Poetically, if we assume 6 degrees of separation then you need 7 to be safe^.

The thing called cancel culture isn't rooted in a proud intellectual tradition, because intellectualism relies on knowing what the opposition's argument is to dismiss it (ie, the opposite of cancelling). It is group-forming action of identifying and attacking an enemy.

Although groups sometimes superficially seem to be using evidence, it is rarely important. The most secure kind of tribe is one that rallies around ideas that make no sense - because then if someone espouses the idea that proves they are in the tribe. If the idea makes sense then people who agree might have just arrived at it on their own.

Extreme guilt-by-association is a great cultural marker, because the only way that attitude makes sense is if the espouses is an adherent to cancel-culture ideas and is signalling support of the group. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It isn't really being important in the mobs decision making, the only important thing is identifying an enemy and it doesn't matter how.

^ I know, I know, 6 is supposed to be an average.

> How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?

There is no limit really. If you're targeted for cancellation, they'll dig up and use anything as evidence. Thankfully people seem to be wising up to these tactics and they're losing power as a result.

> they're losing power as a result

Ah yes, the old Conservative trope: eventually they'll go too far, and then you'll see.

How's that working out? Conservatives have lost on every issue since I was born.

But yeah, don't fight back. Power-hungry people will "defeat themselves"…eventually. Trust me.

Trust the plan.

Hmm, perhaps we should start passing laws to break up the mob think then.

Also you’re being hyperbolic or are a very well spoken 4 year old.

Some amount of shaming can be a good thing in society but the idea of not associating with anyone who may even remotely be connected with a bad idea is a terrible concept. It feels very cult like.

It's counter-productive too.

I was friends with a guy who was really into InfoWars in the early 2000s. I'm no longer in contact with him for unrelated reasons but I have to think that keeping friends who weren't in that world helps people from falling deeper into it.

Isolating people from good ideas doesn't seem like a great way to change minds.

Especially in a friendly context (and of course depending on your relationship) you can rag on them when they say something way out of line. It’s partially friendly banter, but also social pressure to consider infowars entertainment and not something to be taken as a serious news source.

Doesn't this go both ways though? I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people that get dragged into white supremacy because they make friends with a few at the bar. Just normal chat at first with occasional "facts" about a group thrown in.

Sure it goes both ways. That’s why a culture of taking offense to minor transgressions rather than giving people the benefit of the doubt is so detrimental. It goes back to that comic where someone asks about racism and the anti-racist tells them it’s emotional labor and to google it, then the white supremacist pulls out all his “research” and talks about white supremacy at length.

That person who can easily be influenced to be a white supremacist doesn’t feel accepted. I don’t really mind accepting people and opening up to them about my own flaws and ideological inconsistencies. Some people are going to fall into the wrong crowds - you can’t win everyone over, but blocking someone out because they’re superficially racist or they have “regressive” views or whatever else is a great way to get a confused person to be very sure about those views.

It definitely goes both ways but I think it's important to recognize that _most_ people don't fall for those fringe beliefs. Keeping ties to the people that do fall into them gives them a lifeline to pull themselves out.

Additionally, I find the thought process of the person that wants to shut down those "dangerous" ideas pretty repulsive. It seems implicit to me that they are trying to protect those that are lesser than them. There's an implicit superiority there.

I'm reading it as a criticism of views, not a criticism of people, which seems like an important difference.

If your best friend growing up is now a white supremacist, and for various reasons you want to keep being friends with them - maybe you're trying to talk them out of it, maybe you know they've got some deep personal trauma that you can help with and you want to be compassionate about that, whatever - I think there's a pretty good argument that that's your business. (To be clear, I think there's also a pretty good argument that you should ensure you're not effectively making them think that you support their positions or actions, though, but that's beside the immediate point.) There's good reasons to choose to be friends with them and that's your judgment.

If you link to their white supremacist writings, though, you're giving a platform and publicity to white supremacist writings. You're not amplifying or supporting them as a person: you're amplifying the messages they're communicating. And so the moral weight of that is in fact on you.

I think the article does do a pretty good job of talking mostly about views and not people, though it is obviously easiest to refer to views by the people who espouse them (especially in the case of personal blogs, which is what most of these are). The article is not trying to say that it's newsworthy that Sam Altman is best buddies with Elon Musk who married to Grimes who hangs out on a discord with Scott Alexander. The article is not trying to say that the NYT of the future will create simulations of Grimes just to cancel her.

