Silencing is when even though a movement has lots of supporters, none of them will admit to it publicly under their real name. Even though a movement is widely discussed, its ideas never penetrate to anywhere they might actually have power. Even though it has charismatic leaders, they have to resort to low-prestige decentralized people-power to get their message across, while their opponents preach against them from the airwaves and pulpits and universities.
As usual with his posts, I recommend reading the whole long thing. My thoughts:
1. Commenters on this blog and elsewhere have said that Scott Alexander should be counted as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.
2. “Scott Alexander” is not his real name, which suggests that the issue of what one would “publicly admit under their real name” is salient to him.
I would recommend trying to move away from “silenced” as a binary concept. The word itself invites a binary connotation–you are either silenced or you or not. But it may help instead to think of a continuum.
Instead, I would talk about something more like a filter ratio. For any given proposition, what percentage of time is it filtered out because of social pressure?
To take an actual example, consier the proposition that the variance of genetic mathematical ability is higher in males than females. I believe that proposition. But it seems that Larry Summers lost his job as President of Harvard because he affirmed that proposition. Since many people are aware of that story, I can imagine that not everyone would be willing to affirm this proposition publicly.
For any proposition, let the numerator be the total number of times a proposition that is relevant to a discussion is NOT affirmed by someone who believes it. Let the denominator be the total number of times that the proposition would have been affirmed in the absence of social pressure. The ratio of the numerator to denominator is the filter ratio.
When the filter ratio is zero, there is no silencing going on. When the ratio is 1, there is total suppression. “Silencing” is somewhere in between. If you want to stick to a binary view of the world, then you can say that any time the ratio is greater than 0, there is silencing. But I think a world of absolutely no filters is unrealistic. What we can reasonably argue about is how strong the filters should be for various propositions.
For example, back in the 1960s, if you had asked me, I would have been on the side of those trying to get rid of the filter that suppressed people’s use of four-letter words. But I have since come around to the view that suppressing cursing was a good thing, and getting rid of the filter was a mistake. People gave each other more respect when they acknowledged speech boundaries with one another.
In general, I see the IDW as battling the left over the issue of filters on topics related to race and gender. The left wants to implement certain filters, and the IDW sees these filters causing problems. In theory, we could get beyond name-calling and argue about what makes the filters good and what makes them bad. But the discussion rarely takes place at that level. Instead, it tends to become personal.
Consider the following analogy:
You have a new vice president of logistics at Amazon. Jeff Bezos is driving the organization to successfully deliver 99.9% of all prime packages within 2 days. He sees this goal as a core objective to the company’s mission.
So the new vice president is interviewed about his job, and he is asked about the policy, and says that the goal will be difficult to meet. He explains that Amazon doesn’t own the entire distribution channel, and research shows that UPS and the post office simply don’t quite have the institutional capacity to do better than 95% yet.
Would it be silencing if he was fired?
If he told management something they didn’t want to hear and was fired for it…wouldn’t the answer be a bleedin’ obvious ‘yes?’ What am I missing?
Organizations set goals. Its leaders are paid to pursue those goals, and their public messaging shouldn’t undercut the core objectives of the organization, regardless of whether the underlying facts of that messaging are technically correct or not.
If the VP had expressed his understanding of these obstacles internally to Bezos or some other top executive and was fired, that was one thing. But to publicly express reasoning why his organization is misguided, without the consent of the CEO and the board of directors shows that the executive is fundamentally missing an understanding of how to lead and how to meet objectives.
What if the CEO of Whole Foods came to the conclusion that organic foods were a rip-off, and decided to express that conclusion in an interview? What if Tim Cook thought people spent way too much money on cell phones?
I think we’ve lost our capacity to see any context any more.
I’m not sure I see how these hypotheticals are relevant. What are the organizational goals you see being undermined by the so-called IDW types? In which organizations? By the expression of which public statements or sentiments?
I was specifically addressing the example offered in the original post, where Larry Summers lost his job after deciding to publicly cite variance of genetic mathematical ability across gender.
Harvard had long ago decided to openly and explicitly fight to mitigate against such variations as a matter of policy. Summers may have been technically correct, but he was clearly signaling a lack of commitment to a core organizational objective.
