Not that there aren't legitimate free speech issues that we still wrestle with and don't get right or real injustices out there, but it's mostly a bugaboo.
The Information Age has had a catalytic effect on the calls for ousters of any number of people for the merest hint of thoughtcrime.
I'll take it a step further. "cancel culture" is the same moral panic that's always existed. But now the power is put in the hands of the masses instead of the elite.
Cancel-culture panic is a largely anecdote and feelings-driven. There's no real data to show that firings or social consequences for speech are more numerous or more severe or more unjust (or even more "left-wing") today than they have been at any point in the past.
And in many of these anecdotes that seem to drive the discourse, nothing of note actually happens to the person who was "cancelled" - they are the subject of an investigation or social media dust-up for a news cycle. Then life carries on.
The shift happened because businesses became dependent on more and more talent for continued growth. Suddenly having a large contingent of your workforce threaten to quit because some dude wants to spout off about women not being as naturally smart as men is really bad business; and it's not surprising that businesses respond to the incentives and axe the dude spouting off.
In this situation, who took the decision to fire you? The owner? The bank? The bank regulators? The politicians? The people who called the restaurant, in fear for their health? The people who published the initial lie? Everyone participated a little, and by the end of it, there wasn't really any other possible choice. That's how it usually works.
Most cases I have seen have more been about loss of business and fear of loss of reputation. Basically, in your example, the manager would have the talk with the employee after just the social media storm. Perhaps the manager's fear are all the other things, but the cancelling happens before it ever goes that far.
As expected. If you find yourself at risk of something bad happening to you, you'll make steps to mitigate that risk before it materializes. The question of how real is that risk extends beyond "cancel culture" - it sits at the core of the public relations and reputation management industries.
Whether it makes sense or not, companies tend to be quite aggressive at protecting their reputation in certain contexts. This is an empirical fact. Cancelling someone is mostly about exploiting that - it's an art of causing harm to a person by making them a target of their employers' PR immune system, which starts acting before any real harm comes to the company itself. It's been demonstrated to work, the mechanism of action is clear and obvious, and it's quite easy to use.
When done properly, there isn't a single person or group that could be specifically blamed for destroying the victim's life. You can't fine the company for trying to proactively protect their business deals or shield themselves from potential liability. You can't fine the crowd for being idiots. The original instigators have plausible deniability. And everything happens so fast that it doesn't matter whether the allegations about the victim are true, or complete fabrication.
That's why people are so afraid of it.
Before I get into that, I do want to counterbalance it by saying that I agree with Stallman in that specific context. The context being key. The question is whether a 17yo can morally consent to having sex (not legally). Unless one truly believes that a switch flips the day you turn 18, you’ll be hard-pressed to form an argument that a 20yo having sex with a 17.99yo is not merely illegal, but also immoral.
But the problem of course is that Stallman has a room temperature social IQ. I hate to phrase it so bluntly, because it’s like staring into my future when I’m 60. I bet I’ll run my mouth one too many times and get into some hot water, and it’s all too easy to take potshots at someone who’s willing to risk saying controversial-but-true things.
And yet.
> It seems that [Stallman’s] general points are two.
> 1. …
> 2. And that, depending on the context, what is technically child pornography didn't cause anyone harm.
>> This child pornography might be a photo of yourself or your lover that the two of you shared.
> He then says that the mere possession of child pornography does not harm anyone. I assume he is implying that only the production of child pornography harms people.
>> But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a child, that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship.
> I would disagree with that, but it's his personal blog. He is not speaking for MIT or the free software foundation.
“Disagree” is a rather benign term for the emotions one tends to feel at that sentiment.
It’s an interesting experience to consciously try to override one’s own tendency to raise a “conversational exception”. (From http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, “Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used: to end a discussion.”)