The article is trying to say that, for instance, it's newsworthy that OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric about the urgency of building a friendly AI that implements your worldview, and that the worldview of this Rationalist community happens to be a worldview that gets an uncomfortable amount of support from white supremacists (and not just in the "We like this" sense, in the "This argument supports our argument" sense).

This discussion is incomplete unless it also comprehends that the definition of white supremacy (or x-phobia, patriarchy, misogyny) in elite and academic circles has expanded incredibly, to the point where it bears no relation to any reasonable person's understanding of these terms. Despite this, apparently well-intentioned people try to have conversations about these concepts, but the terms no longer have shared meaning.

It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.

And for people who think it’s just some wackadoos who use “white supremacy” in this way, behold FCPS (the school board in the Virginia county where I grew up). https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-haras.... People railing against the “white supremacy” of a high school (the one I went to) that’s overwhelmingly Asian.

This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.

I went to TJ too. Asra loves to make this argument but it is BS. TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students. The article you linked is gruesomely biased.

> TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students

You’ve got it exactly backward.

“Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people).

In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.

The proposals that Asra and friends decry as racist are random lotteries. How can a standardized test level the playing field more than that? The proposals further eliminate features that are either largely unrelated to academic capability or are tightly bound to access to wealth or attending the right gifted programs.

Performance in standardized tests is not “tightly bound to wealth.” Most of the Asians at the NYC test-based schools, for example, are lower income: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyve.... It’s true most people at TJ are solidly upper middle class, but so are most families in Fairfax County (the median family income of the whole county is $150,000). It’s not like families at TJ are richer than those at McLean, Great Falls, Langley, etc.

Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.

The "holistic application" is not what activists wanted. I agree that these fuzzy factors cause all sorts of trouble. What the activists wanted was randomness beyond some cutoff where students would be likely to succeed at TJ. This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.

I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science. My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome. And this was decades ago. It is much worse today.

My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.

Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).

The problems with TJ also extend beyond admissions. 8th period is dead. History education at the school was always awful and tied to the AP curriculum but it has further slipped against STEM. Colleges seem to be taking note, with admissions to what were previously backup schools like UVA now becoming much more difficult for TJ grads.

> The "holistic application" is not what activists wanted.

In the absence of objective criteria holistic evaluation (and worse) is what you’ll get. Not necessarily at TJ, but at the next steps, and if these ideas are applied generally.

> This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.

I have never understood this demonization of the prep process. Yes, kids start prepping for TJ admissions in middle school. So what? Asians do the same thing to prepare for high stakes testing in their home countries too. Test prep isn’t free, but the average family income in Fairfax County is over six figures for every racial group. (Asians actually have significantly lower average income than whites in the county.) Test prep is not an unaffordable expense for most families in the county.

Given that test prep is mostly affordable for the families in question (and given that studies show it doesn’t help much) it seems to me that people are really complaining about cultural changes brought about by an immigrant group. They don’t like asian culture where childhood is single-mindedly dedicated to education (ideally an education in a narrow range of acceptable fields like STEM). Now I don’t consider that “racist” or “xenophobic” (I think natives have a right to protect their culture) but that’s what it is.

> I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science.

So?

> My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome.

This is a conversation my wife and I have about our kids. (Though we decided private rather than magnet school.) They’re 8, 2, and the third is due in June.

> My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.

That’s a good change.

> Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).

In Kendi’s formulation of “racism,” the lottery approach is racist against Asians. It will exclude half to two thirds or so of the Asians who would otherwise have gotten in under a test-based model.

I think Asra is too quick to cry racism. I think the activists are just idealistic and misguided. That said, it’s not like the sentiment of white people not wanting to have to “compete with super study Asians” doesn’t exist. E.g. back in the day Wall Street would hire white guys from Ivy League crew teams, and today classes are overwhelmed by Asians with STEM degrees. As to colleges, they’ve been leftist since long before decades ago...

If there was a merit lottery, you'd still see a disproportionate number of south and east asian admits at TJ. That definitely doesn't fall under Kendi's formulation of racism (nor is he the God of activism).

I've seen you post this same debate about a certain high school's entrance exams before in these sorts of threads, and it continues to be as much of off-topic flamebait as it was last time. Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy."

And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"."

If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.

> Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy."

It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about.

It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.

It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult! Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?

What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article!

It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.

> It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult!

No, it’s difficult because the New York Times has chosen to adopt a phrase that has a well-understood usage with respect to violent extremists, and use it to refer to literally all other white people. If you don’t want people to complain you’re being confusing then don’t do that.

> Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?

