PC proliferation on college campuses (formerly UNC students...)

WFcatamount22 said:

ok guys that’s a little rediculius

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wakephan09 said:

This spell was especially effective against Draco Malfoy in The Order of the Phoenix​.

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Strickland33 said:

So, the solution is for “defenders of pc” to find a more polite way of calling “offenders of pc” dickheads?

Two responses:
1) Y’all tend to act like dickheads, so why not just own it?
2) Isn’t being offended because someone disagrees with you and calls you a “dickhead” kind of a “defender of pc”-esque response? A true opponent of pc should revel in the glory of being referred to as a dickhead based on my understanding of your own argument.

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Deacfreak07 said:

I didn’t say you “were” a dickhead. I basically said hate speech is acting like a dickhead. You want to own that as your identity, then that’s on you.

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PC is really about not being a dickhead. That’s probably hard for some people.

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PhDeac said:

Ah yes. The old "if you're so tolerant, you should be tolerant of my intolerance."

Why would a pro-politeness movement be against for non-politeness?

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Sam Altman
« Back to blog
E Pur Si Muove
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.

That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005.

It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.

This will be very bad for startups in the Bay Area.

Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones. Usually mainstream ideas are right and heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the world forward. Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.

More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture.

You can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right, and nearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out sounding like terrible ideas. So if you want a culture that innovates, you can’t have a culture where you allow the concept of heresy—if you allow the concept at all, it tends to spread. When we move from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas.

This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

Political correctness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing to make accommodations to treat others well. But too often it ends up being used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims. The best ideas are barely possible to express at all, and if you’re constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted, you won’t let the best ideas get past the fragment stage.

I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong. If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard. I can picture Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.







[1] I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say "gay people are ok" to make the progress we've made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

In fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think may be true and that I don’t like. But I accept that censorship is not going to make the world be the way I wish it were.

Upvote 161

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sailordeac said:

beyond the ivory tower:

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It’s not news that Sam Altman likes to say controversial things. The 32-year-old president of the very successful startup incubator Y Combinator attracted disdain for supporting Peter Thiel even after the billionaire’s donations to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign won widespread criticism. Now, Altman is pitching an idea pulled straight from the White House’s talking points: Political correctness is bad for America. This is an idiotic point of view, often put forth by idiots who struggle with the challenges of progress. Sam Altman is one of those idiots.

Altman took his stand against a politically correct United States in a recent blog post hubristically titled “E Pur Si Muove.” That Italian phrase is a reference to something Galileo Galilei supposedly said while on house arrest for claiming that the Sun was the center of the universe. “And yet it moves” is the translation, and yes, it was a controversial theory during Galileo’s time. Because he seems to fancy himself a philosopher and history-maker as well, Altman appears to be comparing the state of affairs in San Francisco to Europe on the eve of the Enlightenment. Except San Francisco might never see its great awakening because everybody is so super scared of saying something controversial!

Here’s Altman, the idiot:

This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

Well yes, that statement is uncomfortable, and the idea behind it is so poorly expressed that Altman, who is gay, had to add a footnote in order to clarify it. (That’s what the “[1]” is for.) Here’s part of the footnote which is also idiotic:

[1] I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say “gay people are ok” to make the progress we’ve made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

This is like saying we need people who think white supremacists are cool, because they give us the opportunity to say that white supremacy is bad. It’s also not far off from Thiel, who secretly bankrolled a lawsuit against Gizmodo’s former owner Gawker Media, resulting in the company’s bankruptcy, saying, “A free press is vital for a public debate,” in the same column where he explains why he sued Gawker out of existence.

When Altman tried to say that political correctness was stifling American innovation, I can’t say I believe he did so with any malicious intent. I actually believe that he just didn’t think it through. Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, Altman failed to communicate a complex argument in a casual blog post. The example about disparaging gay people reads like an endorsement of homophobia, and the explanation of that example simply reiterates how offensive it is. Even the Galileo reference is misplaced. As we now know, Galileo’s ideas started the scientific revolution. He was hardly silenced.

There’s some history to back up the claim that Sam Altman is idiot, too. And when I say the word “idiot,” I don’t mean to imply that Altman is actually a stupid person. He went to Stanford, dropped out, started a company that later failed, and then went back and taught at Stanford. He can’t be dumb. Altman does have a history of saying or doing dumb things, though. He caught some side-eye last year after getting kicked out of the Ritz for wearing sneakers and then complaining about it on Twitter. Altman also said all kinds of ill-advised things surrounding the Thiel-Trump drama earlier this year, both by denouncing Trump and refusing to denounce Thiel for helping Trump get elected. Last month, Y Combinator finally severed ties with Thiel, news that Y Combinator shared not by writing a new announcement but by updating the old blog post welcoming Thiel with a line that said Thiel was “no longer affiliated.” This is the same Altman who now argues that Americans aren’t able to say controversial things enough.

The one redeeming detail about Altman is that he’s easy to ignore. Sure, his company does have great power over the startup world, and the ability to turn ideas into multi-billion-dollar companies. But his actions probably don’t impact your daily life as, say, Donald Trump’s now do. Based on what I know from his half-baked blog, though, I wouldn’t give the guy a nickel. He seems like a real idiot who loves to advertise his bad ideas in public forums and ignore the advice of wiser people. I can understand why he’s so popular in Silicon Valley.

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sailordeac said:

say, you guys are great at missing the point, but never mind, you and we already knew that

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sailordeac said:

I've explained many things but many of you are prevented by your ideologies from understanding. I understand, and I wish you would too.

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sailordeac said:

I've explained many things but many of you are prevented by your ideologies from understanding. I understand, and I wish you would too.

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sailordeac said:

can't be bothered, it's pretty obvious for those who understand

you might be able to guess it though, if you put in sufficient effort

good luck, I mean that sincerely, and let us know how you are progressing

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On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as white,” she writes.

Further, she says mathematics operates with unearned privilege in society, “just like whiteness.

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University of Illinois interim Provost John Wilkin told Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications.

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