advocates Stalinism or similar forceful collectivisation makes it onto the national stage. Meanwhile Richard Spencer was so "cancelled" that he continued to interviewed on national TV
3. In Germany and Europe, most communist parties are under observation by the constitutional secret service, despite being democratic parties
4. In the US, Colin Kapernick was cancelled by the NFL for kneeling to protest police brutality
Leftist positions, as it turns out, are much less inherently tied to authoritarianism than Nazi ideology. Thus, you often see people advocating for democratic socialism on the national stage, but not for Stalinism and a violent revolution. The latter of which immediately gets them cancelled before they become much of a public figure
2. Richard Spencer has not been canceled because he went too far left.
3. So not a single person then.
4. Is Kapernick far left?
I actually see people supporting leftist authoritarians openly pretty regularly. I already provided some pop culture examples elsewhere... AOC tweeted Marx's labor theory of value. Bernie openly supported the USSR (even honeymooned there), Cuba, Venezuela, and is an open socialist. I see people wearing Che Guevera shirts walking down the street.
If the left is so powerful, so accepted, where are all the communists in power? Who's in the white House?
Colin Kapernick isn't remotely far left, and he still got cancelled.
There are open Marxists in Congress, in Hollywood, in the top Universities. Corporate press and the NBA openly supports Communist China. There is no such equivalence on the right. There's no open Hitler supporters pulling the levers of power. Trump is not a white nationalist, not even close.
Trump has on multiple occasions used Nazi imagery, quotes and Slogans. "America First" was a Slogan used by American fashists https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/20/...
He only condemned David Duke after a media uproar.
If your standard for "white supremacists" is "openly admits to wanting to eradicate or enslave blacks and Jews, as was done before" and your standard for "far left" is "anyone who admits to some Marxist ideology" then you are measuring with two different sticks. And trying to make these two equivalent is dishonest.
The Marxists in power did so by democratic elections and without any shady business (I know of no ongoing investigations or impeachments at least). The barely shaded fashist in power still has investigations running, has deteriorated the democratic institutions in the US whenever he could and used rubber bullets and gas to (possibly illegally) clear a parc from protestors for a photo op. Which of these are more in line with authoritarianism?
But actually, don't bother to answer unless you will actually engage. If in the charitable case, for you any form of Marxist thought means hardcore left, then you are also dismissing all of social democracy as "far left", which is literally most of Europe. And in the most uncharitable case, you are wasting my time trying to create a false equivalence between democraty compatible socialist ideas and fashism, which is inherently nondemocratic. Have a nice day
And being up Bernie Sanders name in "polite" democratic circles, let's see how supportive they are.
Reality is, the far left doesn't get cancelled as much because their popular ideas generally involve democratic control over the means of production and treating everyone like a human being, not revolution, while the far rights "popular" ideas are racism, sexism and the disenfranchisement of the "proles". One of these inherently requires authoritarianism, the other doesn't.
It's easy to require due process prior to anyone being deprived of freedom, and we generally see this as a positive development, compared to the alternative. Using "shame" (aka witch hunts, cyber bullying and the like) to punish unwelcome views is the opposite of due process.
Also my idea of shame doesn't include death threats let alone more extreme things like swatting.
And why not swat someone? If you're going to go after their livelihood and try to stop them from ever having a job again, you're half killing them anyway. People murder each other for less. Be honest and just have their dog shot already ;)
George Floyd shouldn’t have come into the line of fire of these systems, he was an innocent man. The fact that it was and is so difficult to prosecute the responsible officer shows how dysfunctional the system is.
Using shame as a system of justice relies on emotional charge at the point of infraction. I would argue that’s how mob justice starts, not how we end injustice.
I hear you. The shame-based system is prone to be unjust. TBH, I also think the people pioneering it are wrong about most things. I guess what I'm trying to say is that any violent regulation of expression is unjust, so even if shame-justice is on point 10% of the time it's still an improvement. And in the cases when it's wrong the consequences are less severe.
I wrote, and rewrote the rest of this comment 3 times, before I gave up, and started from the top of the thread again. Now I have decided to stop exhausting myself over what might be acceptable to an indefinable demographic (HN commenters reading this individual thread) for me to say.
This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.
There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.
In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting.
In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses
Overall there's certainly a larger discussion about the use of force, and maybe tasers contribute to that in some negative ways, but most of the time they're used everybody gets to live at the end of the day.
You get 200 people fired from their jobs and make it hard for them to get employment elsewhere, a few are going to kill themselves. (Or see if they can get revenge first.)
