I mean ultimately we’re just guessing, but I sorta doubt you’d find
many far-left employees in an average tech company. My guess is you’d
have lots of sorta centre-leftish liberal types, and a good number of
libertarians. The idea that silicon valley is full of communists just
isn’t well born out by my experience.
Go hang out on HN for a while. It’s surprisingly reactionary and it’s getting worse.
SV is full of people that want the social credit of being seen as not racist, while also holding surprisingly right wing attitudes.
I've accrued like 18k karma on HN just to provide a maliciously compliant leftist voice that speaks their language. It's fucking awful, but I've watched the orange hellsite slowly become more open to unions over the last few years.
You used to get downvoted to oblivion for mentioning unions on that site, but if you pitch them in the right way without using their trigger words, they're more open to them. I've had posts about unions, democratic decision making and allocation capital get hundreds of upvotes and posts agreeing with them as long as I use the annoying HN tone and style.
But yes, in other aspects, they're just getting more and more reactionary. They've dropped the 'grey tribe' masks entirely.
I picked up hate followers after getting roughly as much karma as you. Everything I post goes down by a fixed number within 24hrs, regardless of the content.
They have a shadowbanning system that'll do just that. I had an account that happened to, but learned that if I post a lot about software engineering and the industry, it'll stop Dang from dinging your account for politics and/or trolling. Malicious compliance of the rules gives me a lot of leeway to talk about leftist ideals because 80% of my posts are just "Well, akshully" posts with citations about software development. The other 20% are me squeezing left-wing perspectives into the community.
I upset some Musk cultists and now whenever I submit anything about Musk from reliable sources, the same crew of TSLA investors whines about it in the comments and flags my submissions.
I did that, and now my nerdy software posts go negative regularly. I gave up and abandoned that forum, it stopped being fun with Dang’s bad moderation and whatever was pushing me negative all the time.
That's spot on. It's very much the tone and style of SSC and LessWrong. They value hypotheticals over lived experience. Things that might directly affect you are not real, and you must treat them as thought experiments. You are not allowed to make jabs from a leftist perspective, even though jabs from right-wing perspectives are allowed and celebrated. Decorum is the most valued thing on the board, and you will literally be tone policed if you don't maintain it. Every single thing that you post that might sound left-wing must first be neutered and it must be cited, even if the person you're replying to cites nothing and makes sweeping generalizations that are just assumed to be true to your typical right-libertarian. You must cater to their feelings above all else, and you must walk on eggshells and be deliberate with your speech so that it doesn't offend their sensibilities.
Interacting on the forum lets you pick it up by osmosis. You can see the transition of DoreenMichele's posts and how she learned to talk about the things that have affected her as both someone with disabilities and as someone who has been (or is) homeless. She'd get downvoted for her tone and style when saying very true things that make HN users clutch their pearls, but now she says the same things just in a more long-winded and detached manner. Posters can call people like her the scum of the Earth, but she must remain calm and collected, and must make citations if posting anything to the contrary.
You can use their decorum rules against them, though. A lot of HN users will either get really worked up in their arguments and will drop decorum, or will just go for straight insults if you say something factual that they don't like to acknowledge. If they get worked up enough, more so than is usually tolerated for those repeating right-wing talking points, eventually they'll get tone policed, too.
It's very much a place that can be described as "white guys getting together for their weekly discussion on whether racism, something that has never affected them, really exists". Being anything other than detached means your wrong, passion means you're emotional and irrational, what racial minorities have to say about anything is discounted wholesale unless they agree with them, and arguments that make them even slightly uncomfortable are interpreted as the "real" discrimination and are completely unacceptable. Your feelings don't matter, but if you don't kowtow to their fragility, they'll absolutely lose their minds.
Excellent rundown. I have a 15 year old HN account myself, active now and then, and the reactionary tilt of HN is becoming rather unbearable. I’ve been warned a couple times by dang that I’m close to getting banned for “sneering” at HNers. I take it as a badge of pride but I still want to keep my account so I can provide a slightly countervailing voice, with scorching hot takes like “racism is bad” and “white men aren’t oppressed in American society”.
Dang is one of the most uneven moderators I’ve had the misfortune of interacting with. If two people flame each other, it’s always the left most person who gets the warning.
