these are explicitly illegal activities with clearly argued jurisprudence. perhaps what parler hosted was illegal, but that should be up to a court to decide, not amazon.
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
I'm not exactly disagreeing that maybe parler should be taken to task, but amazon should not be the ones to do it. although, the historical application of the insurrection act has been incredibly political and inconsistent (the pullman strikes), so citing it as the primary reason for booting parler seems a little suspect to me.
I also think there's an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance from people who staunchly defend Section 230, then turn around and cite comments submitted by users as an excuse to shut down the entire platform. There's no way in hell they're able to keep up with the moderation requirements given how fast the platform must be growing right now.
I don't even like Parler, but I think this is a dangerous, dangerous precedent that will only turn up the temperature.
strong agree. I don't exactly want to been seen as defending parler here. I think what amazon is doing is creating a dangerous precedent, regardless of whether parler is as odious as I've been led to believe it is.
Businesses can refuse service for any reason unless it's a reason prohibited by law. It is annoying that terms of service have broad sweeping language on prohibited uses but it is impossible to list every possible scenario.
Unions come with consistent skills trainings, legal counsel, and representatives to intercede when management is treating employees poorly. This seems like a very helpful stable of support to be able to call on in situation like this one.
> Unions come with consistent skills trainings, legal counsel, and representatives to intercede when management is treating employees poorly
I didn't notice any of that when I was represented by SEIU. I had not seen a raise in 4 years, and representatives didn't even call me until after I was laid off. Found a more stable job paying 4x as much though as a result of the layoff.
> The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.
You're pretty much spot on with this line. Most people are terrible public intellectuals, and of the people who identify as such, many are profoundly unserious and completely useless. This article is asserting that Paul Graham does not belong in the vanishingly small set of people one should consider as a serious public intellectual.
Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea? I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.
> I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.
> we
I'm not sure this is even well-formed statement, you're certainly free to devote your time to issues that you consider important and ignore those that you perceive to be a waste of time. However if you want to persuade others to adopt those same economies of time then to would be helpful to share the specific motivations.
> Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea?
How error-prone would it be to take someone else's assessment of an individual at face value and conclude that they had nothing further to offer and so to ignore everything they had written?
we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc. I don't feel like sharing the specific motivations, that is what the piece you're commenting on is doing.
I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.
> we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc.
we all have different perspectives and priorities, I'm not sure how you or I could decide for someone else that PG was not worth listening to and if I decide that for myself then I don't listen to him. If I want to persuade others that they should also ignore him then I make my case on the merits.
> I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.
Can you share the basis of that understanding rather than expecting that we would take your assessment at face value?
Your assertion was largely that an article like this didn’t have value. I explained why it does. You are free debate the points of pg here, but that’s not how our disagreement began and you are asking me to defend a different point than the one I commented initially to defend. Do you still believe the article is just a way to label pg as bad, or do you see why a discussion of issues of his credibility is important?
my assertion was that its of questionable value to add someone to a list of "wrong-thinkers" or in other ways suggest that they have no further contributions to make without supporting that assessment. Its great to criticize someone's thought, its not so great to attempt to deplatform them by persuading other people not to examine their ideas.
> Do you still believe the article is just a way to label pg as bad, or do you see why a discussion of issues of his credibility is important?
I think its great to discuss his credibility. I think its less great to try to write him off based on the results of that discussion.
I'm not writing him off, certainly. But I also don't see how this labels him as a wrong thinker? It demonstrates that he's missed the mark a lot as a result of his over-reliance on intuition. His technique for finding truth seems amiss. I don't think anyone is deplatforming him either. He's still able to write his blog and use all of his internet accounts. This article is compelling his audience to be more critical of the technique he's using to figure things out.
>> His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely to ever change.
> What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?
I think we probably agree more than we disagree and just took different things from the discussion. The above quotes (one from the article and one from the original comment I replied to) are offered as an example of the sentiment I was replying to. Thanks for the discussion.
Of course, that assertion is hyperbole. The point being I don't think this really belongs here.
I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage.
What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular?
This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"
Suppose a professor has a Very Great reputation, and another professor has an Ordinary Great reputation.
You take a class with each.
From the Very Great professor you get several maxims that don’t seem to actually help you, nor can you figure out how to apply them to your work.
From the Ordinary Great professor you get a bunch of advice that you can easily apply to your own work, and you feel that you’ve immediately improved in the subject.
Is it jealousy to then say the Very Great professor seems to have a reputation that exceeds his actual skill?
That’s how I read the comparison of Graham to Hickey.
It’s an important issue, especially if Very Great has a prominent position in the industry and is using that prominence in harmful ways.
I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of him it's mostly considering.
Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason.
But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people.
Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here.
If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me?
If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work.
If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.
Your comments are drawing my attention because you’ve previously written a great deal on Hacker News that I agreed with and so I’m surprised that you have such a negative view of such an excellent essay.
It's not the essay I dislike. It's the level of conversation here on HN. It's mostly drama and my personal opinion is that the reason for that is primarily because of the style of the writing.
I've proposed a remedy: That someone -- anyone -- more knowledgeable than me about programming should leave a top level comment engaging with the actual meat of the article. There's no reason it can't be you.
Engaging further with my comments is not a remedy for what I feel the issue is. And engaging with my comments specifically because they are mine is just adding to the problem.
I commented on the matter because I've studied social phenomenon and I see a negative social pattern here and because I value HN for its high quality discussion. This article is mostly failing to foster good quality discussion. The primary focus has been on Paul Graham and not on something more substantive, like his writing, his ideas or his work.
After I left my remarks, people began leaving remarks that deny that this is an ad hominem attack on Paul Graham. That's problematic because it means the focus remains on Paul Graham. In discussing whether or not it is an ad hominem, the focus remains on pg, not on something more substantive.
It's a little like when I used to argue with someone and say "All you do is talk about you and I am not even a part of this discussion" and the reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a dirt bag. I'm a terrible person. I'm a lousy excuse for a human being." Like, I wasn't asking the person to attack themselves. I was asking them to include me in the discussion. Going from "Me. Me. Me." to "Negative things about me, me, me." doesn't fundamentally change the fact the topic is still "me."
It really shouldn't matter to you too much that it's me saying this -- unless it helps you figure out what my point really is. If you look at my comments and think to yourself "She has studied social phenomenon a lot more than she has studied programming and her observation is about quality of discussion here and I can see that" -- cool. Other than using what you know about me to help you understand my point, it shouldn't matter that I'm the author of the comment.
If you think that the substance of the article should be discussed, then go discuss it. If you think it's basically an ad hominem on Paul Graham, the best thing to do is ignore it.
I'm trying to step away from this discussion. Me being here is only deepening the issue that I dislike. It's not remedying it.
Austerity measures are passed all the time under guises of a balanced budget or trimming fat. When govts cut food stamps people die, I think govts cutting hot showers might be doable.
While I partly agree with you, unpopular political moves are weaponised during elections. If the opposition win they can revoke previous changes. This highlights issues around populism, and democracy in general.
> Companies have every right to ask employees to focus on work at work.
I’m responding to this claim, maybe we’re talking about different things?
My point is really:
What if the “work” is running trains to death camps?
Shouldn’t employees object? If you believe climate change is as big a threat as scientists claim, I think workers building tools to help fossil fuel extraction have a duty by this historical argument to not “run the trains” or not just “focus on work at work”.
