Political Correctness Killer for Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Political Correctness Killer for Social Media

speerty.com

8 pointsPropopulo35 comments

It looks like this is a "safe space" for people with rude opinions about a bunch of things including probably the concept of safe spaces.

Is a rude opinion necessarily incorrect? I understand the need to engage civilly, but there are probably uncomfortable truths that others find rude.

Then you should be willing to suffer the consequences of truth telling. It's a fairly common pattern in history.

The entire point of having a relatively free society is to reduce those consequences so that people can freely search for the truth without fearing for their livelihoods, reputations, or lives. We make a lot more progress now that the Church doesn't haul people in for saying the earth revolves around the sun, and now that people don't get blacklisted from their careers for being suspected of communist sympathies. Just because heliocentrism and communism aren't taboo anymore doesn't mean we've figured everything out and can abandon these principles.

none of those opinions would be labelled "politically correct"; the term is a dog-whistle for people who want to express opinions like "what if women are simply less capable than men?" or "black people would get a lot further if they'd just clean up their act and behave like civilised folk". google for "politically incorrect but" if you are disinclined to take my word for it.

Yeah, those are examples of opinions that are politically incorrect today, but so are more sophisticated and plausible opinions, like "genetics may be expressed in behavioral ways that predict criminality", "the distribution of cognitive and personality traits differs between sexes and races", "Islamic immigrants to Europe are disproportionately responsible for cases of sexual assault", "some women falsely accuse men of rape", or even "it's not realistic to expect people to coexist in society together when they hold entirely different social mores and norms". You may agree or disagree with any of these statements, but the notion of political correctness is that we are not even allowed to discuss whether or not these propositions are factually correct, because they are already politically incorrect.

But the real risk of political correctness isn't just the possibility that some politically incorrect proposition turns out to be true. It's that reality is always more complicated than we think it is. Two opposing propositions might be true in different contexts. For instance, the NBA slam dunk competition was this weekend; I don't think it's a stretch to say that in that particular context, women are, in fact, less capable than men. What if that's true about things other than dunking basketballs? We're not even comfortable contemplating that notion. That discomfort is a bias on our picture of the world.

There are a lot of common patterns in history we should avoid repeating.

"Suffering consequences" for truth telling should be one of them.

Truths have truth value while opinions do not.

Uncomfortable truths exist. And like all fact based observations they require evidence and are susceptible to disproof.

The interesting case is when one takes an internal personal dislike (opinion) and rephrases it as if it is a true property of the world and thereby spreads that dislike. e.g. "all martians are immoral".

More interesting still is when such a person convinces himself that his opinion is based on such "facts".

Hard to believe that this 1) is possible, 2) made it through FB's approval process, and 3) is legit.

This is great! I love all of the opinions! Thanks so much for your feedback. I'll try you answer all the comments when I have time, I'm on the road right now. Yes, this is legit. We're in beta. Still very rough around the edges. Obviously there's room on this site for abuse, but it's meant to address a larger social issue. Voices and opinions on the periphery of society have been scorned in such a way that no one ever talks about them anymore. This is an opportunity to have educational, yet progressive discussion. At the same time, all character bias is removed and your friends won't view your comments as coming from a particular race, background, nationality, or the like. Users have an opportunity to evaluate comments for their logic and core tenets, not the messenger. Please keep the feedback coming, good, bad, or indifferent. Thanks everyone.

So this is basically sockpuppets as a service?

Dope watermarks.

BTW: address is in Ohio, phone area code is in Silicon Valley.

"Defy political corrextness"

And all the photos still have the stock stuff on them... this is more likely to be a weird phishing operation or a honeypot than an actual product

Thanks for that, did that while I was in the car. Corrected.

"Political correctness" is a phrase used by assholes who haven't figured out what free speech is. They think it means they can say whatever they like, without fear of repercussions or consequences. And they get very offended and hurt when they find out that isn't so.

