Comment by oisdk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oisdk | Hacker News Reader

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"Here's a taxonomy of people that I just made up. There are four types of people, classified by superficial characteristics. Actually, this classification is an extremely strong indicator for behaviour, certainly stronger than other indicators. How do I know this? I am very smart and I say so.

Based on this fact, I notice that the social-justicy types of today bear some superficial and extremely tenuous resemblance to the pro-slavery types of yesterday. Really makes you think."

I'm sorry but this comes across as total nonsense to me. Any "there are x types of people" stuff always reads as astrology for people with STEM degrees, especially when it's as ill-supported as the types given in this article.

Also the article is pretty ahistorical: being "pro-slavery" was absolutely not the unanimous consensus that we like to pretend it was today. There was widespread opposition to slavery: many viewed it as an obvious moral evil. France banned slavery in 1315, for goodness' sake. People knew it was wrong.

In actual fact, the type of people arguing against abolition were people in a much more similar position to Graham: the Economist famously urged delay with regards to abolition, fearing what freed slaves might get up to. Graham's notion that "actually, I'm much more like the abolitionists than slaveowners because we're both such iconoclasts" is extremely weak and, on its face, a little ridiculous.

(also: does Graham really think he's going against the grain with this stuff? Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship is about as mainstream a position as there is. It would be hard to pick a more "conventionally-minded" opinion than "I think free speech is good")

It certainly comes across a bit like Peterson's "everything is either order or chaos and chaos is bad," but for tech people who claim to be independent thinkers while all reciting the same old anti-regulation ideas.

I especially find PG's claim that "the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded" to be questionable.

I think the exercise of considering which historical atrocities you would passively comply with is a good exercise for understanding the banality of evil. PG did little to argue his moral superiority from this perspective, rather highlighted how different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself. The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.

You point out that he did have an axe to grind regarding cancel culture, and highlight that it's not particularly heroic. But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.

He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to. I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity. Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.

> different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself.

But this is exactly what I'm disagreeing with: there was widespread and popular opposition to slavery from its invention. To act like "everyone was doing it, everyone thought it was ok" is absolutely just not true.

The people in favour of slavery were largely the wealthy, powerful minority who benefited from slavery.

> The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.

This is such a strange statement. "anti-slavery individuals did nothing"? Who do you think achieved abolition?! You seem to think that abolition was some passive force which happened as a result of "changing tides": I, on the other hand, seem to remember that there was a war fought about it (in the US at least).

Furthermore, slavery didn't begin and end in the united states: abolition was achieved in many other places before it go to the US, in fact the US was something of a holdout for slavery in the west. There were countless slave rebellions, some quite successful, and political action absolutely achieved progress towards abolition in many places around the world.

> But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.

The "anti-cancel-culture" crowd, by my estimation, makes up the vast majority of positions of power in the US. For god's sake the president routinely decries cancel culture and a large part of his appeal is the fact that he's "un-PC".

> He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to

The Stanford prison experiment was a complete fabrication and research fraud. (honestly: you should look up modern information on it. I had kind of thought it was common knowledge that it was bunk, but I suppose it did have a large cultural impact)

> I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity.

I don't know, but my point is that Graham has clearly picked superficial personality traits that flatter him by associating his idea of himself with his idea of abolitionists. Regardless of whether the idea of "personality types" is valid or not, it's clear that what Graham is doing here isn't.

> Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.

Again, I would completely disagree. I don't know what the psychological consensus is, but from laypeople it seems clear that "personality traits are important" is an extremely mainstream view.

To clarify my point on the slavery example-

Slavery was present for hundreds or thousands of years. It was also obviously morally wrong for the entirety of it's existence. It's decline in the western world was relatively quick compared to the duration of it's existence. This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor. This change of material conditions gave enough cultural leeway for passive conformists to embrace legislative change.

It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud. Even with it's flaws it suggests that people are much much more likely to engage in immoral behavior when an authority figure endorses it. Historical atrocities confirm this.

I don't think there's a productive way to argue about the cancel culture point. Data supporting which side is "winning" the cancel culture war is too cherry-pickable. The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.

I do not think that the personality traits discussed are superficial. Other posters have provided more evidence, especially regarding openness and conscientiousness, that I speculated on earlier. I do not think that the purpose of PG's essay is to flatter himself.

> This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor.

This is just not true, and certainly not the view of most historians. This is an important claim, and you have not backed it up with evidence.

> It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud.

I'm sorry, but this is quite a strange statement to me. Let me put it this way: if I cited the Stanford prison experiment in a university paper, the paper would be failed. The experiment is widely criticised, outright fraud has been found in a number of cases, and its results have not been replicated.

> The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.

Again, Stephen Pinker is an extremely powerful individual. He's a multi-millionaire, a Harvard professor, I don't think I could come up with a better example of someone with a large platform. If he's been "cancelled" then he's an example of how insignificant and ineffectual "cancel culture" really is.

(of course people looking into his association with Jeffrey Epstein is quite another thing, I certainly don't think that's a "cancelling")

Also, "here is a taxonomy I made up and coincidentally I just happen to be in the category that is the best. "

> It would be hard to pick a more "conventionally-minded" opinion than "I think free speech is good"

It's important to make the distinction between people who feel like they're in favour of freedom of speech, and people who are actually in favour of freedom of speech. It often seems to me that Americans belong to the former group but not the latter. I'll link a funny poll (from a long time ago, but I'd love to see a new one) where 96% of respondents said they were in favour of freedom of speech, but only 40% said they were in favour of radicals being allowed to hold meetings and express their views.

https://news.gallup.com/vault/206465/gallup-vault-tolerance-...

> It's important to make the distinction between people who feel like they're in favour of freedom of speech, and people who are actually in favour of freedom of speech.

Exactly. I think it's clear which group Graham falls into.

Yes: the former.

All of his recent screeds basically boil down to: I want free speech for the rich like me, and people who don't like that attitude should shut up because that's Cancel Culture and therefore bad.

> Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship is about as mainstream a position as there is

Not at all. I am 40. My father and one of my brothers share that position with me, but every single one of my friends and acquaintances from universities and workplaces, in the USA and in the European country in which I grew up, if they make their position clear on social media, it is in line with the progressive left and thus implicitly at least supportive of "cancel culture" and censorship.

> it is in line with the progressive left and thus implicitly at least supportive of "cancel culture" and censorship.

It's very easy to say everyone is in favour of cancel culture if you say that any support of the "progressive left" amounts to support for cancel culture.

That's fair, I didn't make my case very well there.

Participation in cancel culture and censorship is becoming mainstream. Part of what makes it work is that participation isn't acknowledged, especially by those federating together to cancel.

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