Comment by gringoDan
6 years ago
Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited.
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
I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him and everyone is backing her up... even calling him a racist. I guess a lot of people who work on fairness in AI got offended because they feel he calls their research BS. (which I don't think is what he meant)
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.
I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry about training production models on unbiased data.)
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".
> 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.
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.
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Don't have a lot of time to respond now, but will try to do it later. Just a quick note. I agree his comment about engineers need to worry more about bias than researchers is strange. But in my opinion it wasn't the focus of what he was tying to say.
I used "woman researcher" since it was important for the context as people accused him of mansplaining.
I agree with all of your points about the diffusion of responsibility that is common in ML, though I think you may not be sensitive enough to the harmful framing being created by the "anti-bias" side.
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.
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So, your argument is that you disagree with data being the root of the problem by arguing that data "shapes research directions in a really fundamental way", research is "empirical" (i.e. based on data) and his research can't be isolated from data it'd be used on in production?
Looks to me that you're argumentatively agreeing with Yann.
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It has been this way for a while. Outrage/cancel culture is an absolute pox upon our population that really needs to stop.
Isn't a large part of this down to the forum of communication vs. the level of discourse? I mean, if you want to have a nuanced, balanced discussion about a potentially sensitive topic you just can't do that on twtter, SMS, message board, etc.
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"
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I am very likely naive in these circumstances, but I honestly don't understand how cancel culture can work at all. So there are some voices on twitter who loudly express their immature mob mentality. Why don't all the sane people just block them and ignore them, and then go on with their lives as if nothing happened?
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If silence is violence, then destroying a person's ability to maintain employment is also violence. And should be treated as such by the courts.
It reminds me of the (nearly cliche, but timeless) quote from MLK about riots:
I don't think anybody, even "cancellers," think it's a remotely ideal solution. But when groups go unheard, feel a system is unjust, and feel unable to change the system they understandably seek to go outside the system.
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.
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Yes.
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.
Is that request not a call to cancel cancel-culture?
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>>"Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.
this post is no longer available, of course
I don't even think he said "model's don't cause bias," he just said "ML systems are biased when data is biased."
I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?
Just curious, but what "error" did the original tweeter make? Did anyone really expect the model to accurately reconstruct the original photo starting from a pixelated mess? That makes no sense to anyone with even a passing knowledge of ML. You're always going to get craploads of bias and variance (i.e. blatant inaccuracy, over and above the bias) in such a setting, even starting from "ideal, unbiased" data. The problem domain is at issue here.
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>will request FB to fire him... (which thankfully won't happen)
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.
That made me think of an essay I often revisit, Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841):
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism.
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.
If you are a history nerd, reading what people wrote 90 years ago you will realize that we are exactly the same species, and our attitudes have not changed a bit. One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making them gain support.
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.
I've been heavily downvoted for suggesting that we're witnessing something dangerous.
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.
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> One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making them gain support.
Could you point me to those essays? Would like to examine those!
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... but there was a reason, sort-of, for the rise of Nazism. Maybe I understand it badly, but things weren't great then. Now, there aren't really... problems on a comparable scale.
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> The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism.
Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?
Does it mattter which one?
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.
If Trump was interested in totalitarianism though, why would he pass up the opportunity of a lifetime during COVID to impose strict lockdowns and restrictions, and be hailed by the left while doing it?
I've seen moral fashions. What's happening now is bigger, rarer and worse. It's known as a "purity spiral" (Haynes), "mass movement" (Hoffer), "political religion" (Voegelin).
Living outside the US and watching what's going on (ok, it's not just the US, but it is just a few countries) is like watching a friend's slow motion descent into madness. It's pitiful and sad, and I feel powerless to do anything about it.
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.
Well if you ignore the change that is reflected in what we call the news and social media of course society would seem the same, but that doesn't mean it's not changing. I agree that face-to-face interactions haven't deteriorated and may even be better than in the past, but the challenge is their share of communication and social interaction has dramatically shrunk.
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Most of the discourse motivating what's going on is in the English language, so perhaps that's a factor.
Is it a power-grab or an attempt by individuals to gain social status?
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.
The Unabomber, really? There's something disturbingly smug about thinking that one side is emotional to the point of religious and another side is logical and factual. Maybe it's time for some humbling introspection.
If you're quoting that you should maybe note that "Leftism" there means effectively anything that the author dislikes (or fits with their current PC bugbears) regardless of whether it's driven from the left side of the political spectrum of not.
It's unclear which country and which side of the spectrum you're referring to.
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.
Yes science can be a good guide. The trouble is that some left-wing social movements explicitly reject science (and Enlightenment values in general) as a tool of the oppressor. There are certain things you're not allowed to say regardless of scientific evidence. For one example, look what happened to scientific critics of Lysenkoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#Effects
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Why is this comment being downvoted?