The core organizational objective is misguided and immoral. It causes harm to individuals and society, so much so that even insiders who stand to lose greatly if they state the truth sometimes do anyway.
Common sense dictates we want more insiders to stand up and speak the truth if they believe their organization is acting immorally. It’s why we have things like whistleblower laws.
With universities/the press/the cathedral the issue at hand is their overwhelming degree of social control. If someone gets fired from a cigarette company for saying they cause cancer they can usually get another job and their friends/family will see them as brave. If someone gets blacklisted for being “racist” because they state true facts their whole life is over in the vast majority of cases.
asdf –
You may feel that way, and so may Summers, but this topic has been fought over for decades and has been found to be legitimate by the courts.
If Summers has a crisis of conscience, fine. I think it would have been admirable if he was taking a stand. However, he almost certainly didn’t make clear his reservations about university policy on such matters before taking the position, and if he would have been foolish if he didn’t know what Harvard’s position had been.
If he chose to fall on his sword, that’s his business, but this isn’t silencing free speech.
This also has nothing to do with whistleblowing. This was all out in the open. Summers and Harvard had a fundamental disagreement about a key operating principle.
So let me ask you: You’ve expressed racially provocative opinions on this blog for years. I’m guessing you’ve done it elsewhere as well. Is your “whole life over”?
I’m guessing not.
“This also has nothing to do with whistleblowing. This was all out in the open. Summers and Harvard had a fundamental disagreement about a key operating principle.”
What’s out in the open? As far as I can tell Harvard advertises itself as a university that pursues truth based on evidence and the scientific method. That is dispassionately pursues that truth wherever it may lead. And that its faculty are employed in an environment of free inquiry and debate.
Now, there might be an *unofficial* policy that says “not really, all that stuff stops being true if X”, but its not clear what that is. It’s certainly not openly state, even if shrewd and save individuals can vaguely piece it together.
What would the argument against Summers be if it had to be stated honestly and openly. Fully developed and acknowledging the best counter arguments? I don’t think there is a good one. I haven’t heard it yet. The ones I have heard sound unfair and repulsive. If the taboo wasn’t there to stop the debate, it would be obvious that the arguments weren’t good. That’s why the unjust side enforces the taboo. It’s the only thing holding their power together.
“but this topic has been fought over for decades and has been found to be legitimate by the courts.”
I honestly have no clue what court ruling your referring to here?
“So let me ask you: You’ve expressed racially provocative opinions on this blog for years. I’m guessing you’ve done it elsewhere as well. Is your “whole life over”?
I’m guessing not.”
I’ve never done so under my real name, for obvious a reasons. Scott’s point was pretty clear. “Silencing” is about using taboos to keep ideas far enough from the mainstream consciousness such that they can’t change the world we live in.
It’s my belief that if people were allowed to state truths without repercussion in the “real world” that we would actually be able to change things in the real world for the better. That’s the whole point of the taboo, if the truth comes out the silencers ideology and power fall apart.
Summers may have been technically correct, but he was clearly signaling a lack of commitment to a core organizational objective.
So the president of the organization makes a reasoned, logical argument for which there is ample empirical evidence and which you think might be correct, but you still think it was okay to fire the guy? What a bizarre stance. If his argument is correct, wouldn’t it make more sense for people to, oh,…I don’t know, change their opinions rather than fly into hysterics and hound him from campus?
– Jeff R
” If his argument is correct, wouldn’t it make more sense for people to, oh,…I don’t know, change their opinions rather than fly into hysterics and hound him from campus?”
No it doesn’t make sense. Harvard has quite explicitly chosen not to operate strictly as a pure meritocracy.
For a private University, choosing who to train for certain roles using pure meritocratic principles is a strategic operating principle and that is great, and to be commended.
But if they make a strategic decision to also improve social mobility and expand access to professions that have been traditionally insular, that is a perfectly reasonable goal too. Its up to them to decide. Harvard decided to commit to that path a long time ago, as you well know.
Personally, I think having a healthy number of both types of institutions is a good idea.
I think we should take this a couple of ways.
1) Harvard provides a rationale for affirmative action based on the following.
a) To right past wrongs.
b) Diversity is strength.
c) To fight back against “bias” or “systematic oppression” or whatever. As in, “we aren’t *really* opposing meritocracy, we are trying to give people a leg up to achieve *true* meritocracy.
