Comment by andreyk
5 years ago
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and saying how dangerous it is (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-d...), and yes there are certainly such examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get overly freaked out because of rare events?
Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
If you'd like to see how big of a problem it is, post "males are not females" or "males do not have periods" or "all lives matter" or "we should not be giving hormone blockers to children" to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Go right ahead. If you feel even the slightest bit of trepidation over publicly stating any of those things, then you will see first hand how big of a problem it is.
*edit
this very post will be down-voted
If I were to post one of these things, I would certainly get some side-eye, but I very much doubt I would be fired or the like. And since when is feeling some trepidation over saying something controversial (because people might dislike you for it) unnatural? I mean, is your stance "it should be ok for me to say whatever I like publicly"?
I guess you think these are all examples of perfectly rational things to say that cannot be disputed, but let's just take "all lives matter". Sure, no one can disagree that "all lives matter", but saying this implies that you think this in response to "black lives matter" , and Pinker himself articulates the issue with this well:
"Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/05/the-purity-posse-p...
At least 1/10 of the posts on my Facebook feed at any given time say one of those things or something similar. The people making these posts are not being cancelled, fired, or really even called out.
In my filter bubble the people posting things like 'Black Lives Matter', suggesting that we use people's chosen pronouns, or indicating that maybe our current justice system is anything other than absolutely upstanding and unchangeable are the ones being called out. They're still not being fired for their opinions, though.
I could see myself getting fired from my company for stating one of these views. Even as I write this, I feel it's important for me to state the following.
I think the "all lives matter" is a anti-slogan to something important so I wouldn't say that. I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really disputed. You can gender identify how you'd like though.
I think the hormone blockers is a complex issue and I'll leave it at that.
But I recognize that if I held radical ideas (which the ones you pointed out are either on the edge or beyond it), I very well might get fired for expressing them in a public forum if someone showed that to my companies HR. To deny that is just me being blind.
To be clear, I took my job with that explicit knowledge that, any public information on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, or here would be scrutinized. I don't like it, but I also went into that with my eyes wide open.
"Males are not females" is a radical idea? You might be surprised at the number of radicals in this country, then. Enough, in fact, that it seems a stretch to call it "radical".
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Feeling trepidation before posting sentiments that have complex and potentially problematic histories within public discourse does not equate to being targeted by cancel culture.
If I post "the Republic party interfered with Donald Trump's impeachment investigation by not allowing witnesses to testify before Congress" on my social media I'm sure I would get some backlash; that does not mean that I have been cancelled. It means that I've chosen to post decisively about an issue that might not be as black and white as I consider it to be.
You think the phrase "males are not females" is problematic?
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> Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it?
It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.
If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.
For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.
Nonsense.
Read Matt Taibbi’s recent article for starters. David Shor(a junior data scientist), a Mexican-American construction worker etc.
12-year olds kicked out of school and ostracised for saying the n-word on some random TikTok.
You really must be kidding when you’re saying “normal” people aren’t affected.
Who's brilliant idea was it to give 12-year-olds unfettered access to a bidirectional wide-band broadcasting tool? That's unwise independent of the specific outcome you're describing.
I'm not sure how you'd go about collecting statistics on the question. You can go poll employers on how many people they've fired for ideological nonconformity, but they're all going to report 0 regardless of whether it's true. Anecdotes might be the best evidence available.
I suspect that employers would not admit to firing people for ideological nonconformity, even if they did so. There would be some platitude instead, and you'd have to decode whether the platitude meant that or not.
What kind of data are you looking for? Number of people fired for a tweet? Number of colleagues shunned for not being woke enough?
Yes, something along those lines. It's not like it's impossible to categorize and quantify and catalogue 'cancel culture' events -- even if the result is somewhat subjective , it's better than just this vague belief based on rare examples. I mean honestly, is this 'cancel culture' really a thing, or it is mostly celebrities sometimes being criticized (at times rightly by sensible progressives, at times wrongly by overly woke people) that somehow has many on HN and a whole lot of people so anxious?
It's not about just the celebrities. People are anxious that they, personally, might be fired or lose friends if they don't believe the right things.
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It's pretty clear what your view on cancel culture is, namely that it's not really a thing.
Got any data to back that up?
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I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.
Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.
Why do you need data when you can experience the chilling effect cancel culture has on open discussion for yourself?
Well, when people argue against BLM/M4BL I often hear calls to statistics. That's a potential bias of my own, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think about what metrics we might be able to use as indicators of whether cancel culture is created by an unsubstantiated bias that some folks have or if it might actually be a phenomenon that has a real impact on the way that the average person communicates.
Basically what I'm saying is that I personally don't feel or notice a lot of "cancel culture" within my own life, and I'm trying to better understand where people feel like it comes from. Data might not be necessary, but it might also make the impacts more clear. I'm just wondering about how to frame the issue in a way that makes sense to me.