And they have right to attack people that have different than mainstream media opinions.

you have to wonder why someone has gone through so much time and trouble to let people post things anonymously on social media, when they know their friends are likely to dislike said posts. seems like jerks all the way down.

I posted my reasons in a comment above. I don't think I'm a jerk, just a quiet physicist. You should get to know me :-)

i'm even more inclined to believe that as a physicist you're going to hide behind "i just provide a value-neutral tool; it's up to people how they use it.". can you think of many "politically incorrect" opinions that don't simply reinforce biases against an already marginalised group?

You sound rather smug and happy that people who hold opinions differing from yours can not express them for fear of repercussions. That must feel great.

Nice personal attack. :) But no, I'm afraid you are mistaken. What I am is dismayed that so many mistake fundamental free-speech rights for the right to be an offensive asshole and be tolerated.

But that's precisely what Freedom of Speech is for. Ie if you happen to disagree with someone's point of view, you are welcome to explain why they are wrong. In the process the better idea will prevail (assuming everyone is free to explain themselves).

Under the guise of PC, some ideas can not be uttered. The simplest explanation is because there is no valid counterpoint - so it's much easier to just shut down the debate.

PS This was not a personal attack at all - as I know nothing about you personally. I merely restated what you said in different words.

"Merely restated" is a false description. What you said was a personal attack by the standard that applies here: your language was both hostile and personal. That's not allowed on HN, so please don't do it again.

Bud also shouldn't have said "phrase used by assholes", something that was plainly false and guaranteed to provoke. But by attacking personally, what you did was worse.

Everyone agrees that X is an offensive asshole? Is that the case? Exactly what do you 'tolerate' then? The word only has meaning to the extent that it is acceptance of speech that the tolerator finds offensive. Perhaps you'd be happy if we junked the concept?

Social taboos against unpopular opinions may not rise to the level of criminalization, but that doesn't mean they are all perfectly acceptable. The Hollywood blacklist wasn't a government action nor was it a violation of free speech in the legal sense, but that didn't make it a good or even an acceptable thing. Actually, we consider it a great scandal when screenwriters are blacklisted from their livelihood for expressing sympathies with Stalin, but we don't bat an eye when a tech executive is hounded out of his job because he backed the wrong California proposition a few years ago and refuses to comment on the issue today. One of these is called "McCarthyism" and the other is called "political correctness", and it's hard for me to see a world where one is okay and the other is not, unless of course we live in a world where denying legal marriage to same sex couples is worse than Stalinism.

> The Hollywood blacklist wasn't a government action nor was it a violation of free speech in the legal sense, but that didn't make it a good or even an acceptable thing.

Well, yeah, it was an combination in restraint of trade. Which is whole different category of wrong than a free speech violation.

So we agree that hounding people out of their livelihoods over their expressed opinions is wrong, then.

Not sure how you inferred any comment on that subject from my simply pointing out that the Hollywood blacklist was a combination in restraint of trade.

Which, incidentally, the complaints about Eich were not.

If you actually knew anything about the blacklists of the 1950s (hint: it went far beyond Hollywood) you would realize how absurd it is to compare that to the man who gave us javascript.

And everything is much better when we've got the illusion of agreement, rather than knowing what the assholes actually think. It's much more important to provide consequences when we disagree.

I would reply to you, but [THIS PHRASE HAS BEEN REDACTED FOR BEING ANTAGONISTIC. WE APOLOGIZE IF YOU HAD ANY FEELINGS OF NOT BEING ABSOLUTELY CORRECT IN ALL YOUR STATEMENTS.]

To make the sarcasm a bit more clear:

The problem with legally enforcing a set of rules for speech is that he who makes the rules has all the power in the world.

For an example of over-regulating speech, check the IRC for Minecraft Forge. The rules of the IRC begin with "Lex (the admin) is God. Respect him or else."

You cannot trust anybody with that kind of control over what is said. At best, you will slowly ruin the community you're "protecting".

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11091365 and marked it off-topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com