Imagine if the New York Times had chosen to call all traditionalist/conservative Muslims “jihadists.” That’s exactly what the Times is doing with “white supremacy.” Should we all just play along, and Google to see if someone actually wants to kill non-believers, or whether they just support the tradition of gender-segregated prayer?

> What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well

Poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem where you invoke an unrelated fact to detail a discussion. In discussing a newspaper article about white supremacy, it’s not poisoning the well to point out that the newspaper’s deliberate editorial choices have made it impossible to understand what’s being discussed without doing your own research. It’s totally relevant.

Similarly, this is an astonishing (and infuriating) interview with SF board of ed president Gabriella Lopez: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren...

Even for SF, this is extreme.

Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.

I think it's clearly better for our incompetent leaders to have less power than more, but better still would be to have competent leaders with adequate and no more power.

> Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists.

I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists!

Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.

Umm.. there's definitely evidence of white supremacy in scientific research, especially older work now discredited.

Did I say otherwise?

> OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric

The sheer number of hoops you had to jump through to be a NYT apologist is just mind numbing. No, OpenAI isn't influenced by Grimes' chat messages on discord to mind-control us.

I specifically said the Grimes connection isn't the point being made. OpenAI is in fact influenced by, if not rooted in, Rationalist rhetoric about AGI and alignment: https://openai.com/charter/

Are you claiming it is not??

I think you're missing the point. It is the NYT that is making those absurd links and for you to defend it is indescribable and grim.

>How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?

no one can be safe from the mob if mob behavior is a normalized practice of the society. It doesn't matter that a given mob at a specific moment in time is directed in the "good" direction. Mob is just a tool, it doesn't have any way to distinguish "bad" from "good" (by it is nature the mob forms when its members let go their own moral independence for the sake of unity, mutual validation and resulting safety and drunk high feeling), and thus it can be turned in any direction by the tool handler.

Not only that, it's also if you don't vocally condemn along with others (no matter the reason) you are also suspect. You support "the status quo" even if you try to stay away from mob behavior, etc.

But that’s true! You are supporting the status quo. Every action in the trolly problem is a decision. Once someone shows you the lever you have no choice but to make a decision even if it’s inaction.

What people want from you when they ask you to openly condemn something is to make a broad societal change that normalizes that condemnation.

There’s nothing wrong with not doing it. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that some issue isn’t worth getting involved with, or you don’t think an issue is a big enough problem, or you don’t like how activists are going about it. Plenty of valid reasons but the crucial thing that you have to recognize that you’re making a choice, own it, and realize that it might have consequences.

You make an excellent counterpoint.

I think your comment also exposes an ambiguity in the phrase "support the status quo."

One meaning is to affirm the status quo as generally acceptable.

Another meaning is to (implicitly) decide that one particular aspect of the status quo falls below the cutoff line of what you have the time or energy to deal with in the moment.

I don't know if conflating the two intentionally is a common occurrence, but I can see how doing so could be used to incite outrage amongst uncritical thinkers.

From what I have seen, it is extremely common to conflate doing literally anything other than trying to tear the status quo down as supporting it.

Yes, and it goes further: activists will sort into tiers of extremism and each tier will frame the less extreme actions of the tiers below them as supporting the status quo. It's the active ingredient in their recruiting pipeline. High tier extremism can't recruit directly from the general population but it can recruit from the tier below by guilt-tripping them for not doing enough.

If you don't decide to "support the status quo" at some point, you'll wind up in the deep end.

Or I could be in favor of whatever it is, but don't want my news feed to be filled with my commentary about whatever social issue du jour it is like everyone else who engages in this, and would rather it just be more personal.

Also I don't want to have to be attacked or have to defend my position if I don't word things perfectly (more commonly don't show enough outrage, because I don't have as strong of opinions as a lot of people on social media), which seems to be a common occurrence nowadays.

Ignoring the status quo is not “supporting it”. You’ve created a false dichotomy here. Do you support the current regime of North Korea because you don’t take time to condemn China for supporting it? By your definition, everyone not speaking out about this is supporting the regime.

This makes the word “support” meaningless because you can no longer distinguish between 99 percent of the population of the world that doesn’t have time and the 0.01% actively supporting the regime.

This mindset just seems impossible to implement in general. If someone came to me and said "you should denounce suchandsuch Estonian law because it's terribly unfair to burglary victims", I would have to decline - not because I think burglary victims don't matter, and not because I support the Estonian justice system, but simply because I have no idea what they're talking about and there's no easy way for me to find out.

It's got to be absolutely exhausting! Even when I have the context to understand, I have trouble keeping up with the ever growing list of things I'm expected to be upset about, let alone have time to visibly denounce each of them.