Stated or implied is the idea that any difference in disparate impact must be cause by unconscious or conscious malice or negligence, since obvious merit is equally distributed along all gender/racial/sexual categories in all endeavors.
(a) is dubious for a whole host of reasons. If I remember the relevant Supreme Cost case it was struck down as a principle to base affirmative action. It’s also the case that most people benefiting from it on both a racial and sexual basis are pretty well off (rich foreign students for instance).
2) Diversity is strength is equally hard to prove. Lots of evidence goes the opposite way, that diversity is weakness or diversity is irrelevant.
And not all kinds of “strength” are good for society. When you want to scam someone, its usually good to have a spokesmen that is the same color as them. How well has saying “their racists” been at helping Harvard dehumanize its targets and justify lots of things in its interest but not in the interest of society.
This “diversity is strength” reason was also addressed in the supreme court case to have a time limit. 25 years from the 2003 case it was supposed to no longer be relevant. That is a mere decade away.
Lastly, its clear that only certain kinds of diversity are strength. Non-elite whites, mostly outside the northeast, are underrepresented based on their IQ * population. They would represent a lot more diversity then another rich student of color, and they would be far more important for putting the rulers (Harvard grads) better in touch with the ruled (Middle America). Instead, we get the opposite, so I don’t buy the diversity argument.
(c) So let’s get to the heart of it. No woman wants to be told “we admitted you to this physics research project even though you don’t have what it takes because we were told to have X% women”. And the men working (and denied working) on the project will find it insulting to.
So you need some narrative to cover up the truth (disparate impact due to genes) and all you’ve got is that men/the man’s world are evil. Which certainly is a poisonous narrative to shove down people’s throats being that its not true and it promotes conflict and dehumanization.
So when Summers says “maybe disparate impact isn’t due to bias/hate, could you just chill and stop causing unnecessary problems” he got canned. It was evil and it would be correct to punish Harvard for it.
“private University”
Federal funding and tax breaks say different. Besides, with any institution so embedded in shaping our society and government its a bit silly to say the public has no interest in its operation. That’s one card to pull when your really operating in a non-partisan academic truth sense. When your clearly in the bank for certain interests and ideologies its a little late.
You want the safety of the Ivory Tower, you’ve got to operate according to the traditional academic principles of truth and neutrality.
But if they make a strategic decision to also improve social mobility and expand access to professions that have been traditionally insular, that is a perfectly reasonable goal too. Its up to them to decide. Harvard decided to commit to that path a long time ago, as you well know.
You have sanitized this to make it sound a lot more reasonable than it really is. The situation was more along the lines of Harvard having noticed the gender disparity in certain faculty departments and naively concluding that it must be due to some form of discrimination, either overt or otherwise, and then attempting to remediate that discrimination, and then having that chain of logic quite reasonably be questioned.
Making decisions based on faulty or incomplete information happens from time to time; there’s no way around that, but a healthy organization would want to know about it after the fact, so that they can avoid wasting additional resources and can avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Jeff R – “You have sanitized this to make it sound a lot more reasonable than it really is. The situation was more along the lines of Harvard having noticed the gender disparity in certain faculty departments and naively concluding that it must be due to some form of discrimination, either overt or otherwise, and then attempting to remediate that discrimination, and then having that chain of logic quite reasonably be questioned.”
I’m sanitizing this?
I was not intending to debate university policies here, but regardless of how you feel about the outcome, no one can claim that these policies were arrived at naively. These ideas have evolved over decades, and are shared across many of the world’s most prestigious universities. They know all the research, and they made their decision very carefully.
The point is that CEO’s and Presidents of major organizations are not the kind of people who can claim to be silenced. If they aren’t responsible for how the world works, nobody is. It is common for a top executive to lose their jobs over power struggles about organizational direction. It is one of the few job hazards they have to deal with.
I still don’t see what the big deal is not the IDW outside it is rebellious name for something that making some writers bigger name. And like curse words, some of the filters are reasonable in society.
1) I suspect there will be a blowback on this. Jordan Peterson seems dangerously close to the incel movement and I still say the biggest risk to social is not Feminist arguing with Jordan but listening to him. So instead of following patriarchy system, they focus only career and economics is a battlefield. Have you seen the 2018 D Primary winners?