I guess it could be a bit difficult to see from the US where you had the first amendment forever. But the rest of the world is not like that.
On the contrary, my claim is that if you take the world as a whole there has never been more permissive attitude towards open debate than today. But even in the so-called free world... Compare the treatment of JK Rowling got to the treatment MLK got.
> If there's significantly less violence, it's a win.
Don't try and back away from your claims once you've made them.
And taking this debate from the point of view of the world as a whole is disingenuous, don't try to latch the damage done by one onto the overall good done by others and claim a net good for the first who caused the damage.
Also we aren't comparing now to the 1960s; yes now looks fabulous compared to then as does it compared to the purges in the USSR but we arent comparing those; we're discussing the recent devolution in free expression as pointed out in the blog this post is about.
Where did I say anything that can even remotely be interpreted this way?
Whether you think it's appropriate or not, I wasn't referring to the blog post. I also don't think it's what the blog post is about: Scott is worried about his patients knowing his political views interfering with his work as well as death threats, none of which has anything to do with shame.
Where I live cancel culture coexists with violent regulation of expression. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the US history but I doubt that whatever golden age you have in mind was sufficiently long even if it existed. Larry Flint was shot in '78 so that leaves 30 years max if that.
Now perhaps I overshot the gun and we could state that your interpretation of shamming tactics was something else but right now they have a very public face so you'll have to specify if you mean something else.
This blog post is a symptom of the lean towards shaming tactics over debate; the problem has evolved to the point that scott has to worry about his career being destroyed because of it.
And re times, how about the 2000s then? we built and debated online without the need to destroy one another's lives because of the POV we took on a political argument.
Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?
Wow. I couldn't imagine that a person from the USA, of all places, could made so nonchalantly the equivalence smarts=power (unless there is a level of sarcasm on this essay that escapes me). There's such a lack of self-awareness in the american elite if they are bona-fide capable of sprouting such bullshit without realizing what they say.
Raising any sort of doubt regarding nuclear energy safety will quickly get you downvoted, flagged or banned:
Fukushima proved that nuclear energy is not that safe.
I'll downvote that not because it's a doubt about nuclear energy safety, but because it's a pretty bad assertion.
It seems, too, that making jokes is very risky. With text online it's just far too easy to take something out of context and misrepresent or weaponize a person's words. I have had this happen to me personally and it's unbelievably frustrating.
People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems. It is just too fraught, and even sincerity and honesty are not safe.
There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream, because it's safer to associate and identify with people who won't get them fired for their opinions. The greater the censorship and fear, the more people will "flip" in a search for safety.
Now he is alt right and he has a vested interest in portraying the ascendancy of the alt right as inevitable, but the point is nonetheless logical, and quite disturbing. It may be that punishing moderately "wrong" speech will ultimately drive moderates into the waiting arms of the extreme right, where they won't be judged so harshly for their errors. Moreover if the purity spiral [1] theory is correct, this phenomenon may be hard to stop, because punishing people for their dissenting speech is an effective way to gain status in many communities!
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
I wouldn't call myself alt-right, far from it in fact. But I definitely see this happening in me over the past few years. Starting the night of the 2016 election.
It's one of those things that makes me wonder how much I've changed vs how much society has changed around me.
For instance, I learned first thing this morning that I have a corrupt faith and that I've fractured the nation [1]. There's only so much debasement one can listen to before you just tune out.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/23/881992622/book-jesus-and-john...
Given that we're less than 6 months out from an election -- the election -- it's not a surprise. Lots of propaganda, foreign and domestic, is going to go hard all summer.
I have observed that in the last 10-20 years the definition of "mainstream" has come to mean something very personal and subjective. Some media are referred to as "mainstream" only if they offer a supporting bias, and others are labelled "mainstream" only if they have demonstrated disagreement, depending on your ask. The epithet "mainstream media" has become a brush with which one may paint a canvas any colour one desires to forward one's peculiar viewpoint. It is a phrase that has become as meaningless as "political", "science", and even "unbiased". Just another empty adjective to lend pseudo-credence to your opinion.
My country right now is deeply divided between literal left (not USA left, I mean actual marxists) and "right" (almost noone support true rightwing, either in historical sense, being monarchists, or in the current sense, being capitalists, what they support instead is a populist authoritarian way of doing things, more in common with left than with any kind of right).
I now have to be very careful with who I talk to, often whatever I say spark trouble because where I live most people are marxists, and I am ex-marxist.