It's simple: I'm mad at everything all the time. Everything sucks and we should change it.

See! Easy! ;)

> Everything sucks and we should change it.

Careful there, now you just made the "both sides are bad" argument showing you support the bad guys!

But it’s not Estonian burglary law. It’s about racism. Your dancing around hypotheticals hides the core issues.

So you’re right and you’re wrong. The people in this example don’t care about racist activities of people they support, which in itself is indirect support to mainstreaming these issues.

Not understanding Estonian burglary law is understandable and forgivable, not understanding the negative impacts of racism is not. It would take willful determination to avoid learning even the basics of recent world history or current events and why it’s been such a problem.

It’s not that hard to say “I find some of the ideas by X interesting and useful, but also I don’t support racism in any way.” I get that they don’t want to do it, but that’s the level support that enables the problematic culture to be pervasive.

The word racism is meaningless to many people now. the definition is too encompassing and by denouncing it, particularly in conversation with a political activist, you have no clue what you are signing up for.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dictionary...

From the linked article: Merriam-Webster captures this as well, noting that racism can mean “a political or social system founded on racism.”

So by denouncing racism I am literally denouncing the entirety of civilization I guess.

> So by denouncing racism I am literally denouncing the entirety of civilization I guess.

Considering the "denouncings" have included the US Constitution, Magna Carta, Greek philosophers, and math+science in general, this is more correct and scarier than almost anyone has thought through.

Exciting times ahead!

Is the entirety of civilization truly founded on racism or is just a part of it founded on racism? If it's only a part then what is wrong with denouncing the racist portion of civilization? How important is that portion?

To be honest… civilisation – at least, the parts the can be described as “a political or social system founded on racism” – isn't that great.

If we just eliminated the government, eliminated all hierarchies larger than 100 people, eliminated all nations and laws and institutions… well, most of us would probably die very quickly. But that doesn't mean that what we have now is even in the top 20% of possible ways that civilisation could be.

> top 20% of possible ways that civilisation could be.

This sort of an unmeasurable goal. I think we’re certainly in the top 20% of civilization from any time in history. Or top 20% ever attempted.

It’s hard to tell how good all possible civilizations can be.

Yeah; what I wrote was absurd. Most civilisations can trivially be improved; we're definitely pretty high up the possibilities. I meant we're not in the top 20% of feasible possible civilisations anybody currently alive would want to put into place (which is a qualitative claim, not a quantitative one).

> But it’s not Estonian burglary law.

That doesn't matter, because we all agree that burglary is bad. The question isn't "is burglary or racism bad," the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"

> the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"

And the answer is no, as per their post. We can agree burglary is bad but if you’ve never been burgled then how can you know? You see this a lot with gun control advocates telling victims of violence they don’t need a gun to protect themselves. How can someone know another’s perspective on life without titling at windmills daily from wrong assumptions as you attempt to figure out their point.

Spicy isn't dancing around anything. In his hypothetical there was no mention of it, and info that could illustrate to them that Estonian burglary laws had anything to do with racism had not propagated to be able to make heads or tails of it.

It's like a math problem without enough information. You don't get a result, you get "cannot compute from information given".

Making an affirmative or disavowing statement without all the pertinent information is irresponsible. Now we can argue the definition of 'pertinent' til the cows come home, and we do, every day. Real, meaningful, unambiguous communication with 100% accurate replication of surface and deep contextual meaning is hard, and at the very crux of humanity's difficulties putting up with one another.

It's why not having a view on something is perfectly okay. However, nowadays it is increasingly getting villified by a very vocal group who insists that everyone's viewpoint on the matter should be on record or inferred from their digital or social footprint. Which is a very dangerous position to take, because that viewpoint axiomatically requires an us/them divide. This is also a reason I reject this kind of cultural push out the gate. My, wouldn't it be nice to draw a circle around only the people willing to agree with us, and share our cognitive blindspots one and all, that does not a civilization or liberty loving people make. The true love of Liberty requires the love of all the ills it brings with it from those who will exercise it. We can argue endlessly around where the limits are, as long as we're all debating,and we're willing to revisit things to reevaluate the status quo over time, and maintain an agreed upon realistic representation of the progress we make over time moving forward.

Example:

Those that complain that what foundational/structural echoes remain of the very real institutional walls that used to exist are as bad as having the whole hog full in force are fools. Those that would tear down or dismantle material reminders of how far we've progressed, are also fools as well, because they are trying to break down the common record we measure our own progress as a civilization as a whole against. You see things like the 1619 project trying to completely rewrite history not in a "Hey, lets record what happened, and let people form an opinion of their own," sense but in the "all your narrative is belong to us, now" sense. People notice, can, and do read between the lines. Most just won't bring up that they do in public out of an abundance of concern for not subjecting everyone around them to a contentious atmosphere.