2) I still think the IDW follows to closely to Charles Murray Bell Curve 25 year old analysis and sets them up for failure. (So the infamous 15 lower IQ points is closer to 5 – 7 points today and will likely diminish the next generation.) So it is hard to take Murray or Sullivan seriously and I suspect some of the issues of the WWC, not minorities, is they are on the wrong end of the stick in modern times. (And isn’t opoid crisis hitting these areas the hardest?)
3) People who believe in IDW might do small everyday ignoring of them. Long term does a mini-Damore (say plays Rush Limbaugh at work) get ignored more often by the rest of the team? Working for a company is joining a tribe in a lot ways. (Yes it is an economic exchange but the company & employee have to act together in a lot small ways.) I find one of the most important ways to be successful within a company is to make co-workers want to work with you.
4) And how does Trumpian politics play in the long run? The IDW is not just Peterson or Haidt but Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. I believe it was Douthat who once stated “Only Trump can win with Trumpian politics” And other people are not successful at the MS-13 type campaigning. In reality of California politics one under-rated impact of Asian-American voting. In the 1980s, Asian-Americans were heavy Republican and loved Ronald Reagan while today they tend to look down upon Trumpian politics and his base voters.
And before we assume the left goes overboard, I still think many Democrats running in 2018 will either connect themselves to Barack Obama or Joe Biden. Ds are already running ads in California with Obama all over them.
The more interesting and important thing to watch will be whether or not the Democratic establishment and friends in the media are able to rein in the tendency toward even increasing radicalism in candidates, or if the problem will go into a runaway mode that spins out of their control.
I wonder what Peter Turchin would say. The United States seems to have it’s own cultural Minsky Cycle of ideological dispute intensification, then “national nervous breakdown” then eventually followed by a brief reaction-period of a “return to normalcy” before the next cycle begins. The Civil War, the Early Progressive Era, and the tumult of the late 60’s and early 70’s seems to be prior instances in which all keen observers started to feel like the wheels are coming off years before extreme upheaval. (maybe the radicalism of the Revolution followed by the conservative pragmatism of the Constitutional convention could provide another example.)
Maybe we’re just at the beginning of the end of a political version of “The Great Moderation” and due for another crisis.
1) The only thing linking JP to “incels” is he expressed the believe that low status males that can’t find companionship should be pitied because they are still human beings.
2) BW IQ gap hasn’t narrowed as far as I know. Murray is solid.
https://medium.com/@houstoneuler/the-cherry-picked-science-in-voxs-charles-murray-article-bd534a9c4476
3) There is little indication that James Damore was hard to work with. He was informed of programs meant to promote less qualified women above people like him and didn’t think it was fair. He also was forced to attend indoctrination sessions that were demeaning and denigrating to him. His sin was publishing a well researched and polite letter saying that maybe this was all counter productive and unfair.
It’s probably more accurate to say that the things he wrote against cause lots of tension and strife in the workplace.
4) Asians from former communist countries voted R back during the cold war. Same with Hispanics. Non-communist Asians and Hispanics always voted D. As the cold war fades from memory those that came from communist countries have merged in voting patterns with their overall ethnics. This pattern has held constant for decades through many different kinds of candidates. Trump actually got more of these people then Romney. Not much to see here.
1) Probably the bigger point is less on Jordan/incel movement but what happens to society if women listen to Jordan that life and economics is mostly battlefield? So we see teacher unions in red states going on strike and Democrat Primaries won by a lot of women. And the birth rate continues to drop. Sure the incels deserve pity but what else? (Their theories are really stupid and I don’t think feminism is to blame. I dont see any evidence of sex being more inequal the last 40 years.)
2) There is a variety of evidence on how much narrowing (say 15 to 10 to 8 to 3 ) the last generation but showing evidence going back decades does not to prove much on IQ scores. Showing African-American had lower IQ scores in 1960 there was a bunch of environment issue back then. (Less nutrition and different schools.) Anyway, if the drop at age 17 is around 5 points (of 15) then that sounds like a significant change. And shouldn’t be celebrating these increases? (Note the birth rate of minorities are dropping much higher than white birth rates.)