Yes, it’s technically true that possessing CSAM does not physically harm anyone. And that’s worth pausing to consider the implications. For example, I’ve spent a lot of time considering whether AI models should be allowed to generate CSAM. After all, isn’t it tempting to think you could train one Final Model on Forbidden Content, with the justification of “See, now no one needs to go and produce this training data anymore; we have an endless supply that harms nobody”? It’s at least worth considering, if only to disagree with it.
Then you get into the really weird questions. If you train a model to produce loli hentai porn (which 4chan is actually doing), is it morally reprehensible? (Turns out, it’s often illegal.) After all, it’s just drawings. No real people were even involved. How do you even argue against that from a moral standpoint?
Yet all of this context seems completely lost on Stallman, who spends two seconds to type two paragraphs and clicks “reply” without pausing to consider how it might sound. It’s so frustrating to see someone bring up so many valid points in a way that’s not merely tone deaf, but existing in a universe absent of undertones and nuance.
At times like these, I like to reread http://paulgraham.com/say.html:
> If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.
I despise AI safety filters, but they exist because we can’t afford to ship a Richard Stallman model out to the real world and have it generate an endless list of reasons why child porn doesn’t hurt anybody. We’d have no time left to do actual research, because we’d have to spend it all defending ourselves for the decision to release such a model.
He's autistic. Apologised afterwards. etc Which one would expect a crowd championing (neuro)diversity would keep in mind.
The author of the original accusations for the petition latched onto every bit of tone-deafness they could tho. Saying he was transphobic since at some point where pronouns were only just becoming a thing in public discourse he discussed about the use of a default since something else seemed linguistically better to him. This because....well he was/is around a decent amount of trans people given he's very much not transphobic. He had again apologised publically about that one but it didn't matter.
Stallman appears to be aware of his condition, but takes no steps to actively counter his tendencies. This works well for building emacs. Perhaps it even works well for leading an open source software movement. But it’s mystifying that he seemed to be caught completely off guard by the entirely-predictable backlash.
To put it another way, is autism a reasonable defense for believing that obtaining CSAM harms no one? It’s unrelated to the question. Even if we’re extremely generous and set aside how CSAM was obtained, him being autistic wouldn’t be more than a footnote.
Being neurodivergent is hard. That’s why it’s called divergent. It’s why I don’t try to get a job in sales, despite being pretty good at it. Because that would require me to be a reliable 9am to 5pm person; I wasn’t born that way.
So really the only questions we should be asking are:
1. How can we limit the harm from people doing such things as much as possible? 2. While doing so not infringing on people's liberties and freedoms, and risking falsely accusing people?
But neither have simple answers and have many sub-questions within them that are specific to any particular case.
> Here’s a particularly awful direct quote:
So, if I understand you correctly, you'd be ok with rape if it was not against the law?
Here’s what I’m actually saying: it is morally absurd to define rape in a way that excludes an adult in their 50s having sex with a 17 year old. Just so you understand me correctly.
Yes this sort of things feels bad when it happens to us… which is ironic because you were ok doing it to someone else :)
> Here’s what I’m actually saying: it is morally absurd to define rape in a way that excludes an adult in their 50s having sex with a 17 year old
He was arguing against the fact that statutory rape in USA is a boolean value basically.
You are making it sound like rape is legal if it happens to someone old… when in fact rape is always illegal.
RMS returned to the FSF board in March 2021, where he remains. In other words, a return to the status quo.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes this guy was left in absolute shambles by the woke mob
The problem touted about “being canceled” is that cancelee’s life is destroyed. They’ve going to suffer long term irreparable effects.
But when you look at what actually happens it’s nothing. So if the problem is the harm, and there is none, and in fact sometimes profits from their notoriety? Then how is the goal post set out by the “victims” even met?
So yes, I believe they’re is goal post moving, just not the goal posts you’re implying.
It’s a shame they’re all still employed… among other things.
Literally seen it today. I don't remember having a week without something like that happening. It's routine by now - somebody got a flu, somebody got cancelled by online mob.
Note that with AI the process of producing a huge volume of false "information" about someone can now be automated.
https://archive.ph/20201214175330/https://twitter.com/AnimaA...
