> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?
It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.
Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.
When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”
The set of things you can't publicly say without facing adverse consequences is never the empty set. Maybe your opinions happen to lie within this week's Overton window.
How is this not labeled (2022)? It sure hasn't aged well.
The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.
Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!
I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.
That you feel differently about "Milikan, Shockley, and Watson" is shocking. You really think a mentally ill rapper deserves worse than eugenicists and thieves?
In my opinion, it's best to hold your views along a gradient of strength/importance.
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.
Ideally, one would have a meta cognitive toolkit and regularly retest their beliefs, sincerely. But that's unfortunately advanced technique, and likely requires the better part of a decade of reading and practicing.
What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...
No because “strong opinions” mark you as “aggressively conventional”: Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”, and most people won’t try and find out.
Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.
>Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”
It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?
As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.
I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.
Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.
This is great individual strategy, and is an important part of being polite generally.
But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.
There is one question I ask myself everytime. Do words hurt in such strong ways that they should be censored? Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.
Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions.
I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it?
My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them.
Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use?
Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.
> Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea?
This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"
> Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.
There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.
However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.
If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.
Yeah heresy has ‘returned in a modern form’ - if you overlook the glaring issue of the fact that people were typically imprisoned or executed for heresy in the past.
> Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else.
Losing your job, being "cancelled", publicly vilified and unhirable is not the same as being executed, so therefore we should dismiss it as a false equivalency?
There really hasn't been a heretical witchhunt in the US in recent times like against those who do not want US aid to Israel. BDS resolutions and state employees across the country having to sign pledges they won't boycott Israel, college expulsion of Palestine supporters, then expulsion of multiple Ivy League presidents for not cracking down on students more, with Congressional visits and hearings. Nothing this century in the US comes close in comparison.
Despite that, half of Democratic Congressional representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, just voted to cut aid to Israel.
This seems like a strangely inverted observation, i.e. pretty directly backwards of what's actually happening. This is evident in the odd way you characterize your latter 2 of 3 examples. The first example is real though, and those are bad state laws.
Further reading for those interested:
https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation
Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.
What the above poster listed is just a brief overview of the opposite, which has been the status quo for the past like 50 years here.
There is a lot of noise against Israel, but all the action is in the other direction, so to speak. And there are comical pains being made to absolve Israeli society for the country's actions even though it's a democracy that has voted for the very policies people are increasingly discovering and labeling abhorrent.
I say this respectfully because it's your wife, but if one can see the acts that Israel has been committing and how it plays in the US political process, but feels attacked when people react strongly and do things like try to boycott the country, then some introspection is required. Really needs to be a "are we the baddies" moment.
It's good she's here and that your children will presumably be raised here. It's not good to be in the kind of society that is under the grip of such an ideology as prevails over there.
eh, I was watching a Space Marine 2 stream when this popped up in my sidebar. just one word - "Heresy" - as a title of the tab, screaming to be clicked.
even though it's from 2022, it still resonates with how I got fired just recently. something that Warhammer's Imperium calls out and does with no shame, publicly, is being built out silently or with euphemisms in our world.
ever more reasons to appreciate Warhammer as an unfortunate parody of our own little rock ball. and here I am, jobless, for calling Claude Code "a decent search engine"
Depending on how into 40k you are, you might be surprised to hear that many fans (though arguably closer to tourists, but that's another topic) don't see 40k as a satire at all, or at very least consider the Imperium to be overall a force for good, which I guess in a grim way only adds to the parody that you can be so on the nose about it and the propaganda still holds
>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago
I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.
There's a causal relationship there, often expressed in some form of the idea "the pendulum swings". Heresy-hunting inevitably produces the backlash. It's fun during the upswing to push harder to punish the heretics more and harder, but the result is that the next phase of whiplash is even worse. As well as the inevitable attempt to hold on even harder and with more righteous fury as the grasp on power fades.
Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.
I'm not sure that's quite right, the pendulum has swung to a degree, for sure, but I find it evident to argue that the place the pendulum was at was in the benefit of liberal elites, and rather than reversing, I can see how the opposition to those liberal elites do have more freedom now, but the circles adjacent to the liberal elites have enormous leeway right now, I'm not sure there's even anything verboten.
You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.
Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.
I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
That's a bit too reductionist. When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is.
For example if Trump and Obama both say "all lives matter", well yeah of course it's technically true in both cases. But only a complete idiot would think they were saying the same thing.
Otherwise, hard to disagree with anything here, but I don't think he's said anything new or profound anyway. The far left is definitely reaping what it sowed at the moment.
Yet another "anti-woke, anti-political correct" screed, whining about how it isn't cool to be racist anymore. I guess this felt edgy in 2022, but in the current political climate this essay is utterly redundant.
It's trying not to be that, but it still reads like that to me. The deliberate non-naming of heresies but specific callout that "heretic-hunting" is coming mostly from the left naturally leads to that conclusion.
> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?
It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.
Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.
When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”
The set of things you can't publicly say without facing adverse consequences is never the empty set. Maybe your opinions happen to lie within this week's Overton window.
2022, and pretty clear why.
Here is the discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147
How is this not labeled (2022)? It sure hasn't aged well.
The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.
Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!
I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.
"Fanfare" and "imprisonment" is a false dilemma.
That you feel differently about "Milikan, Shockley, and Watson" is shocking. You really think a mentally ill rapper deserves worse than eugenicists and thieves?
Is the moderate view "strong opinions, weakly held?"
In my opinion, it's best to hold your views along a gradient of strength/importance.
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.
Ideally, one would have a meta cognitive toolkit and regularly retest their beliefs, sincerely. But that's unfortunately advanced technique, and likely requires the better part of a decade of reading and practicing.