So I decided yesterday to talk with people in an whatsapp group that is anti-marxist... instead found myself having to be careful and self-censor because they went all the way to the other side, hard, people there were mad our former justice minister praised the army honor... because to them, that is evil, what he should be praising is the army might, as soon I touched on the subject it sparked hostile rants against anyone that believes that a violent army-backed coup is wrong, in a chillingly civil way, they explained to me that the army job is basically kill people in the government until it obeys the majority of the population, basically a literal dictatorship of the majority.
It became obvious then... I won't find a place to talk about my now somehow "moderate" views.
Went down a strange rabbit hole there for a while this morning after reading this. Ready to come back up for air now and put that behind me a while.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_...
Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".
I've wondered a couple times recently how dangerous it is that I'm easily discoverable. I tell myself that since I live in the Midwest, the worst of it hasn't reached here yet. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.
Lots of us passionate techies like to weigh in on every topic and forget that not everything is academic. Sometimes the world doesn't need to hear our opinion. That doesn't mean we're being censored.
Everyone has a right to express their opinion even on topics they are woefully unqualified for. Including clueless techies.
The only instance I agree is when celebrities spout opinions as fact (or promote a pet diet or cause) only because it could send millions of people on wild goose chases. That said it’s more of a wish and really not a desire to censor them.
An example might be someone arguing "trans women are not really women". If the question doesn't affect them personally, they're just pursuing what they see as a rational debate or stretching their mind. Their lives will not actually be affected by the exercise.
If you're a trans woman then that's an argument you've been exposed to hundreds of times and it's demeaning and emotional.
You can argue that you're just being rational. And you might ever change your mind! But it's a shitty thing to force that conversation on people when they're only the ones who have a stake in the outcome.
It's not censorship if you are choosing to hold your tongue out of consideration for others.
That...pretty much is being censored?
Are you living in a bubble?
When you see phrases like "wrong/right side of history" and you see things happening like mass cancellation of brands or people for their opinions, you are seeing it. When a police officer is immediately fired and then charged with murder for performing his job the way he was trained to do it, you are seeing people fear the mob more than they care about the truth.
JK Rowling and Terry Crews are two famous people that come to mind who recently stated unpopular opinions and were attacked by mobs of people. There was no desire on the part of the mob to look for logical reasons for someone to have a valid opinion that differs from the mainstream.
If you want an example of a current person with a true belief that is not accepted by their society that seems by definition hard to produce. Especially to an anonymous member of the society.
Bits and pieces are strewn all over the place. But you have learn to separate the wheat from the chaff for yourself. Then you might start noticing the places with limited quantities of slightly more observant commentary.
>Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?
No, they just don't exist on the internet the same way most real conversations don't exist on the internet. The internet is great for information of the type that would be found in traditional publications, is of professional interest, or are marketing materials. It sucks for everything else.
People being real exist in very small quantities, usually on lighter topics to avoid exposing themselves, and are always outnumbered by people preforming for the audience or (untempered by people openly talking like reasonable people) have taken an extreme position on the topic.
He also claims him voicing his opinions about politics got him blacklisted from his dream job of being a Hollywood writer.
When he’s talking on a platform like Joe Rogan or having a leisurely chat he’s much more willing to be moderated by others opinions, and demonstrates the sort of give and take of a normal human being in a conversation. He’s certainly not some bastion of liberal values, and has principles he believes in, after all he’s an Orthodox Jew, but people like him exist because there’s a market for it and he’s carved out this public persona.
The people performing to the audience will get views from people like my uncle who just wants to see “Stephen Crowder OWNS libs” and has no interest in being right, only in feeling right. Unfortunately they’re going to likely always have the larger audience.
It's very simple. Suppose the following.
1) A man has a law degree from Harvard and was publishing nationally when he was in high-school.
2) He has a set of opinions and schools invite him to speak.
3) Lot's of students ask him questions many who strongly disagree with him and attempt to "take him down".
4) All of this is on video, hours and hours of video.
OK
Now, in what possible world would this person not "own" people at a high frequency?
If he wasn't "owning" at a high frequency then that person should be embarrassed.
You see "Ben Shapiro owns X" and not, Ben Shapiro in conversation with Ezra Klein, or Ben Shapiro telling his audience that their opinions aren't worth anything if they don't spend time reading and listening to the best voices on the other side.
"Ben Shapiro the guy who owns people" is a meme because he's more of a threat then "Ben Shapiro the guy who certainly should speak slower, has reasonable arguments, even when he's wrong" because that Ben Shapiro, that second one is actually scary. People could listen to what he has to say.