3) With Damore, I should be more clear that I have no idea if he was tough to work with. (I am a lousy writer.) In terms of company what is acceptable speech for them. I still think the football player kneeling is stupid and does not belong the field. And the stronger elements of IDW, not Peterson but Limbaugh, could create tension at the job.
4) Well I have witnessed the generational change of Asian-Americans from the 1980s to today. (The parents escaping were Republican but the children Democrats.) However, with local politics, we need Republicans minorities want to vote for and Trumpian politics is not popular here. I have shown my sons Reagan speeches to show Republicans are beyond WALL! politics.
1) This is a complicated topic. The only thing I’ve seen from JP is questioning bad feminist ideas in which the data is pretty clearly against academic feminism (i.e. most women don’t want to be CEOs, so we shouldn’t pressure them through official and unofficial means to do what they don’t want or blame men/society when they choose not to based on some disparate impact measure) , and offering empathy for individuals plight, especially those who have it tough and society hates.
2) I’m not sure what I linked says what you think it says. Anyway, this is one of those “you can lead a horse to water things.” You’ve got the data, we’re not going to rehash all that in this thread.
I would celebrate anything that would fix BW gap. I would spend 10% of GDP on genetic engineering research if I was dictator, maybe more. That *might* fix the problem. Spending the equivalent amount off social interventions definitely won’t fix the problem.
3) Racial quotas and constant demeaning “struggle sessions” cause work tension.
4) I grew up around Asians. They are racists through and through. They just happen to find aligning with democrats mildly useful at the moment. If we were back in their home Asian countries that would support immigration policies that make Trump look like Bryan Caplan.
Murray isn’t dead and even if he was you could still debate the position he lined up in the bell curve
especially if you believe there is new evidence for change
who on the left is doing adversarial collaboration on IQ and race?
Excellent post Arnold.
The true test is whether an average person could say something at work and not get fired/retaliated against. Charles Murray may still have a job at the AEI, but that doesn’t mean his ideas aren’t getting silenced. It just means he’s lucky enough to have a rich benefactor. If an average person walked into their job and said “we should end this unofficial racial quota system for promotions because its unfair based on “direct quotes of evidence from Murray” they would get fired. So long as that happens to the average person there is zero chance of Murrays ideas ever getting implemented.
I would be surprised anybody outside of tech has much unofficial racial quota system for promotions. I remember this stuff in the mid-1990s at my company but it has been quiet for years. (Even Google hiring of coding workers almost fits exactly the markets percentage of coding so Google doing lots of talk but little action.)
Not that it doesn’t exist but I have not seen much of it. Also it would really bad interview question bordering on illegal to be honest.
You have GOT to be kidding.
Unofficial racial and gender quotas are ubiquitous. Based on disparate impact rulings they are effectively required.
Right. Collin is way out to lunch on this one.
I think that most organizations allow whatever amount of affirmative action they can afford.
The more ‘g’ loaded a profession the less you can afford. So high end tech has less diversity then say the paper belt professions (where 1 SD is often good enough, especially in the easier roles at the firm). Large firms with monopolies (Google) can afford it more then struggling start ups (which skew very heavily white/asian and male).
At most any firm there is a lot of slack (people who don’t do much) and tasks that aren’t too ‘g’ loaded (running meetings, schmoozing, etc). There are a limited number of slots to go around to token AAs that won’t hurt to bad.
If that was all it was…perhaps an inefficient but tolerate equilibrium would be found (at least for now). However, there are two problems.
1) The narrative demands shame and guilt for anything less then zero disparate impact, and the knots and humiliations that it ties its workers into over this are qualitatively worse then mere token set asides.
2) Any attempt to actually achieve true zero disparate impact would of course lead to unaffordable levels of diversity induced incompetence.
Not exactly quotas strictly speaking, but…
There is increasingly good data on the role of affirmative action in university admits in the USA. The book _Mismatch_ details some of it. As I recall, the data examined were law school admits, LSAT scores, and likelihood of passing the bar exam (California Bar Exam)
Offhand for a lit review /survey you could try the chapter on affirmative action in Peter Schuck’s recent book _One nation undecided: Cleaer thinking about five hard questions that divide us_. 2017.
Somewhere I’ve seen estimates for how many hundreds of SAT points are provided in your favor should you check the “African American” box on your application to an Ivy League School. It’s a non-trivial “thumb on the scale.”