Long story short: There's more to life than being for/against a list of hot topics over time, and the people who care about those hot topics owe a bit of deferrence to those who have other more highly prioritized things to worry and devote. brain cycles to, just as those with other more pressing matters recognize and give due time to those who prioritize most highly things they are ambivalent about. The end result is an overall average whereby only the most pressing things capable of having consensus achieved are acted upon, or those so inconsequential that no need for resistance is recognized.

The entire practice of politics is concerned with shifting people between those buckets, and trying to push a social system to mandate picking a side is a Bad Idea (TM).

The comment I was responding to wasn't about racism. It was a general claim about all issues.

"normalizes that condemnation" is another way of saying "If you aren't for us, you are against us.", which many disagree with.

All right, I'll own it. I have failed to denounce people who are N degrees separated from me who believe terrible things, because I believe that guilt-by-N-degrees-of-asscociation-unless-denounced is both nonsense and deeply damaging to our society. I am not taking part in that kind of performance theater.

Surely there's some room for nuance, though?

If, say, large subgroups of white nationalists LOOOOOVE you, and are doing things to try and provide you support... passive acceptance of that support is questionable. There comes a point where if you continue to accept the support and not condemn that group that you're willingly associating yourself with them.

The problem now is that you can condemn something repeatedly and still be accused of not condemning it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-yicMhjGo

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...

Large subgroups of white nationalists looooove In-n-out. What has the company done to stop accepting them as customers?

Despite being perhaps the most benign example anybody could come up with off the top of their head, In-N-Out has actually already been targeted as having racist and ageist hiring practices:

The class action suit, brought by a Berkeley law firm, claims that the Irvine-based fast food chain with the cute paper hats "recruits, hires and maintains a work force that is predominantly under the age of 40 and/or non-African American." Out of 210 locations and thousands of employees, "very few" are older than 40 years old or black. The suit is also calling for a payout in the form of back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages on behalf of everyone over 40 and/or not white that In-N-Out has wronged with their allegedly unlawful hiring practices.

https://sfist.com/2012/09/06/new_lawsuit_accuses_in-n-out_bu...

I suppose that, by implication, it would be par for the course for their corporate culture to be accused of supporting white nationalism by anyone looking to nail them on something.

Unless a company is aggressively promoting itself as anti-racist in a very public way, it's very open to this sort of criticism (regardless of whether-or-not there's any actual merit in it).

Thankfully, this out of control thread I inadvertently started is finally dead but I wanted to point out your comment reminds me of that scene from the original Ghostbusters, where whatever thing the guys thought of would appear to try to kill them. So they tried to think of the most harmless thing they could, and it still appeared and tried to kill them.

It looks like even the beloved In-N-Out can be associated with the r-word if you dig deep enough. I'm starting to be convinced that for any company or individual you name, no matter how benign or harmless they are, you will be able to go out and find dots to connect some kind of tenuous link to racism.

1. I see it akin to a small war. We are talking here about acts of mild aggression here (if only verbal).

2. There are soldiers (metaphor for politicians) and their job is to fight, so that civilians (citizens) could live free from violence.

3. The idea to put citizens to fight and to tell them to target the neutrals and opponents has to face this criticism: you are applying a huge multiplier to the sum of all violence in the world. You better do the multiplication and run the actual numbers to be sure that in the long run you'll come good.

4. If it turns out a group intimidated 100k people to free from intimidation 90k other people, they turn out not only horrible morally, but also crude simpletons.

5. The more opinions become weapons, the less opinions will be judged objectively by these citizens in future. Circumstances can change quickly and, in democracy, the only way to cope is to have masses of voters honestly predict the real life results of their choices. They need to clear their heads, not to wield opinions as weapons. (They have politicians for that after all.)

You're describing collectivism thought. Everyone shares an identity and as such everyone needs to participate. This only can happen on one side, the other side believes in individual choices that aggregate to a greater good so long as everyone is responsible in their own choices. So yeah that is how the extremes go about it, and it seems to have been successful to some extent in social media (apparently by who the current big platforms are).

That's part of the necessary practice of being "conspicuously upset"[1] about things, that SSC points out. It's not enough that I am upset by White Supremacists (I am). I must conspicuously post over and over how upset I am about things, lest someone confuses a brief period of silence with acceptance of something awful.

