> When people bring up posts like this they never say what the "heresies" are. People aren't getting "cancelled" for their takes on taxes.
There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.
See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.
I'm very confused as to why you're suggesting that people being disagreeable or unreasonable is a thing that is specific to "the current moment" or is specific to any one political identity. But please correct me if I misunderstood.
Edit: Another response brought up a good point. Your pushing back on body image issues seems pretty tone deaf. Those are pretty personal and the point there is that it doesn't help to shame people for being overweight. Nobody responds well to that, it usually just causes hurt feelings. You can still promote healthy lifestyles without making it about "anti-fatness".
I personally think I owe it to other people to object when they promote ideas that seem clearly false to me.
I could be mistaken about their idea's falsity, or they could be mistaken about its truth, but we'll never get closer to knowing if I don't engage.
Obviously I also owe them kindness and respect.
If they choose to interpret a kind, respectful disagreement as oppression or violence against them, they're hurting themselves.
In a mildly-related vein, it took me a long time to be able to recognize personal criticisms as a gift from the critic, and I'm still working on it, but the basics of that mindset shift seem to be settling in at this point. When someone tells me what they really think of me and my actions, they're engaging with me and giving me a chance to understand them a little better. I strive to be grateful for that even when the delivery is rude or hurts my feelings.
Genuine rejection and harm to others looks like physically injuring them, verbally abusing them, or barring them from societal spaces and services.
Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
>Telling someone what you think they're wrong about or how they're flawed is not usually doing violence or harm. Done in good faith, it's giving feedback and giving them the chance to show you how your own perceptions might be wrong.
You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. For an activist in a marginalized group, it can be very hard to figure out who to trust.
Sure, same for combat vets. It still incumbent on them (and everyone else) to reality test their beliefs. Creating social conditions where people say unreasonable things and the only acceptable response is to say nothing and think to ourselves, "it's okay, she's a woman/black/whatever" seems bad to me. I don't think it helps anyone.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here, probably because he's a rich investor offering to give everyone big wads of cash for a skill they already possess.
You make interesting points but mix it in with shitpost stuff. Would be great if you chilled on that
I don't understand why you think that's a shitpost. Or rather, if it is, everything else is here so who cares? Look at the rest of the replies in this comment thread. It's true, isn't it? I actually can't read pg articles without looking at them through this lens, they otherwise make no sense to me and there is no other reason for them to be posted here and gain 800 replies when they're also filled with the same baseless posturing you would probably refer to as shitposty. He would just be another anonymous nobody with a blog and a chip on the shoulder. I'm only saying this because these sentiments ("You can't say everything you possibly could ever want to say around persons A and B because they'll get offended and mad and not want to talk to you anymore, isn't that terrible") are so old and tired at this point, but for some reason we seem to be giving them a pass here and I would guess it's only because pg said them and he is a Famous Person. I'm sorry if that seems blunt but is that not what you asked for? I'm saying what I really think.
To me it's like, look, do you really want to go to work with someone who says things like "you are ugly" and "you are stupid" and "your mother is a whore" to everyone every day? I know people who would do that even in professional settings, it's just as bad as you'd think. It's not declaring "heresy" when they get fired because nobody wants to deal with that every day. Pg is of course entitled to his own opinion of what he wants on his startup incubator and forum, which is why there's moderation on this site and why he has kicked people out of YC before for literally just saying things. It's not enacting "heresy" when you ban somebody from YC or hacker news for saying stupid and callous things! So why the double standard? That's why this whole comment thread and article is just absurd to me, I'm so saddened that so many people are actually commenting on this.
> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that.
I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respect you."
Obviously you can tell people when you think they're wrong without them trusting or respecting you, but you're clearly right that it may not have many useful results in that case.
> On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here...
I have a slight bias against pg.
His earliest essays I enjoyed, but his writing in the past ten or fifteen years strikes me as suffering from the blindness induced by being rich and myopically focused on startups and technological advances, with the apparent assumption that those things must be inherently good.
If I happen to agree with him on this particular point, it's not because I'm inclined to like his stances by default.
> See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
Is this really a topic you needed to weigh in on? I’m assuming you weren’t concern trolling or playing devil’s advocate, but it’s very easy to imagine how a “gentle challenge” might get interpreted as such if your relationship with the other person doesn’t generally include similar discussion topics.
She's a professor and aims to be a public intellectual; she's written a book. I really think this in and of itself is invitation for dialogue. Also, our relationship was been fine talking about politics when I agreed with her, but any disagreement was treated as hostile/moral failure on my part. I'm really pretty good at listening and being respectful; these sorts of failure modes in communication in my life have come exclusively with dedicated self-identified activists.
I don't think you can't really blame someone for that when their activism is a core part of their identity. People wouldn't become activists if they weren't deeply affected by these things. It's not their prerogative to (in their view) waste time with people who are just going to argue and push in the other direction. That's my experience from talking to a lot of activists, anyway. They have to be very careful to pick their battles.
Someone can be affected by things and still end up with false beliefs. It’s possible to still be kind to someone and argue a belief they hold is wrong.
What’s true can be in conflict with deeply held beliefs (and often is). Part of the core issue is when one side won’t engage in actual discussion of the content and only argues at the meta level about identity.
I think roflc0ptic’s examples are good ones - thankfully it seems the discourse around this kind of stuff is shifting back to being more moderate.
You're absolutely correct, but that still isn't helpful to someone who is already committed to being a single-issue activist. You're taking completely the wrong angle. You have to address the why and not the belief itself.