See also Jonathan Haidt’s article at Heterodox University website, “The amazing 1969 prediction that racial preferences would cause the exact grievances of protesters today,” dated May 12, 2016.
The now retired radio host Ken Hamlin said he was once interviewed and hired by someone who told him “I gotta hire a Black guy.” Those days may be gone now. Described in his entertaining polemic _Pick a better country_, ca. 1997.
Come to think of it, a good analytical treatment of the whole issue is Robert Klitgaard’s book _Choosing elites_. Now pretty old–1985? I believe some of his data was on “Overseas Chinese” in Indonesian universities.
If you are interviewing for a school teacher position, you will almost certainly be asked, “Do you believe all children can learn?” The honest answer is, “All children can learn something, but many of them can’t learn everything we want them to.” However, saying that will pretty much guarantee that you don’t get the position.
That’s actually a fairly tame answer. The amount that can’t be learned, in the sense of understood and remembered rather than memorized and forgotten soon after the test is over, is astoundingly more than is prescribed in the various state standards (or the Common Core). Which is why there are ever-recurring “crises” in education.
In the last few decades, people in the ed business, have become aware that people who don’t take and pass algebra are without access to many careers, including the now valorized STEM. So algebra has become a requirement in many places. But for perhaps a majority of people, algebra is not just a small step past arithmetic. It is a qualitatively different, and pretty much impossible. One more thing to make school seem pointless and unpleasant, and to make the student a failure. As the novelty tee shirt says,
I STOPPED UNDERSTANDING
MATH WHEN THE ALPHABET
DECIDED TO GET INVOLVED
Of course we could organize education differently. We could track students better. We could have more vo-tech training. We could redo our lesson plans and performance expectations to better serve our students and teachers. These are implemented a great deal in other countries and to a limited degree in the US.
We could even ditch the obsession with “good schools” that dominates so many aspects of our lives and think more about “appropriate schools to do the best we can.”
However, you would have to break down the taboo. Taboos exist to stifle truth that could make things better, but would be inconvenient for those in power. Tom DeMeo above wants everyone to toe the line, even if people get hurt.
Nice T-shirt. This is the first time I have seen it.
My favorite is the Facebook quote “Another day has passed and I haven’t used algebra.” Which doesn’t ring true for me since what is more useful to understanding the world than imagining functional relationships in your head?
Statistics.
Scott has a really great post, about this key question, raised by many Dem media folk:
“can a movement really claim it’s being silenced if it’s actually pretty popular?”
I think “silenced” is more accurate in this case than filter, tho “punished for speech” is the real issue. You know the joke:
In America, we have Free Speech.
Yeah, and in Russia we have Free Speech, too.
But in America, one is still free AFTER speaking freely.
If there is organizational punishment for speaking freely, like Larry Summers or James Damore, or Murray at Middlebury, one doesn’t have free speech. “Silenced” is a reasonable way to express that.
Filter is for weaker words, for instance for 4-letter obscene words, which can lead one to being socially avoided. I argue that individual free association, or taking yourself away, is not quite organizational punishment, so it’s not quite silenced. Filter seems good there.
I too, thought 4-letter words were cool (Lou Reed; F-u, F -em, F -em all…), but now think losing polite conversation was a big loss for civilization. One that has a direct bearing on the anti-hate speech / anti-conservatives; if calling them obscene names has become normalized, the desire to “punish” them in some other way gets stronger.
Four-letter words are cool. They serve a purpose, which is to communicate strength of emotion. Strong emotions are relatively uncommon, so if these words are used liberally, they lose their function, and instead of communicating strong emotion they just become a variant of “um” and “duh” – but a confusing variant, since they sound like they’re trying to communicate strong emotion. Confusing people – especially emotionally confusing them – is not polite, thus heavy use of four-letter words in conversation is inconsiderate.
But efforts to ban them altogether are tied to discomfort with hearing strong emotion – they are efforts to establish a taboo against expressing emotions. And that says a lot more about the weak characters of those who try to avoid other people’s difficult emotions, than it says about the people trying to express them. Frankly, the idea that polite conversation cannot, when appropriate, include expressions of strong emotion, is f***ing ridiculous.