1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Okay, but it’s not like people expect Scott to denounce these things apropos of nothing. He publicly discusses them. It’s fine to have a nuanced take — but if you leave room for interpretation, don’t be surprised when people side-eye you for not taking a clear stance.

Ironically, there was a recent astral codex article about how much writings sucks and becomes useless when you have to appeal to too many stakeholders by constantly re-stating the obvious to keep everyone happy.

I think the disconnect here is that if your schtick is doing deep, ostensibly neutral investigations into controversial topics, a lot of people actually don’t find your true position obvious.

Im of the opinion that the “true position” of the writer behind writing is irrelevant. Teachers are supposed to grade essays anonymously to avoid biases against students but here we are preoccupied not only with the writer, but his “true position”.

Well, this article is about the writer. But maybe I was unclear — by “true position” I don’t necessarily mean the feelings of the writer, but the thrust of their argument. You said that there is pressure to continuously restate the obvious; my point is that to a lot of people, it’s not actually obvious at all.

Why is it important that peoples' intentions are obvious in every piece of writing?

Journalists, anthropologists, and plenty of others strive towards rhetorical neutrality intentionally, and just as someone can be a citizen scientist, someone could also be a citizen journalist or anthropologist.

And furthermore it just isn't any of your business anyhow. What you are talking about is the equivalent of worrying about thoughtcrime. No objective harm was done but you worry that someone secretly holds an opposing viewpoint.

You can write however you want to. But don’t be surprised if you write something that could be construed as sympathetic to race science, and people go “hey, this person might support race science”. You seem to be saying that you can be as ambiguous as you want and that people shouldn’t try to fill in the gaps, which is ridiculous.

And no, it’s not “thoughtcrime” to form an opinion about a person based on things they’ve written.

The only reason your statement here doesn't seem completely absurd is because you are invoking an issue which people have an acute emotional reaction on, to the point where even something which would be viewed as paranoid in another setting seems acceptable.

I shouldn't be surprised if people react in a paranoid or irrational manner, no. But I would hope that they would hold themselves to a higher standard.

In this case we are talking about a very humane and nuanced thinker, and under normal circumstances we should in fact withhold insinuation of malice unless evidence exists. It is called the principle of charity.

Well, no. Scott invoked the issue here, not me. And obviously, people see evidence of malice, which is why we’re having this whole debate.

But again, there’s nothing abnormal or “paranoid” about inferring someone’s intentions from their writing. You’ve done it yourself, which is why you described him as “humane”. Why shouldn't others be able to arrive at different conclusions?

> And obviously, people see evidence of malice, which is why we’re having this whole debate.

Because the entire point of attempting to force one to take a stance is to further whatever the narrative may be, or to cancel counter narratives. There is no other point. There’s nothing wrong with arriving at your own conclusion but stop there if you don’t agree. Don’t cancel, dox, or otherwise force their opinion to match yours.

No one is being “forced” to take a stance, or canceled or doxxed.

Yes, clearly. Come out from under your rock. Or try to view things from the alternate perspective. If this is not the intent, this is full well the idea has been implanted over the last 4 years. As a somewhat related source of evidence, see what they did with the Trump trial? It's mostly about what he did NOT say. This is one example, there are many many more from the last 4 years.

He's taken a clear stance on pretty much everything I've heard people complaining about him not taking a clear stance on – including some things this article implies he supports (or condemns).

It's not just being upset. It's, "Post the black square!" It's the guy who got accosted by BLM protesters demanding that he repeat their slogan. Havel's greengrocer provides a good characterization of this problem that has existed for a great deal of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

Name a single example of someone who has been 'canceled' for fourth degree associations with white supremacists?

If you’re a liberal, you need no degrees of separation. You read about what Trump said about the Central Park Five decades ago as a privatize citizen, but rarely about Biden’s outreach to the segregationist wing of his party. E.g. eulogizing Robert Byrd a former KKK member. (Back in the 1970s-1990s, Trump was almost certainly to the left of Biden on social issues but you’d never know it.)

Not to say I think Biden should get flack for that. But the guilt by association thing is an especially easy kudgel to wield in an uneven way.

Looking at US politics as a european, it seems like the republicans are far right and the democrats are center left. The problem is how these two parties have a duopoly. I'm pretty sure that Sanders supporters and other more progressive leftists heavily critisize Biden and the democrats.

So no, it's not only republicans and Trump that get "cancelled".

