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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

If you want to hear more of his view, including some solid rebuttals, I highly recommend IntelligenceSquared, a debate series that gets published as a podcast. They cover motions from culture to science to politics across the spectrum and usually get excellent, well-informed debaters on both sides.

Their most recent one was "Cancel Culture is Toxic"[0] and Kasparov was arguing in favor of the motion.

While I ultimately disagree with the motion, I think Kasparov and Kmele Foster (mostly Kmele, really) made the stronger case. And regardless, it was a fascinating and well-argued discussion of the sort you almost never see around topics like "cancel culture." Well worth a listen.

[0] https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/cancel-culture-tox...

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You felt the anti-woke side made the stronger case, but you still disagree? Can you add some more detail here?

The challenge with this debate is that the meaning of "cancel culture" is too broad, verging on incoherent. Examples of "cancellation" range from people who experienced harsh consequences for minimal or imaginary "offenses", like Justine Sacco and Donald McNeil, to powerful serial sex offenders like Harvey Weinstein.

But surely you can simultaneously think that Weinstein shouldn't have been cancelled (mostly by his almost-equally perverted friends who dropped him like hot lava when he started becoming toxic, to save their own reputations, after having cozied up to him for years/decades) and still think he should be charged/jailed for actual crimes by actual justice system.

Sure, you could, but that seems a little perverse by itself. Choosing to remain friends with someone you know you to be the serial perpetrator of sexual assault while also favoring their conviction and imprisonment seems ... odd, at best.

What makes the Weinstein case difficult are the widespread claims that lots of people in Weinstein's circle did know what he was doing, and did not (a) report him (b) dissassociate from him. Their lack of willingness to report him (let alone their willingness to actively aid him) means that they are not part of the category described above.

[ EDITED because my final sentence was a clear logical error, but is now correct. ]

I think that most of these debates even exist at all because there is little to no agreement on these things. The current climate for social and political discourse does not allow for much nuance. That means individuals with what are actually different ideologies and belief systems get forced together into the same group. So many current issues are portrayed as having only two sides and you can only be totally on one or the other. "Woke" Is no different.

I'm not some ageless immortal who has personally witnessed all social strife in human history. So while I can confidently say this is a problem now, I can't say for sure if this has always been a problem and inherent to the human condition or if its a recent one and its causes lay in the circumstances of our time.

As with all history, it never repeats, but it rhymes.

People have always stood up to abuses that were previously hidden. They have always been dismissed as not real problems. A few have always been selfish, and have always been portrayed as if they were the true reason for the movement.

This Time It's Different because of the Internet, enabling more people to talk about it, more people to spread misinformation, more people to say stupid things, and generally creating more heat than light at a vaster scale. Everybody involved adapts their tactics to that. But the core issues are identical.

If someone feels that one side had a harder path to begin with due to context outside the presentation/debate itself, that can happen. To veer dangerously close to Godwinning, but I think for good reason, consider how much better a holocaust denial argument would have to be than its opponents', for you to agree with that side. You might well come away going "damn, they really did do a better job of presenting their case" while still disagreeing.

[EDIT] To be clear, I picked something extreme so it'd be easy to see that this situation could exist without getting distracted by minutia, and am not equating anti-cancel-culture with holocaust denial. I hope that was obvious, but just in case.

The fact that you have to repeatedly and expressly clarify that you're not equating cancel culture with holocaust denial is apt given the topic at hand. No intellectually honest person reading your analogy would be able to conclude that you're equating the two topics. And yet almost all of us feel the need to include these kinds of disclaimers so we don't face backlash from anonymous strangers on a tiny message board. If we feel this way here--when we're almost all anonymous to some degree--that's an indictment as to where we are culturally.

Love this. "No intellectually honest person reading your analogy would be able to [reasonably] conclude that you're equating the two topics."

Added one word. Would like to add, the oppocite of what you state, seems to be the default behaviour in the cancel culture climate, which shuts down a lot of reasonable commentors, as in, "fuck it, I am staying out of this one"

Eh, it's standard public Web forum writing. It's a terrible style and grates on me when I read it, but one I find advisable to employ at times nonetheless. Things might have gone fine without that part, but when I re-read the post I decided to err on the side of caution in this case. More to do with preventing low-value responses than any fear of backlash, at least this time.

AFAIK this kind of redundant and absurdly explicit writing style aimed squarely at bad or inattentive readers who nonetheless find the time to post (plus, the occasional troll who looks for things to misunderstand on purpose) predates the current cultural moment we're in, by years.

