coffeemug

Elevating people, giving them opportunities to fulfill their potential, and giving people someone credible to look up to is a wonderful thing. We should do more of it, hopefully a lot more.

The problem is that these things start out for a very good reason, but then take on a life of their own. When that happens it's very difficult to stop them, and in the limit case they result in horrendous tragedies. It isn't an abstract philosophical thing. There is an underlying social process, as real as gravity, and it's crucial to study and understand. I saw the consequences of this process first hand in my country.

Roughly, it goes like this. When you create a mechanism to oppress someone to fix oppression, however small and ineffectual, this mechanism gets captured by bad actors. Then it grows and grows and grows in their hands. It's very difficult to stop because of a combination of moral-sounding purpose that many people fall for, and the benefits that accrue to a wide variety of interest groups. At the limit of this there is nothing left but oppression, for anyone.

I'm not overly concerned about this in America because we're extraordinarily good at preventing centralization of power, but I must say watching bad actors accrue power and watching politicians pander to them has been disconcerting to say the least. I hope we can find a compromise that allows us to create opportunities while simultaneously kicking bad actors to the curb. I promise you you do not want to live in a society where the annoyances continue down their natural course.

Nobody is trying to get responders to shut up. They're trying to stop responders from shutting up the initiators. The distinction between the two is that the latter is usually qualitatively escalatory.

Alice makes a joke on Twitter, but rather than respond on Twitter Bob calls her employer. Alice schedules a talk at a university, but rather than scheduling a rebuttal Bob calls the university demanding to cancel the talk. Alice writes an op-ed, Bob publishes her address.

Both are speech, but a cultural norm of escalation makes the culture a pretty awful place to live.

I'm in favor of correcting injustices, obviously. The problem is with the opportunists.

> Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech.

First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings.

Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for "the people's court" because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn't involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between.

Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage.

When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word "culture" is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word "right" is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming.

We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.

I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.

(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)

TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.

Being a successful middle manager in a large corp entails smiling when you're expected to smile, feigning frustration when you're expected to feign frustration, showing up to the meetings you're expected to show up to, and writing the documents you're expected to write. Your problem is that you think of them as people. They may be people outside of work, but at work they're a neural net that simulates the averaged behavior of other middle managers in the corp, and then tweaks it to locally optimize their own comp. That has fuck all to do with your programming ability.

It's of course possible that you suck. In fact, it's likely, because most people suck-- excellence is the exception, not the norm. But judging your own programming ability by a column in some HR database that your NPC manager filled in? That's bonkers, man. That feedback is at best a very weak signal for it. More likely you can disregard it altogether, but that's somewhat dependent on the situation. (It is, however, a very strong signal that you're low on the corporate totem pole and can be dispensed with with little risk to the manager in question)

The proper response to a new manager assessing your performance (regardless of whether the assessment is positive or negative) is "umm, and who are you?" Don't say that out loud, but that's roughly what you ought to be thinking.

I'm sure Apple is a political quagmire, but if you describe your experience working there the same way someone might describe their time at Auschwitz, it's probably you and not them.

But over the last few years friends called me a nazi and a racist, coworkers ostracized me for having unfashionable political views, many people cut contact entirely under the premise that I "support" white supremacy. This isn't some shit you easily forgive, and it isn't something you ever forget.

This wasn't just about politics, or teams, or policy preferences, or red vs blue or whatever. This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it." That's fair enough, but it isn't about groups of people oppressing other groups of people. It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis. That's not something you can ever come back from.

Depends on the business and users, but in many cases I agree with you. But I didn't mean to extend the doctor analogy to individual people. Personally, I'm very slightly aspy. I didn't get into computers to help people, I got into it because I loved programming, science, and tech. Unlike doctors, I don't need to see my work save people's lives. I'm in it for a totally different reason.