> Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful.
...you realize where this goes, right?
Like -- suppose you're right; and suppose you're given the power to suppress all such harmful discussions. You apply it. No more such discussion. Great.
Now suppose this occurs but in fact you're wrong. We must then ask: How would you find out that you're wrong?
Well, in such a case, you probably wouldn't. I guess you might find out when the chickens, whatever they are, finally came home to roost. But ideally one wants to find out before then. Better hope the chickens are merely bad rather than catastrophic, seeing as you've been doing absolutely no planning for this case. And hopefully they come sooner rather than later.
(And that's assuming you're a reasonable person who would actually admit error at that point; see below.)
I mean, really... illiberalism, it always goes the same way. You think it's discussion that's harmful? Have you seen the alternative? Because, I mean, examples abound, and how it goes is pretty clear. You're talking about going down a path dominated by humanity's worst tribal instincts. I should hope that's not what you want -- but that's where that path leads. By the time the far-off disaster occurs, do you think it'll be people like you, who are capable of thinking clearly but just think certain discussions should be suppressed, who are going to be running the show? No, it'll the people who are the least reflective, the most tribal, the most doublethinky.
Liberalism, free speech, when working properly, is supposed to work as a negative feedback loop. If you're wrong, you find out. Someone contradicts you, supplies arguments, and then you can consider them and see whether they might be right. As a lot of people have noted, it... doesn't exactly always succeed at this. But suppression of speech... hoo boy, that fails so much harder. That's how you get positive feedback loops. As the professed beliefs of the group get further and further from reality, simultaneously the requirements that you agree, the punishments for disagreeing, get stricter and harsher. You sure as hell don't find the truth that way.
Truth, now... I notice that's something you didn't even mention at all. Because some of the points made in that memo, are, as best as people can currently tell, true. You haven't made any claims about to truth or falsity, only about harmfulness. But do you think the harmfulness of the claims in that memo exceed the harmfulness of shitty civilizational epistemic practices? (Nature can't be fooled, as they say!)
Like, OK, bad epistemic practices might not seem that bad, might seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, if you imagine suppression of specific facts or claims or discussions as an isolated thing. Maybe we don't need to know literally everything. But that's not how it goes. Free speech, liberalism, these are ideas that are unnatural to people, they had to be learned, and they are constantly seeking ways to slip them off or and go back to full-on tribalism (or pervert them in service of it). You may want suppression of particular claims... you will get the bad old days. The positive-feedback loop of doom.
Claims don't exist in isolation, after all; claims have relations between them. You can't just suppress one claim, because people will rederive it from other claims. And if the claim you suppress happens to be correct? Then people will definitely rederive it. So either surrounding claims have to go, or the process of inference itself has to go. Likely both. In fact definitely the latter; you can peel off surrounding claims all you want but eventually you'll have to attack inference itself. And hey, it happens already that people are constantly eager to do that anyway! They only need a little push... and then oops, there's your positive feedback loop. Once you encourage people to use bad methods, they'll use them to reach all sorts of bad conclusions... I expect many of them will surprise you!
(And what is the scope of this suppression? Shall the hidden truth be kept alive in the academy, say, with a strict cordon, so that the facts may be known by the chosen few but never applied outside where it might be necessary? Shall those who wish to learn a subject have to first learn only the public parts, and then apply to join, to learn the hidden secrets? Or shall it extend even to them? Is the pursuit of truth itself something that must simply be forbidden?)
It's a dark road you're suggesting here -- and not a new one; an old one, an ancient one, one whose failures we know very well. I'll take whatever harmfulness the truth might pose over that any day. I don't think it can really hold a candle to that.
Excellent comment.
> suppose you're right; and suppose you're given the power to suppress all such harmful discussions.
I would suggest an additional thought experiment:
imagine that 200 years ago people had suppressed what they considered harmful discussions.
Why are so many people who are interested in progressive causes so against the things that have and do help progress such causes?
I wish I could upvote this comment multiple times, you've laid out very accurately the common underpinnings between all these anti-free-speech ideologies and what they end up as (hint: it's Nazism/Stalinism).
Well, those are extreme cases. Things don't usually end in mass murder. The less extreme version is still pretty terrible though.
they are the extreme case in that they're the result of walking this line right to the end. Here's hoping that the tide can be turned long before it gets to that - there's already mass brawling between the left and right in places like Berkeley and that's too far as it is.
> bad epistemic practices
The idea that some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior to others is one of these "banned" "facts" that has been excluded from civilised discussion for a reason, and that lies in the history of so-called "scientific racism" that was used to justify genocides in the 20th century.
The idea that "some groups of humans have a statistical average of some attribute that is higher than some other attribute" is an idea that people are basically incapable of not turning into "all X are inferior to Y". The idea that women are statistically less likely to be programmers gets used as justification for itself.