What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...
No because “strong opinions” mark you as “aggressively conventional”: Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”, and most people won’t try and find out.
Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.
>Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”
It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?
Why did you leave out the “strong opinion” part?
As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.
I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.
Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.
This is great individual strategy, and is an important part of being polite generally.
But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.
There is one question I ask myself everytime. Do words hurt in such strong ways that they should be censored? Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.
Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions.
I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it?
My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them.
Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use?
Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.
> Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea?
This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"
Words shape worldviews of other people though, and in some circumstances they may act in accordance with those altered perspectives.
> Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.
There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.
However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.
If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.
Yeah heresy has ‘returned in a modern form’ - if you overlook the glaring issue of the fact that people were typically imprisoned or executed for heresy in the past.
What a ridiculous false equivalence.
He said this though:
> Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else.
How is that overlooking it?
Losing your job, being "cancelled", publicly vilified and unhirable is not the same as being executed, so therefore we should dismiss it as a false equivalency?
How the time flies. Now the ENL-world has two thriving cultural revolutions, both at each other’s throats. It’s all become very tiring.
Thanks to the hackernews community for flagging this and proving his point!
Honestly, it speaks well of the community (in some senses, at least) that they're willing and able to flag pg articles.
I agree in principle, but that it's this one of all his essays is quite ironic. Other essays of his contain significantly more BS.
Maybe it's being flagged because it doesn't have (2022) in the title.
Oops, my bad fixed now, but probably too late.
> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade
It's more like what was heresy earlier aligned with one's viewpoint. The change is it has shifted, not narrowed.
There really hasn't been a heretical witchhunt in the US in recent times like against those who do not want US aid to Israel. BDS resolutions and state employees across the country having to sign pledges they won't boycott Israel, college expulsion of Palestine supporters, then expulsion of multiple Ivy League presidents for not cracking down on students more, with Congressional visits and hearings. Nothing this century in the US comes close in comparison.
Despite that, half of Democratic Congressional representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, just voted to cut aid to Israel.
This seems like a strangely inverted observation, i.e. pretty directly backwards of what's actually happening. This is evident in the odd way you characterize your latter 2 of 3 examples. The first example is real though, and those are bad state laws.
Further reading for those interested: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.
My American-Israeli wife says the opposite FWIW
Based on what actual facts?
What the above poster listed is just a brief overview of the opposite, which has been the status quo for the past like 50 years here.
There is a lot of noise against Israel, but all the action is in the other direction, so to speak. And there are comical pains being made to absolve Israeli society for the country's actions even though it's a democracy that has voted for the very policies people are increasingly discovering and labeling abhorrent.
I say this respectfully because it's your wife, but if one can see the acts that Israel has been committing and how it plays in the US political process, but feels attacked when people react strongly and do things like try to boycott the country, then some introspection is required. Really needs to be a "are we the baddies" moment.
It's good she's here and that your children will presumably be raised here. It's not good to be in the kind of society that is under the grip of such an ideology as prevails over there.
Why was this flagged in 2026 and not in 2022?
> when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion
Aaand thats when I stopped reading. You're not being censored, Paul, you're being rightfully told you're an asshole and refusing to take it to heart.
Do you really not see to what degree you are proving his point here?
eh, I was watching a Space Marine 2 stream when this popped up in my sidebar. just one word - "Heresy" - as a title of the tab, screaming to be clicked.
even though it's from 2022, it still resonates with how I got fired just recently. something that Warhammer's Imperium calls out and does with no shame, publicly, is being built out silently or with euphemisms in our world.
ever more reasons to appreciate Warhammer as an unfortunate parody of our own little rock ball. and here I am, jobless, for calling Claude Code "a decent search engine"
Depending on how into 40k you are, you might be surprised to hear that many fans (though arguably closer to tourists, but that's another topic) don't see 40k as a satire at all, or at very least consider the Imperium to be overall a force for good, which I guess in a grim way only adds to the parody that you can be so on the nose about it and the propaganda still holds
The problem is that the questions end with “Is it true?” instead of following up with “Why is it true?”
"Why is it true?" is usually an even more cancellable/fireable offence (which is also why you see it discussed less).
>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago
I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.
There's a causal relationship there, often expressed in some form of the idea "the pendulum swings". Heresy-hunting inevitably produces the backlash. It's fun during the upswing to push harder to punish the heretics more and harder, but the result is that the next phase of whiplash is even worse. As well as the inevitable attempt to hold on even harder and with more righteous fury as the grasp on power fades.
Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.
I'm not sure that's quite right, the pendulum has swung to a degree, for sure, but I find it evident to argue that the place the pendulum was at was in the benefit of liberal elites, and rather than reversing, I can see how the opposition to those liberal elites do have more freedom now, but the circles adjacent to the liberal elites have enormous leeway right now, I'm not sure there's even anything verboten.
You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.
Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.
I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.
> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
That's a bit too reductionist. When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is.
For example if Trump and Obama both say "all lives matter", well yeah of course it's technically true in both cases. But only a complete idiot would think they were saying the same thing.
Otherwise, hard to disagree with anything here, but I don't think he's said anything new or profound anyway. The far left is definitely reaping what it sowed at the moment.
Yet another "anti-woke, anti-political correct" screed, whining about how it isn't cool to be racist anymore. I guess this felt edgy in 2022, but in the current political climate this essay is utterly redundant.
I cannot tell if you are being farcical or not. The article is very blatantly not that, if you take more than a cursory glance at it.
Don’t feed the trolls.
It's trying not to be that, but it still reads like that to me. The deliberate non-naming of heresies but specific callout that "heretic-hunting" is coming mostly from the left naturally leads to that conclusion.