Assuming you're a tech person, have you ever observed a debate between two non-tech people on a tech-adjacent topic (say, responsible disclosure or net neutrality)? It's quite easy for this to happen if you went in agreeing with one side, and that side omits what you consider to be important arguments.

Not OP but I listened to the debate.

Said “anti-woke” side argued well that the vein of cancel culture that oversteps and ruins the lives of people just living pay check to pay check and posting bad takes on Twitter on their 15 minute bathroom break is toxic. Meanwhile, it’s ineffective against the people who the movement claims to be targeting. They’re right, in my humble opinion. However, I vehemently disagree that it’s anything new or that it threatens discourse or “free speech.”

The “woke” side argued well about holding people accountable for what they say. Especially people with outsize influence. I also agree that it’s an important avenue for minority voices to be amplified and heard. However, the “Cancel Culture” they argued for only exists in the minority now. They didn’t really acknowledge that the majority of cancels are just normal people who post stupid Tweets that then lose their jobs and get radicalized.

In effect, they just kinda talked past each other because neither was arguing with sufficient nuance to encapsulate the entire movement. The people for the motion (the motion being “Cancel culture is toxic”) won in my head, just because they landed the closest to the reality of the situation.

For reference: My politics skew in the direction of wishing UN Agenda 21 was even half the conspiracy Republicans made it out to be. If even I’m backing away from social media and side eyeing the people to my left…uh. It’s not good.

> They didn’t really acknowledge that the majority of cancels are just normal people who post stupid Tweets that then lose their jobs and get radicalized.

Can you provide any examples of this? I found myself agreeing with the against side because I really don’t see this happening.

A little late here, but here's a list I keep. These aren't strictly normal people, but I do consider all of their "cancellations" terribly wrongheaded:

- Keith John Sampson (11/2007)

- Adria Richards (3/2013)

- Justine Sacco (12/2013)

- Nicholas & Erika Christakis (5/2016)

- Justine Schwarz (2/2017)

- Bret Weinstein (5/2017)

- James Damore (8/2017)

- Ben Frisch (3/2018)

- Jonathan Friedland (6/2018)

- No Winegard (3/2020)

- Colin Wright (4/2020)

- David Shor (5/2020)

- Emmanuel Cafferty (6/2020)

- Gordon Klein (6/2020)

- Stephen Hsu (6/2020)

- Elisa Parrett (6/2020)

- Norman C. Wang (8/2020)

- Will Wilkinson (1/2021)

- Lauren Wolfe (1/2021)

- Chris Harrison (2/2021)

- Donald Mcneil (2/2021)

- Alexi McCammond (3/2021)

- Sandra Sellers (3/2021)

- Paul Rossi (4/2021)

- Ryan Singer (4/2021)

- Antonio Garcia Martinez (5/2021)

- Emily Wilder (5/2021)

Sure! Debate is a skill, and I think the, to use your term, "anti-woke" side performed it better. Debate skill is not, however, equivalent to truth.

As an extreme example, imagine a child debating with an adult. The adult asserts that the moon is made of cheese. It's entirely possible that the adult could "win" that debate by any reasonable measure because most children are (understandably) terrible debaters. This being despite the fact that the adult is clearly wrong.

Now, it's certainly harder to debate well in favor of a bad idea. Given two equivalently-skilled debaters (eg two random adults), one would expect the cheese-moon position to be soundly trounced. But given a proposition that's much more contentious (like "Cancel Culture is Toxic"), I think it's pretty easy to "win" despite being (imo) incorrect.

This is possible because I judge the best debater only by what was said in the debate, but I judge whether cancel culture is really toxic or not from years of information, experience, and many points and nuances of argument that none of the debaters hit on (or didn't hit on in depth).

Hence the disparity.

(And, as an aside, I love how IntelligenceSquared handles this when judging the debate: they poll the audience before and after the debase and whichever side moved the larger percentage of the audience to their side "wins").

Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.

It’s an established, commonly used title, kinda like Doctor. Entrepreneur not a title, only a name of an occupation. Nobody really calls anybody “Entrepreneur Smith”.

"World champion" is also a bit of a title.

He's kind of an unusual case. I'd normally think of him as yet another sports star with an opinion, but because of the way the Cold War worked, he has political importance/baggage that somebody like Joe Montana or Fernando Valenzuela doesn't have.

Second the recommendation for the series. They have some misses, mostly of the sort where everyone seems to talk past each other, but I learn something from most episodes.

Agreed that they're not always perfect. I think they sometimes miss on the guests where you wind up with 3 distinguished experts and then some equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, and the debate takes a turn for the worse every 4th speaker. But yeah, I've yet to hear an episode where there wasn't at least one compelling argument by someone, and often it's all 4.

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