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Great post. I wish more people would genuinely listen to those they disagree with. When we shut people down or make them feel uncomfortable/threatened to the point that they won't speak, what have we gained?
The problem is that it's a vicious circle. You can't attempt to understand/reason with someone going against societal norms otherwise you will be seen by your peers as agreeing with that person and thus ostracized because they themselves do not want to be seen as understanding/reasoning with someone (you) that now appears to be going against societal norms.
this forum literally hides opinions people disagree with.
The up and down arrow are really bad icons for UX.
I think the up and down arrows are perfect representations for what they do: "I want people to see this" vs "I don't want people to see this".
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
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In my experience on HN, downvoted comments are almost exclusively low-effort, spammy, immature, etc. I'm not sure I've ever noticed an insightful dissenting comment downvoted here.
The [-] allows you to hide the most popular threads and dig for hidden gold. I do this often.
> I wish more people would genuinely listen to those they disagree with.
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.
> I love to debate and hear ideas from those I disagree with
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.
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> They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas.
“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.”
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That's what it means to truly disagree with someone- to hate them.
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.
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> They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas.
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”.
Yeah whenever people on here allude to 'what you can't say' it usually boils down to the same few very specific ideas, none of which are particularly secret, original or new. Hell, if you're a tenured professor, billionaire or anyone in a position of power whining about 'what you can't say' I find it hard to take you seriously.
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There’s a lot of things I’d like to blog about that I hesitate to do because I realize that no matter what I say, the topics alone will evoke a reaction from people.
For me rather the film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), we are going through the McCarty years again.
I'd say this forum is exactly this. How often have I self censored because I just don't want the downvotes?
I read somewhere that downvotes are capped to -4 and it made me much less likely to self-censor when I felt like I had a valid point.
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)
There have been many times when I wanted to use my upvoting ability to unhide a comment that has some merit. To that end, I wish I could see the precise score of downvoted comments. (IIRC, a net score of -1 prevents a majority of HN readers from seeing the comment.)
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Unfortunately you still get the [flag] abuse. It seems that some members are able to flag posts and you can often find if you say something disagreeable in a thread that every single one of your comments will get flagged regardless of the content of the comment in question. The comments can be well-written, non-confrontational and be a genuine attempt to start a discussion, but they'll get flagged because someone doesn't like what you wrote but (presumably) can't form an argument against it (like Paul Graham said, people only really hate things that could be true).
I self censor for a different reason. What if someone decides to find that one political comment I made few years ago after I am back on my legs again to drown me?
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.
This feels like an instance of negativity-bias. If you're willing to self-censor to avoid downvotes shouldn't you also be willing to shill / virtue signal for upvotes?
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.
What about if you have say 7 downvoted comments in a row, you might be shadowbanned [forever]?
That seems much worse. As well as not being transparent at all.
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Yes, this is the worst aspect of HN's design in my opinion: the paler font is essentially the equivalent of silencing dissent.
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.
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Why are you afraid of downvotes? There's little reason to self-censor due to an internet currency.
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."
If you get downvoted, you will be rate limited. So your ability to participate in the discussion will be limited.
This is a really interesting question. I know I - and most of us - seem to have a sensitivity to negative social responses, that it's own freestanding emotional response, it's not linked directly to any pragmatic connection to the consequences of that response. Which is why in a mass society, where that avoidance response is not well matched to consequences that sociopathy becomes a superpower.
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's a bit of a difference between "not saying things because you may lose a dozen of meaningless internet points" and "not saying things because you can have a mob of haters try to get you and you family fired, you life ruined and maybe send men with guns drawn to your home to get you murdered if they're lucky".
I don’t self-censor. I don’t really pay attention to votes except as a barometer for how HN interpreted the topic or content of my post or comment. I try to post within the guidelines and rules and generally not be divisive. And yet I often get a warning that I’m posting too fast. Seems like a form of HN’s invisible soft mod power that suppresses legitimate comments and posts. I know this because I tried to post something yesterday afternoon, got the posting too fast error, and now the post is made by someone else 12 hours ago or so. How can these kinds of casual censorship be quantified across HN? It’s hard to talk about that which you can’t say.
Why do you care about invisible internet points? Create an alt-account and use it in good faith.
There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.
I don't care about invisible internet points, but people do get banned from here if they rock the boat too much.
Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!
Honestly, I once got a gentle slap from dang, and it made me reevaluate my comment. Downvoting is easily ignored.
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Downvotes don't hurt, but I wonder how many people here would stick around if HN forced all users to use their real names. How many people would instantly self-censored or completely change the way they share opinion and respond.
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Dudes, this comment has gone from 0 to 5 votes, I don't even know what to make of it any more.