I still believe in the power of the search engine. Any idea can live on its merits if its logic applies sufficiently well to some recognized problem. The various polarized views show, the logic apparent in the search lists.
As it happens, there was a story just this week about Google voluntarily de-indexing certain off-shore websites selling prescription drugs to American consumers, based on FDA administrative findings, that is, without Google being compelled to do so by court order, and with a minimum of due process for the companies involved.
I’m not making alarmist predictions about it, but the future is hard to predict, and these things are changing fast. How can we be sure Google won’t eventually decide to de-index the bad ideas too? I bet they’ve already been asked to, and sentiment of favor of doing so is building, and, perhaps most importantly, I suspect that a large portion of Google employees would be more than eager to do it right now.
We have modern memory holes to disappear the ugly or inconvenient past. Are you really so sure that no one will ever decide to use them?
In this vein, it is reported that Amazon just “de-monetized” Legal Insurrection, a completely mainstream conservative legal website run by a law professor.
And Islam: Harris was smeared as an Islamophobe. Also Maher and Houellebecq. Ali was booted from Brandeis’ graduation ceremony where she was supposed to receive an honorary degree. At least the Ayatollah didn’t issue a fatwa against them like he did against Salman Rushdie, but the severity of intimidation is calibrated to the needs of the moment, and right now, those are much lower than death.
And sexuality, which isn’t the same as ordinary gender: Peterson got into trouble with refusing to use preferred pronouns, and expressing opposition to same-sex marriage would be a good way for most people to get fired.
And immigration, though the way this is handled is mostly under the category of “race”.
And global warming: I’m guessing some of the folks on the site have been accused of being ‘deniers’, which is a dirty attempt to lower their status to that of flat-earthers and neo-nazis, and consider Mann’s interminable lawsuit against Steyn, or what happened to Bjorn Lomborg in 2002. Mann also demanded that David Koch be purged from the board of Boston’s PBS station. What about the sagas of Lindzen and Curry and Bengtsson?
And abortion: Kevin Williamson would still be writing for The Atlantic is he had kept those opinions to himself. There was also the cancellation of the Stanley – O’Neil debate at Oxford.
And obesity! Geoffrey Miller got in trouble when he was at Stern business for “fat shaming”. Also Chip Wilson from lululemon.
I could go on.
The point is, all these ‘filters’ pretend to be about civility and offense, but only insist upon demonstration of special respect, sensitivity, and solicitude for certain people.
They all go the same way in terms of effectively raising the status of all the identity groups which belong to the progressive coalition by granting them the social equivalent of lese majeste right to be free of any upsetting statements, regardless of whether they are true or false.
It doesn’t matter if the King is actually lazy. You are not allowed to call him lazy. That’s the kind of thing an equal or peer could do, but you are lower and he is higher, and that status gap relation cannot be brought into question or narrowed by anyone without severe sanction. So know your place, peasant.
I really should do a post on this, but until then:
The idea that the identified folks are the “dark web” is a joke. The folks mentioned are basically social liberals who enjoy “truthtelling” while still using the right forks. Most of them have tenure.
I mean, how the hell do you talk about Sam Harris’s podcast with Charles Murray and not recognize Murray as an IDW member? Steve Sailer? Razib Khan? Greg Cochran? John Derbyshire?
Scott Alexander isn’t a member of the actual dark web. He is, like Sam Harris, a guy who enjoys the frisson of talking about it, but heaven forfend, he doesn’t think such thoughts.
I heard somewhere that the IDW was started by the other Weinstein brother, or at least that the article was pushed by him, which makes sense. It’s just a fan club.
“For any proposition, let the numerator be the total number of times a proposition that is relevant to a discussion is NOT affirmed by someone who believes it. ”
Good lord. It’s not that I disagree with you, it’s just that you seem to be saying “Gosh, it appears that there are ideas that people don’t mention a truth even if it’s relevant, so let’s call that a filter that goes from 0 to 1.”
And that’s just…insane. It’s not just that there’s a huge filter, it’s that the filter gets narrower every year, and that the cost of choosing to speak isn’t getting removed as president of Harvard when you have a zillion other prestigious positions to choose from, but being utterly wiped out economically because you’ll never get hired again.