Which European country? I’m most familiar with Germany, because my wife lived there. I think American Republicans, and many moderates, would actually be happy with the German CDU. Not cruel to immigrants and refugees, but Merkel can say that she doesn’t believe in “multiculturalism” and it’s accepted as a mainstream opinion. Abortion is available, upon counseling and waiting periods, but only up to 12 weeks absent a special case. Bavaria can require government buildings to display crosses on government property. Schools are required by the basic law to offer religious instruction (so Christian and Muslim parents can ensure their children are socialized in their religion’s morals, and not a secular moral framework created for schools). Etc.

Part of Republicans’ apparent extremism is a response to the strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions, in view of the very conservative nature of American society. In the area of religion, for example, America is far more religious than Germany (and comparable to Poland or Turkey). But American liberals, through the Supreme Court, have effectively pushed religion out of the public sphere (especially schools) much more completely than in Germany.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

That's the difference.

>strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions

America's cultural institutions are certainly strong and center-left, but not extremely left wing. You don't see Hollywood promoting kibbutzim or the abolition of commodities. The truth is way more boring: Rich people on the coasts are general pro-gay marriage or what have you, but don't try to build dense housing near them or raise their taxes.

American idpol is at the pretty extreme end) left I'd say, even compared to europe.

The democratic left were not very enthusiastic about Biden. Also, I think it's fair to allow people to change over time. Maybe Biden was right of Trump 30 years ago, but the recent actions by Trump and Biden make it very clear that they have swapped places.

Just the other day, I decided not to go to a small event for exactly this reason, because I knew that one or two people there believed some fringe stuff. I don't, but being somewhere where they aren't kicked out is professional suicide for someone in my position. One never knows these days who might be recording and has to live his life as though it were being constantly observed.

Edit: to clarify, by fringe stuff, I mean that some believe that the election was stolen from Trump. I don't and have convinced others that it was not, but I guess I can't do that anymore.

A person can have different views on different topics.

You should be able to recommend a good article that you agree with from someone, even if you disagree with that person on other topics.

You can also recommend a good article that you disagree with because you think it argues an opposing point well.

Depends on the nature of the disagreement. Not to white supremacists like Charles Murray, no.

> white supremacists like Charles Murray

I’m not sure you’re using that word correctly. Do you think Murray is actually a white supremist? Or just made some bad science?

Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion.

* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.

* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.

All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.

Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.

---

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.

From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:

> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man

This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).

In The Bell Curve, they report that Asian Americans have a higher mean IQ than European Americans, who have a higher mean IQ then African Americans. Wouldn't that make him an Asian supremacist, if anything?

White supremacists are happy to co-opt East Asian (not Asian in general, only East Asian) populations for their purposes when convenient.

Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.

It seems your response doesn't really engage with any part of that comment. What is the meaning of "co-opt East Asian populations"? You claim Murray is a white supremacist because he thinks whites have higher IQs than blacks, but when dealing with the point that Murray thinks Asians have higher IQs than whites, you dismiss it with this language about "co-opting"?

I'm claiming that Murray is a white supremacist primarily because his welfare reform and UBI proposals are white supremacist.

Race-IQ stuff as you call it is still a debated issue. The recent blowback over Nathan Cofnas’s work [1], for example, show there’s a culture where anyone not in line with the view there’s no connection is a target for cancellation. I don’t agree with the science from my layman reading of it, but I have much bigger issues with this attempt at silencing people by associating them with white supremacy.

1 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2019.1...

UBI (your second point) is a common idea advocated by many people other than Bill Murray.

This is the first time I've heard it described as white supremacy and eugenics although I'm sure it won't be the last.

I like and support UBI (for complex reasons some of which are related to the arguments in Seeing Like a State). However, some implementations of UBI are white supremacist and eugenicist, and Murray's version is one such implementation.

This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.

The reaction to my posts is rather remarkable. I've lost 30 karma so far just for stating a bunch of facts and opinions that challenge the hegemonic narrative on "Hacker News".

Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s

I think you're getting downvoted because you are stating highly disputed things as if they were facts. When people question you, you refuse to engage with their arguments. You're also slandering a person (calling Charles Murray a white supremacist) on the basis that he supports welfare reform and you disagree with him on some edge cases of UBI. Downvotes are well deserved in my opinion.

"Supports welfare reform" and "edge cases of UBI" are doing a lot of work there.

I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.

See: here is an interesting case where you think I'm summarizing you unfairly or incorrectly. Do you think Charles Murray would feel you were summarizing and characterizing his arguments fairly?

No, I don't, because I'm sure he's constructed post hoc rationalizations in his head about how he's not actually as bad as it seems.

I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.