Edit: It's not particularly important or relevant to what's been said here if you see the mainstream discourse as shifting to being "more moderate". This is a given with any single-issue activist, it's your business if you deal in organizing activists. The shift to being moderate only happens through this process, there's no other process.
If you don't concern yourself with organizing activists, then this isn't your wheelhouse, and I don't see why it was brought up.
Ah I understand - you’re commenting more on strategy around being able to get through to someone when a core value is in conflict with what may be true.
Yeah, on that I agree - requires more deft communication skills. I think you can still “blame them” for holding false beliefs though (or phrased differently not give them a free pass on dogma) while still understanding it’s going to be an emotional thing for them, but this sounds like it might be us just disputing definitions over “blame” and we mostly agree.
> It's not their prerogative to (in their view) waste time with people who are just going to argue and push in the other direction
I think this is a good point. An issue that coexists with this is that activist circles here in the 20x0s, of which I have been both a part and adjacent to, are in general not open to evaluating the truth value of their beliefs under any circumstances, not even around questions like "is this tactically/rhetorically an effective strategy?". There's also a related issue where basically their only tool for communicating across difference is opprobrium. You can see this laid out persuasively in this (uncommonly good) quilette article: https://quillette.com/2021/01/17/three-plane-rides-and-the-q...
What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion. And sure, there was a combative element to the civil rights movement - we're on the bus, you can't fucking ignore us - but it was coupled with cogence and reason. I'm pretty sure microaggressions exist, and also think they're a toxic framework for evaluating the world.
>What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing a culture where people make their activism an immutable part of their identity because it's all they know and they have no reason to pursue outside perspectives; if you're in a marginalized group it can be very easy to end up in a situation where there's nobody to look out for you besides yourself. This is not a new happening in any way shape or form, from my knowledge it's been this way for as long as there's been free societies that allowed protesting. This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
Can there toxic social pressure in activist spaces? Absolutely, but that can be present in any social group where there are leaders and followers. That also isn't new in any way at all. I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
> I take it you haven't spend much time on social media in the last decade or so?
less of this please.
> This is what the civil rights movement was built on. It just doesn't happen if there isn't an outside condition to allow activism and protesting in the first place.
> >What you're describing is an activist culture that has writ large given up on convincing people of their correctness, and functions instead via social coercion.
>No, not at all and I'm very confused as to how you managed to connect those dots. I'm describing
If you take the "don't listen to other people because you don't know who to trust" knob and turn it way up, you get to "listen only to people who agree with me", turn it farther "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy." I _don't_ think this was the dynamic in the mainstream civil rights movement, but even if it was it wasn't the rhetorical tactic outside of the black panther/WUG fringe. I _do_ think it's the dynamic/rhetorical strategy in the current activist milieu which has bled into the broader world.
You're right to say this, sorry I just legitimately can't understand how you could be extrapolating this if you had actually seen a lot of the high profile stuff that happened on e.g. facebook in the last decade. There's just so much unreasonable behavior and tribal "us vs them" attitudes coming from all sides at all times. I've seen lots of people do like you're doing now trying to blame this on "activists" for no real reason when to me it's every group doing it constantly all the time, even the ones that you would think would be relatively reserved. I honestly think you might be in a activist bubble and you need to get out from it, I can't understand why you would be otherwise focusing so much on the tactics of some "activist milieu".
Right, I'm not claiming it's ~cancel culture~, it is however anti-heretic behavior. See other comment; she's a professor and aspiring public intellectual. This combination of "I'm an authority so you have to listen to me" and "you can't challenge my beliefs because it's oppression" is a recipe for bad thinking.
> There are plenty of examples [...] e.g. David Schor
I think it's rather the opposite. There are, to be sure, tragedies and abuses of woke rhetoric that gets directed at the wrong people and/or implemented in outrageous ways. But they're pretty rare, and generally get a ton of media coverage for exactly that reason. Those are what PG is writing about.
But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people entering this kind of argument are actually just wanting more cover to say things they used to say that are... well, kinda off. Not "lose your job" off, but casually "x-ist" in a way that most of us would prefer not to engage with.
And really, that's the rub here, and the biggest problem with PG's essay here. Where are the examples? If there's something you want to say but feel you can't, then say it. This is a reasonably anonymous forum. PG is reasonably immune to that kind of criticism. But the problem is that when you say it the debate becomes a debate about your opinions and not your oppression, and that's ground these folks won't win on, like this one:
> I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric
You literally had a friend walk out of your life because you couldn't respect her boundaries about something as senselessly unobjective as body image, and the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one?
Want to note that you're putting words into my mouth:
> the lesson you seem to have taken from it is that you were the oppressed one
I never said I was oppressed. You've invented that whole cloth.
If you find yourself thinking "they're just using this for cover to say bad things", consider that in the context of you abjectly misreading/inventing details to what I'm saying here. If you fill in details that match your own negative biases and then say "wow, these people really live up to my negative biases," you're not evaluating evidence, you're just testing your own beliefs against your projections of your own beliefs. Certainly looks like what you're doing here.
There are plenty of examples of stuff that is way less clearcut "that's bad" than your example. See e.g. David Schor getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements.
See also, e.g. a friend ending our friendship because I gently challenged her fat acceptance rhetoric, "Anti-fatness is more toxic to women's bodies than fatness has ever been." At best it's not falsifiable, but really it is just not a realistic statement.
I don't personally spend a lot of time talking to my social milieu - left/liberal about the right, because there's not a lot to say. Watching my immediate vicinity devolve into... whatever you want to call the current moment, is frustrating as hell. The left has a lot of cultural power that the right simply doesn't, and watching it be wielded by fanatics towards ever morphing, questionable goals makes me want to push back.