The right's loudest voices have never been the brightest, or when they were bright, the most reasonable. Shapiro raises the level of discourse on the right by a mile.
I have yet to hear Ben Shapiro say something novel or interesting. I like him though, because for the first time a popular voice on the right is educated and can reason from premises to conclusions, in steps, and is willing to discuss the validity AND soundness of his arguments.
By consistently doing that alone, he's in the top 1% of journalists. He's the exact opposite of what the right is "supposed" to look like.
And if you look to reasonable then you'll become a "Ben Shapiro owns" meme or a "binders full of woman" meme.
They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now. Any moment now I expect Columbus city to be renamed.
There’s a movement to have Yale renamed as it was named after a slave trader, not merely a slave owner. But so far Yale has managed to frame it as a troll
Yes, thereby creating tomorrow's woke crowd. Tomorrow's woke crowd will ultimately purge today's woke crowd. So we may as well just politely state our opinions because self-censoring and trying to be nice won't save us.
In a sense, it is starting remind of me stories my parents told me of the old country during communist regime. Political jokes could and were reported by your friends. This could result in various social sanctions including 'wolf ticket' ( effectively blacklist of dissidents ) preventing you from getting a job, car, you name it.
Amusingly, today you find out, who your friends are by being unflinchigly open.
These opinions are now mainstream. He gave them a platform earlier than the media did, because he was more open to being wrong and to exploring heterodox ideas, but also applied research and rigour when writing about them.
Can you explain a bit more about what you're asking for?
>People who could offer smart insights consor themselves for fear of being attacked for their opinions.
The user you're replying to asked what opinions is Scott risking to be attacked about. You're providing arguments about Scott having offered smart insights, which was not the part of the argument debated. The original post shifted the discussion from Scott's worries--which were chiefly related to the dangers of working in psychology--towards the more general discussion about censorship as it is talked about in the works referenced above.
In other words, most of this thread is repurposing Scott's post to give a platform for their current political concerns.
If you read Scott's post, it says that blog readers have tried to get him fired and sent him death threats. That's already happened, before his anonymity is completely broken by the NYT. He's written on a variety of political topics, including feminism and racism, which are now self-censored as the blog has been taken down. Censorship is very much a feature of Scott's post.
But my read is that Scott is simply opposing the NYT's absolute policy of posting his real name in their article. His decision to delete the blog is because there were other non-coronavirus posts which he feared could lead to all kinds of IRL reprisals if his real name were to be known publicly.
Hence the repetition of "No doxing random bloggers for clicks". He seemed to be willing to bring everything back if that policy changes, and went so far as to ask people to mail the editor and be polite and specific about it.
Anyhow, apologies if I'm just restating the obvious here.
Scott has created one of the most thoughtful, level-headed, and interesting places on the internet. And yet he's shutting it down because it has led to a huge downside risk for his personal and professional life:
> I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
What does this mean for others who want to start similar blogs or engage in these sorts of discussions? They're going to see this sort of thing happening and think: "Why bother? It's not worth the trouble."
You can’t imagine how it would affect his job?
In England the regulator is the GMC, and here's their page for doctors use of social media: https://www.gmc-uk.org/ethical-guidance/ethical-guidance-for...
> Anonymity
> If you identify yourself as a doctor in publicly accessible social media, you should also identify yourself by name. Any material written by authors who represent themselves as doctors is likely to be taken on trust and may reasonably be taken to represent the views of the profession more widely.10
But also, a complaint to the regulator is a worrying time for the doctor even if they've done nothing wrong.
> The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for).
You write:
> What's the hidden truth, controversial opinion or super secret insight at stake here?
There is no one opinion at stake here. What is at stake is the ability to hold any dissenting opinion. Or not even hold it, but merely discuss it openly.
In the case of the anti-psychiatry lobby it's not even a dissenting opinion! It's basically the opinion that psychiatry ought to exist. There is just a small community of dissidents who disagree and want to get Scott fired (or worse). They now have a lot more leverage, because we've collectively decided that we should foster a culture where it's totally normal to try and get someone fired for things that are totally unrelated to work.
Just as the members of an anti-psychiatry subreddit should have a right to freedom of speech and association without the fear that their posts will get them fired (or worse), so should Scott.
So yes. He's being silenced because he cannot enjoy speaking publicly without fear of retribution.
1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston
Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those who are already powerful.
2. What You Can't Say, by Paul Graham
Reflection on how to separate truths that will endure from "moral fashions" particular to a time and place in history. Written over 15 years ago and more relevant today.
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
[1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence [2] http://paulgraham.com/say.html