If you accurately state what someone believes, they'll probably agree with you. I don't think you've managed that here.

Well, for his accurate beliefs, let's look to another excerpt from In Our Hands:

"The libertarian solution is to prevent the government from redistributing money in the first place. Imagine for a moment that the $2 trillion that the US government spends on transfer payments were left instead in the hands of the people who started with it. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be my solution. It is a case I have made elsewhere."

His eugenicist UBI is an alternative to his ideal proposal.

As a public figure with extensive writings, his internal state of mind does not matter.

---

edit to respond because I'm "posting too fast":

> So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?

What? A logical statement does not imply it's converse. I'm talking about public figures like Murray here, not average private individuals. Besides, structural racism of the sort Murray advocates for has a much greater impact on material conditions than what some rando believes in their heart.

Oh hohm.

So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?

I find you're making leaps reality can't cash here. I don't mind letting people's actions speak for themselves, but I'd caution against .

You seem to be equating libertarians with racists here. Is that what you intend to do? i.e. You mean that anyone who thinks there shouldn't be taxes is racist?

Not all libertarians, but many right-libertarians, certainly. (I have some wonderful left-libertarian friends.)

Anyone who ignores structural racism and espouses the policy positions that Murray does is either ignorant or racist. Murray, being a public figure whose ideas have had real impact on the material conditions of marginalized people, does not have the excuse of ignorance.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be on the right-libertarian train myself before I realized that oppression was primarily structural and that a laissez-faire approach always perpetuates it. I genuinely do not believe one can be non-racist and espouse Murray's policy positions once one understands this basic fact.

If you want to learn more about how welfare reform in the 1990s—something Murray influenced a great deal—affected millions of lives, I'd recommend the first season of a podcast called The Uncertain Hour.

I usually try to take advice on "learning more" from people who demonstrate a good understanding of a subject, or who seem well informed, people I want to be or think like. I'm not really interested in learning how to declare broad swathes of the political spectrum racist or in presenting the style of argument that you are here.

I haven’t been following this massive side-thread, but maybe you are getting downvoted because you are using white supremacy to describe anything that structurally favors white people. Policies that merely favor white people are not necessarily “white supremacist”, unless those policies are also motivated by a belief that white people are better than other people. Maybe “structurally racist” might be a better way to describe the things you are describing? But what do I know, I’m not a sociologist.

Given that a number of people on this site and elsewhere insist Murray isn't racist, even acknowledging that he is would be a nice change.

HN is more about intellectual posturing than it is about having discussions on anything.

Add on one more lemma - which is that you get to unilaterally decide who is a white supremacist, even over their objections, and you've got a recipe for cancelling anyone you like.

I've laid out my case for why Charles Murray is a white supremacist. Beyond that it's just a matter of free speech and free association.

No, you have not laid your case for why. You have losely described some of his policy positions, followed by the words "is white supremacist" and "is racist".

The "why" is entirely missing. This comes off as "it's so self evident I don't have to bother explaining it" to others, and is the main reason why you are getting downvoted.

Yes, white supremacists love openly Jewish bloggers.

> Guilt by association to one degree is completely valid. The further out you go the more attenuated it gets, but if person C is liked by white supremacists and doesn't openly denounce that fact, it would be accurate to call person C a white supremacist.

No:

- Nobody is obligated to engage in "openly denouncing" anybody.

- The US has a population of 325 million people - who knows what their beliefs are? How often do they change?

- And I'm sure leftists have a daily-changing definition of what "white supremacist" means.

(For those unfamiliar with the OP's illogical argument, that is what the left used to tar Trump as a racist - in reality, Trump never said anything racist. But he didn't denounce some groups to the satisfaction of the left, who would have just kept adding one more group.)

It's easier to understand the origin of this thinking if you put it in some of its more recent historical contexts:

* The "one drop of African blood" theory of the Democrats' Old South * "Jewish heritage", pretty much anywhere * "Class history" in the Marxist Socialist circles * "Intellectualism" in Khmer Rouge Cambodia

This is just another instance, from the same people who would have belonged to any one of these or similar groups. They all come from the same root intellectual history.

Incidentally, the "excommunication by implication" technique is used by none other than ISIS and their ilk. Quite the irony to see that the extremes on both sides are not really that different after all.

It's not ironic. That's human nature. All atrocities, no matter how benign, follow the same formula.

It's reeeeallly easy to avoid guilt by association. You just say 'no, I don't agree with Mr white supremacist'.

That works just about as well as apologizing.

Apologising and distancing yourself both work quite well. People are usually too proud to do either.