Let alone trying to distinguish between "wrong" (morally) and "wrong" (factually incorrect with relation to the observable universe).
Also, at no point did I mention suppressing the discussion. But you've simply turned your own argument around: you're arguing that saying "this discussion is harmful" is itself a harmful discussion!
And indeed we're also back to the question of whether being fired by your employer actually is a free speech question or not. There's no suggestion of government involvement in this speech, is there? Are you going to say "employees should be protected by the state from fear of being fired for any statements they make in the workplace, no matter how offensive their co-workers find them"?
I agree that trying to make statistical arguments to someone who isn't capable of correctly interpreting the statistics can be harmful.
However, I disagree with your original claim that `Not all subjects are amenable to "rational discussion"`, since this is not independent of with whom you are discussing a subject. I am fairly sure that for any possible subject, there is someone you can rationally discuss it with, without causing any harm.
> you're arguing that saying "this discussion is harmful" is itself a harmful discussion!
I don't interpret Sniffnoy as calling the discussion itself harmful, rather they thought you were the kind of person who'd advocate preventing harmful things; thus they argued that a policy of suppressing "harmful discussion" would be harmful. (As opposed to just discussing such a policy.)
If you are not in favor of suppressing harmful discussion, then the free-speech issue also becomes moot; if it's just you saying "I really don't like this discussion." then that's an opinion you are entitled to, but everyone else is free to ignore it.
> The idea that some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior to others is one of these "banned" "facts" that has been excluded from civilised discussion for a reason
Have you ever heard the quote "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"?
I think it's much better to be able to discuss bad ideas, and discuss why they are bad, rather than to prevent (or apply strong pressure against) anyone from publicly bringing them up.
If we make it difficult to discuss about certain topics, who decides which ideas can't be talked about? What if a bigoted group comes into power? Won't this norm to hinder certain discussions hand them a powerful weapon for oppression?
OK, this I can work with a bit more! :)
So in your first three paragraphs you are listing out more explicitly what the harms are. OK. I don't disagree with you much here. Further suggestion that we don't actually disagree as much as I thought is what you say next:
> Also, at no point did I mention suppressing the discussion.
Indeed -- strictly speaking, no you did not!
So it looks now like what you intended to convey, when you wrote that discussing such things is harmful, is that discussing such things has downsides. I.e. it is not all-upside. I'm in agreement there! I just think that the downside is so much vastly smaller than the upside.
Whereas I took you as meaning that it is net harmful; and yes, I'll admit I implicitly read in there a call to suppress such things. Given the context, I think that was a reasonable inference for me to make? That is to say, the original question this came up under related to the firing of James Damore. If you didn't intend people to infer that you meant that, I think you should have been more explicit there. Similarly you should have been more explicit that by "harmful" you merely meant "has downsides" rather than "is net harmful". (Note that "has downsides" is a very weak statement -- everything has downsides! If you've been having to argue who won't even acknowledge that discussing such things has downsides, well... sorry you've had to deal with that!)
Anyway, one way or another, while I don't think you were the most clear, we do both seem to agree that the discussion has both upsides and downsides. I'm just arguing (as I've said above) that the upside is much, much bigger than the downside.
> But you've simply turned your own argument around: you're arguing that saying "this discussion is harmful" is itself a harmful discussion!
This is why one needs to distinguish the object level from the meta level. Yes, the rules need to be different between the two. (Although, in a world where everyone understood that discussion is not to be suppressed, I wouldn't have any problem with people merely saying that discussion should be suppressed, so long as they took no action to do so!)
> And indeed we're also back to the question of whether being fired by your employer actually is a free speech question or not. There's no suggestion of government involvement in this speech, is there? Are you going to say "employees should be protected by the state from fear of being fired for any statements they make in the workplace, no matter how offensive their co-workers find them"?
...OK, I hate to say this, but this part reads like you didn't actually read my comment above. The point of free speech here, so far as I'm concerned, is to prevent the awful default human tribal positive feedback loop of posturing and wrongness. Whether the government is involved is irrelevant. What's relevant is, is this going to deter people from contradicting the consensus when they think something's wrong? Is this going to damage the negative feedback loops we need, and strengthen the positive feedback loops that have destroyed so many groups? I'd say yes, this is.
I'm not making any claims as to whether Damore should have been protected by the state! I didn't make any claims about the government at all. And honestly state protection might be helpful to Damore himself but it wouldn't do very much to alleviate the real problems in this situation anyway. It wouldn't really do very much to defuse the deterrent.
And that's what I'm concerned with here -- are the negative feedback loops that we need working? Or are we headed for unseen disaster?
Even by the standards here, this is an excellent post.
You make a good point, but it would have more impact if it wasn't so verbose.