Anima Anandkumar holds dual positions in academia and industry. She is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, she is leading the research group that develops next-generation AI algorithms. At Caltech, she is the co-director of Dolcit and co-leads the AI4science initiative, along with Yisong Yue.
Debate is 1-on-1, not army-on-one. And you don't call your opponents fanatics, if you want to have a real debate. In reality the list is intended to intimidate them.
>if you want to have a real debate
It's easy to make a list of things that you take away from how earnestly you can take people, especially online. I'm not sure why someone would balk at "fanatic" but think "woke army" is a particularly earnest discussion stimulating term. Of the two, I've heard woke used disparagingly, with political motivations, far more often than the other in recent times. Similarly, calling people you disagree with your opponents, or suggesting that when they talk to you about a topic, it's re-education while when you do it, it's debate.
https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1275191515380215808
Look at the person this message is aimed at. He is one of the "fathers of ML".
You put that word in quotes implying it was a literal quote.
It isn't and the distinction here is actually important. She said "get them away from fanaticism" - there's a big difference in tone and it hits an important issue.
Calling someone a "fanatic" in many ways carries an implication that they have some unchangeable inner nature. They are to be dismissed, ignored. They are beyond reason. She is saying the opposite - that they should be engaged with - that there's a chance that they can be reasoned with.
Why did you choose to alter the wording in such a way?
Technically, yes, that is 'encouraging people to engage with others', but it is clearly inflammatory and I wouldn't be surprised if several people on that list have been blindly harassed by her fans/supporters/followers.
That tweet was stupid, and anyone on that list who is harassed may well have a good chance in a defamation case if they chose to pursue it.
At least this is how people use it. You could argue it's an inaccurate term since there are no actual cancellations in most case. But the prevalence of this sentiment is still noteworthy imo.
So saying anything that might be even remotely offensive to anyone can end up with you losing your job. Based on stories like this, I'm personally afraid of cancel culture. Because this joke is the sort of joke I could've made.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...
They cause massive damage to other people's lives over what's essentially wrongthink.
> Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly?
Organized internet mobs, often from Twitter. Look up Sleeping Giants for an example.
> Is it just fear of losing your job
"Just" losing your job? That's a major life-changing punishment by itself. They can ruin your reputation and essentially blacklist you.
These people essentially run a denial of service on your life and that of your family by denying you income for the crime of offending them with your thoughts. In a way, they're a self-righteous Kiwi Farms.
> who makes that call? HR? Executives?
Whoever's in charge. They will be intimidated into firing you for your offensive conduct or suffer the same consequences for supporting and aligning themselves with such an abominable wrongthinker.
In other words, these complainers have never had to endure or think about:
- anti-black housing discrimination (e.g., redlining) - misogynistic sidelining and glass ceilings - anti-Jewish admissions policies at major universities
etc., etc.
Guess what, in all these cases, socially coordinated groups could cause you to lose your job, or not be able to buy a house, or lose your career, etc. It was never fair. Employers in the US could in general terminate you for no cause at all.
It's just that these people who complain about cancel culture now have never had to worry about this stuff before, and it seems like something new and pisses them off.
Twitter is and almost always has been a collection of people screaming in to an endless void. A platform specifically created by its very nature to remove any nuance due to character limitations. Things have changed on that front, but the culture hasn’t.
I think some people get caught up in things and don’t deserve it but plenty of people do. Either way I think literally everyone’s mental health would be better if they weren’t using Twitter. Though perhaps what comes next will be worse.
Not every AI tool will be a corporation who can get attacked by Internet warriors. And absent laws not every organization will feel the need to listen to them.
I remain hopeful that OSS can overcome this hurdle.
I had GPT answer a prompt (in Dutch) with a reply containing the N-word once. A week later they released a new version, so I tried the same prompt. This time it refused to answer the prompt. I assume they have some sort of alerting system to get notified when it uses 'inappropriate' words, so they can then create some query filters.