I do this, but generally the comment wouldn’t have added much to the discussion in that case anyway.
Who actually knows? The whole reason we exist is to say or do that thing that would not be said or done if we hadn't been there to say or do it..
Why do you care about fake internet points?
Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals. Total ideological purity is demanded, and valued above competence or actual results. The apotheosis tends to be something like Communist "self-criticism" sessions where people are forced to confess their thought crimes.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
> Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals.
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.
Except it is, and not because "leftists" are bad or anything. I consider myself a leftist. It is because leftism promotes a resistance and challenging to authority and a prior belief in the goodness of the downtrodden masses. None of those are wrong per se, they are even healthy, but when they are perverted and distorted they can easily led to circuses like the cultural revolution in China. Right-wing ideologies usually promote submission to authority and traditionalism. The problems that come with excesses in that front are of a different kind.
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The difference between left right and right wing movements is that the right has sort of agreed on an outer bound for how far right is too far. It looks something like political/national racial purity. Once people start spouting that, they tend to be removed from polite conversation. There is no similar outer bound on the left. There is nothing you can support that's so far left you will be expunged from polite society.
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I love "What You Can't Say" and have incorporated the conformist test into my moral compass. But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom. But maybe that's just me.
> But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.
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.
It's not easy at all. Even in a democratic country with highly functional legal system like the US due process is not available to many (e.g. George Floyd).
Also my idea of shame doesn't include death threats let alone more extreme things like swatting.
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Regulating speech via social means is strongly preferable to regulating speech via legal means, in my opinion.
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If somebody is saying hurtful things, what's the due process to address that? Before the digital age, didn't we always manage that kind of thing through a type of social contract?
> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.
This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.
Yeah, my comment was only in reference to this subthread.
How about you and your partner being fired from your job because your 13 year old wrote 1 year ago in Instagram : "Guacamole nigga penis". Is that shame treatment good enough or you prefer it more severe?
Well as far as our rational, atheist and activists who believe in 'science' go something more severe is absolutely required to clean earth off these scums.
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It's not simply being called names (though that can cause some level of psychological distress). The big concern is economic consequences. People are losing their jobs, losing access to the platforms their customers are using, being canceled by payment services, etc.
There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.
Maybe it is like police and tasers?
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
I get the overall point you're trying to make, but for the person who was going to be that #5 shooting and gets to live instead, that's a positive outcome for that person at least.
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.
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Luckily, one can never lead to the other.
It's irrelevant whether one thing can lead to the other. What's important is how often it does. If there's significantly less violence, it's a win.
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.
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Bruises heal and prisons have limited terms. Twitter lasts forever.
> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN
Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?
> Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves (...) which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those who are already powerful.
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.
It seems that by "smart" she meant "knowledgeable", in particular about how things work in her field. Of course people at the top know more (on average) about how the industry works. They are in a position to know.
That Paul Graham essay is fantastic. It really helps me to put into place things that I've been realising over time. For a long time I've had showdead enabled and I always go looking for the buried comments to see what I'm not allowed to say. I suggest everyone does.
From my observations nuclear energy is the holliest cow on HN.
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.
Fukushima did not. Check out the Netflix documentary Inside Bill’s Brain. The last episode discusses nuclear tech, and was rather enlightening to me. Fukushima was discussed, and I learned a lot about why that happened.
Really? I'm more pro-nuclear, and to me it seems like every time there's a post about it there's a pretty balanced argument in the comments about it. It's incendiary, yes, but the debate does happen, and the antis seem just as passionate as the pros.
I think it's less about "any sort of doubt" and more about the doubts that I actually see put forward, e.g. "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.
Another expression i like is 'truth by convention'
The silent majority!
It may have been a conservative talking point back in the day, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. "Broken clocks, twice daily" etc.
Both of those are right on point, and match my observations within my own circles. For me stallmans cancellation was a big turning point. I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now. I can't risk someone pulling up a comment or post years from now and using it to ruin my reputation or career, simply because i may have voiced an unpopular or controversial opinion that did not age well.
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.
It's undoubtedly more dangerous to be critical of the mainstream narrative now than it was 10-20 years ago.
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...
> Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream
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...
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> It's undoubtedly more dangerous to be critical of the mainstream narrative now than it was 10-20 years ago.
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.
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I had a bad experience with this yesterday.
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.
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> There's an alt right author called Vox Day
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.
It's not just commenting--it's any interaction at all:
https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_...
> People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems.
Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".
The most infuriating to me is that educational curriculum drilled into people's heads that color blindness and treating all people equally was the key to ending racism, and now there's been a complete 180 on that
> I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now.
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.
Per a comment up-thread, I wouldn't place too big a bet on pseudonyms remaining pseudonyms forever. Sure, absent a real effort to unmask you, you'll probably be fine. But sustained efforts to figure out pseudonymous identities often succeed.