Here’s a list of ideas people could easily get fired for expressing: supporting immigration restriction, opposing affirmative action, thinking it’s not a great idea to allow kids to pick which gender they’re going to be when heading for the toilet, affirming the existence and relevance of IQ, mocking the number of letters in LGB’s alphabet soup, voting Republican.
And you’re thinking maybe there’s a filter? But you know, filters can be good, because things would be much better today if we’d kept up the swearing ban.
It’s hard to criticize the filters without getting filtered, so I can’t blame someone for retreating to a more abstract and general level.
Cowen recently did a podcast with Ezra Klein and seemed uncharacteristically adamant in his attempts to get Klein to realize the matter is getting out of control and that it would be better to be part of the solution than the problem, which Klein presently very much is. When Klein asked for specifics, however, Cowen naturally had to refuse and distance himself, and it was clear Klein’s priors weren’t budged.
I like your notion of a kind of ‘misery index’ for this stuff representing the degree of aggravation at the rapid tightening of the screws, and perhaps also the silent accumulation of explosive pressures in our society’s political stream engine Rate of change of filter level times life-impact severity of getting filtered for the average vulnerable person. What could be said openly just a few years ago will now make you unhirable for life, etc. “You couldn’t Torquemada anything”, but at least during the inquisition the state religion’s doctrine stayed stable.
You can hold those positions, but you can’t hold them *intelligently*. So you can be against immigration because you are worried terrorism, which is kind of a dumb reason because terrorism is like shark attacks and not statistically important enough to matter. You are allowed to hold that position, because its dumb and progressives can easily knock it down and call you ignorant. It doesn’t have the power to meaningfully change policy or the societal narrative that gives progressives power.
You aren’t allowed to say, “Muslims are clannish low IQ people that will make our country worse the more of them that come. Terrorism is just one high profile aspect of the difficulties that their demographic presence brings. I’m actually more worried about the substantial political, social, and economic effects people from the middle east will have on my daily life, which will only get worse as they become a higher % of the population. I don’t think assimilation will work because of genetic and religious barriers that are difficult or impossible to change.”
That would represent a strong and fundamental challenge to the progressive narrative and power base, so it is fought with the power of a thousand suns.
In Ezra’s dialogue with Sam he kept coming back to, “don’t you know how bad being told your people are genetically inferior makes them feel. Why do you want to make them feel bad.” We all understand its true that such knowledge would make people feel bad, and all other things being held equal we would like not to say things that hurt peoples feelings for no reason.
However, all other things aren’t held equal and people like Ezra are pushing agendas and narratives based on the “noble lie” that are doomed to failure and hurt lots of people. They are basically saying, “I’m going to weaponize the noble lie to drive my agenda,” and then wonder why norms surrounding the noble lie break down when its abused in this way. Being more charitable, the problem is people “not getting the joke.” The joke is that we are equal. That’s what we say. The reality is we aren’t. That’s what we base public and private real world practices on.
In Japan this would be called public truth and private truth (they have good words for that). There are advantages to being able to simultaneously maintain these two parallel truths. However, its very subtle and requires a highly developed social fabric. It seems to me unlikely that diverse/multi-culturual societies are capable of maintaining that sort of social technology.
I think the alt-right criticism is that the weaponized noble lie can’t be fought with half measures. “I would never actually believe X, but shouldn’t we be thinking about X (and lets not even touch Y)” seems to be the IDW take. I appreciate the attempt and get the reasons why its seen as an ideal strategy. If its successful then it will have proven itself in the marketplace of cultural technology. If its unsuccessful it will have just been a useless half measure, chewing up the capital of resistance during this brief window where resistance is possible. I’m a pessimist on its chances, but “prove me wrong kids, prove me wrong.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ5WvUec94
I claim that having water thrown at you in a meeting, because of your views, is an attempt to silence you.
I don’t claim Tomi Lahren is in the Intellectual part of the IDW, but she’s an anti-PC speaker. Who the Dems are trying to silence.
http://www.startribune.com/trump-praises-fox-news-tomi-lahren-after-minneapolis-confrontation/483466411/
If water throwing becomes normalized as an acceptable protest, more violent acid throwing is not far away.
Having obscenities thrown at you in a public place seems to have been so normalized that it’s barely objectionable — we need potty-mouth shaming, more than laws & cop punishment.
The silencing, and attempted silencing, is going on and increasing.