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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

Woo boy. Generally liked the concept for the essay, but this piece jumps out as problematic (or just poorly written):

> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?

Many (most?) statements embed some of the speakers attributes, either explicitly or implicitly. At a trivial level, saying “I am hungry” can be true when one person says it and false when another does.

Obviously “I” statements are not what Graham is talking about, but the idea that your lived experience cannot qualify or disqualify you for passing certain judgements seems suspect.

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> Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?

He can't think of a statement that is false when a white person says it and true when a black person says it (or vice versa).

The literal quote is about the “x-ism” of the statement, not its veracity. He goes on to extrapolate about truth later.

Yes, but it's in the context of someone already having said that an "x-ist" statement can't be true.

The quote in question is immediately after this paragraph:

> If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.

Which the quote about the variation of a statement is given as an obvious counter argument once someone has already said that x-ist statements cannot be true.

"I am black?"

Fair, those are the same words, but it's not the same meaning. The "I" in this term refers to two different people depending on who says it.

Are they really the same statement if they have two different meanings?

That's kind of the point, no? Context matters - and part of who is saying it is context.

Yes, but it's also very much not the kind of statement PG is talking about. It's not generally something someone would be concerned about the truth value of.

Maybe you chose your "hunger" example in haste, but it's not a great counterexample to the points in the article. Only the person making the statement about being hungry can know the truth. The focus of the article, as I read it, is on shared truths that must be evaluated in public sphere.

I read that as "Truths can be stated by anyone, and are still true". If you are saying some truths can only be said or are only true for some groups... We'll have to agree to disagree.

What is true is not relevant in many cases.

Consider looking at piece of art and saying "I think this part is badly done". This is a very different statement depending whether it is the author saying it, the author's mentor saying it, unrelated person saying it to their friends, or the same unrelated person writing it on twitter. And it doesn't matter whether it is true - it might not even be possible to say, objectively, whether that part is actually badly done.

Same goes for talking about groups of people. Criticising a movement as a member internally, as a member on twitter and as a member of opposing movement is very different, no matter whether it is true or not. And movements are (usually) voluntary - it matters even more when talking about groups of people by categories they can't chose, like cultures, sexual orientations, skin color, etc.

the art is badly done or not according to you, the viewer. The opinion of others isn't relevant. The only truth there is individual.

"grouping people by categories they can't choose" is "x-ism". people are more than their skin color, sexuality, or anything else.

I take issue with the speaker not influencing whether a statement is or is not “x-ist”

There are truths that are empirical (math, physics, etc), but most controversy that includes “x-ism” is about things that are subjective and don’t bucket neatly into a true/false dichotomy.

I suppose you have to unpack pronouns when you are evaluating truth or falsity of a statement and maybe add some additional context. If you say "I am hungry" when we evaluate that sentence we have to unpack it to something like "Yojo is hungry at time X" so that way your statement would be equally true or false if I said "it" (the unpacked version) or an hour after you said it and had eaten a full meal.

You are expressing a literally racist opinion. “Only race y can express idea x.”

Unlike others, I don’t want to cancel you for being racist, though you clearly are, by your own admission.

This tolerance I show towards others allows dialog and thus enables human progress. Cancelling racists does the opposite. I support your right to think out load and bless the sacredness of your inner spirit even though you think racistically about free speech which imo is not really “free” speech.

I think you’re injecting a lot into my comment that wasn’t there. I never talked about cancelling anyone. I talked about whether speakers are always equally qualified to make the same statement.

Here’s an example: There are words that have historically been used as slurs that have been reclaimed by the people they were used against.

If you are not a member of that group, your use of the word invokes the history of its use, and is likely x-ist. As a member, you are likely able to use it.

Ghost writing?

Might be simpler. PG no longer has to censor his own speech in fear it will rebound on his business.

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