It won't even need a sustained effort once ai gets somewhat decent at analysing writing patterns. I don't think it will really matter if it's even that accurate, really, like it doesn't really matter to the police how accurate facial scanners are people who are looking for troublemakers will go with it anyway.
You have to make giant, sweeping mistakes a part of your career or personality. Rush Limbaugh lost one tangential job, but is still influential and wealthy.
Or make a private joke to your friend about a dongle.
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Paul's post has always felt like a wordy defense of the "well, actually".
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.
Do you think regular people out there who are not experts in housing, policing, government, economics should remain silent and not express opinions on things they don’t have insight to?
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.
Usually those topics don't fall prey to moral policing.
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.
> Sometimes the world doesn't need to hear our opinion. That doesn't mean we're being censored.
That...pretty much is being censored?
"Techies" are not academics in general.
I didn't need to hear your opinion.
This self censorship is most often meant when someone criticizes political correctness. It doesn't mean that you should unnecessarily put people off with inflammatory language. But I think it could still get you fired if posted on Twitter, at least a few years ago. Some people with especially large incomes seem to be immune though.
Hah, yes, like JK Rowling! If you are a self made billionaire, you are pretty immune from the twitter mobs, and can make controversial statements such as "there are only two genders."
It is a matter of definition and she is probably wrong if academic definitions apply, but yes, that is one prominent mob. There are others of course. If you think that these dissections were meant to free yourself from expectations, it is kind of ironic to have a twitter mob coming after you for wrong opinions. Completely defeats the purpose and then some.
I question your use of quote marks there. AFAIK she is being much more precise in referring to biological sex.
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Ask yourself why is that opinion considered controversial?
Are you living in a bubble?
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Where can one go to learn these controversial truths? I would love to see a list of these facts that apparently only insiders can talk about. Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?
It's not the "truth" and the "facts" that people are afraid to discuss. It's their opinions about truth and facts.
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.
Maybe we should find a more accurate alternative for “attacked by mobs of people” to avoid equating flamewars with, I don’t know, the Tulsa Massacre. We still need to have the capacity to describe the relative horror of that.
Right, but the whole point is that their opinion isn't valid?
I'm sorry, am I supposed to emphathize with a multimillionaire best-seller author who, instead of enjoying her wealth in some yacht somewhere (or whatever it is rich people do), decided to spend her free time riling up some trans people on twitter?
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>Where can one go to learn these controversial truths?
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.
The “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS liberal” videos that pop up on YouTube sometimes come to mind. Ben Shapiro was obviously a (probably very successful) high school debater and the guy thinks and responds fast. Not that those traits are good for actual discussion or coming to agreement.
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.
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There is a pizza restaurant in suburban Arlington, Virginia in which these truths are stored in a filing cabinet in the basement. Certain inner-circle members of those who know are familiar with its whereabouts and its indexing system.
https://humanvarieties.org
I am going to respond with a paraphrasing of a well known quote about one such truth. The truth is that you are a slave in a prison without walls where prisoner never dreams of escaping.
They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now. Any moment now I expect Columbus city to be renamed.
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
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We live in a prison because some folks are doing a historical reckoning about Columbus' past exactions?
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>They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now.
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.
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Okay but what does this have to do with the thread? Scott isn't being silenced, he's shutting down his blog out of concern that his relationship with his patients may be jeopardized if they could look him up on the NYT. (Whether he's justified I'm not qualified to say as I'm not a psychiatrist.) What's the hidden truth, controversial opinion or super secret insight at stake here?
Scott's coronavirus articles were reliably ahead of the media. He was early with insights such as the insufficiencies of the flattening the curve model, the efficacy of masks, and warning it could become a pandemic.
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.
I don't get your point. People are going to roast Scott because he got things right about covid? What does this have to do with his relationship with his patients?
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The point I was trying to make is tangential, but related to the post.
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."
But this is not about his opinions or that they are not accepted. This is about maintaining pseudonym and importance of it for practising MD.
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If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that Scott lists two reasons why he is shutting down the blog. The reason that you mentioned is one. The other reason is:
> 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.
This is pretty easy. Scott does have controversial opinions at times. He uses a pseudonym to make them public without fear of that impinging on his life and work.
So yes. He's being silenced because he cannot enjoy speaking publicly without fear of retribution.
What do these controversial opinions have to do with the NYT writing a piece about Scott's early warnings about covid, and Scott's assessment that it would damage his relationship with his patients? Are you arguing that warning everyone ahead about the virus was controversial?
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I think GP and many people ITT project their current political concerns on OP's post. It doesn't seem apparent to me that Scott is deleting his blog due to any recent political changes.
His name is...