He’s just really good at aping the neutral tone that forum loves, so nobody notices how much he has his thumb on the scale.
Dang has said it multiple times, but he's okay with politics from users as long as the majority of your posts are "contributing to the community" in good faith. I've been doing that so I can otherwise inject leftist perspectives on the forum. As long as you do that and maintain decorum, Dang seems like he'll leave you alone.
Couldn't agree more - I also have an old HN account, and all of this strings home.
This is how they share some norms with rationalists - the notion that 'detachment' is both better and provides a better reasoned position.
What good is logic if you can argue yourself into supporting owning people?
- take any real world problem
- strip out anything complicated, like nuance, emotion, human factors, prior examples in history
- explain an already-existing solution to HN as if you're discovering it from first principles while acknowledging you know nothing about it
- throw in math and CS terms for fun
for example, if the thread is about unionization:
> while I haven't had to negotiate for higher pay at FAANG, I've always found issues like this interesting. logically speaking, if the employees aligned their self interests in such a way that cost(pay_increase) << cost(!pay_increase), they would be able to exert enormous leverage against the employer. perhaps threatening to reduce productivity would make pay_increase an optimal choice for the employer.
Then it's also the question whether it's actually center left at all or just socially progressive center right liberals. Given it's SV my money is on the latter
Yeah I mean I'm using that to mean like Buttigieg democrat types. Which is not really left in any serious ideological sense, but within the norms of mainstream american politics is seen as left.
I know a bunch of people (and of a bunch of people) in tech that have pretty heavy anarchist views, but not at the management level. Programming is a skill like any other
It's almost beyond parody how he considers himself to be so rational and superior and yet almost all of his posts are riven through with obvious failures of logic like this. One of the most annoying writers on the internet. Just as one wants to scream 'read another book!' at adult Harry Potter obsessives, one feels the urge to shout 'read another essayist!' at Paul Graham fans.
(I will never not eyeroll when people call the democrats
leftwing).
E: also Paul is confusing ‘left wing employees’ with ‘left wing
companies’, if all your janitors are marxists, it doesn’t make your
company a communist company. I would expect a tech nerd to better in
these kinds of typeing systems. Clearly he should learn to code.
Twitters own research shows that their algorithms benefit the right slightly. It’s just called out as “woke” because it’s not wildly tilted to the right like Facebook or YouTube.
There is a specific kidn of person likely to fall for adds and the algorithm favors that.
What does it say about that tendency that they are easily tricked?
Yeah to me the democrats always seemed a bit like the Dutch VVD, combined with a few d66 types. And then there is the 2 democrats who keep denying all the demcorat bills (forgot their names, iirc one of them is on the payroll lf big oil and the other did the thumbs down thing)
Kristen Sinema is the thumbs down lady. Nobody has any clue what her deal is, she went from protesting the WTO in black block to this. General consensus is that she’s high on her own supply and thinks she can be president soon because of her performative centrism (lol).
The other is Joe Manchin. He isn’t in the pay of big oil, he’s a majority shareholder in a coal mine. He *is* big fossil fuel.
how these silicon valley types have developed a persecution complex
is beyond me. they literally own and control everything in this space
and their thinking is a veritable homogenous circlejerk. they just don’t
like being held accountable by the rest of society.
I love it when people describe their positions as being “some on the
left, some on the right”, as if they’re so smart that they they’ve
magically escaped all political classification – as if those
classifications are completely arbitrary, as opposed to describing
tendencies that are already there.
Also it provides zero information. Like, which positions of
yours are on the right? Is it your opinions on municipal zoning, or is
it regarding the “Jewish question”? Are you conservative in your views
regarding vehicle registration fees, or “HBD”?
>And surprise, most people’s political views do not fall into just one category/party
I think you know that I know this already, so I'm not sure what the purpose is of pointing it out. But our hamfisted attempts at placing them upon spectra happen for a reason. People don't just choose positions at random via a blindfolded game of darts, they have tendencies, incentives, preferences that tend to align along similar paths.
There is a vast, yawning chasm between "people's political views fall into one category" and "political views are inherently uncategorizable."
The idea of what the “left” is has gotten shoved so far to the right
… the “radical” left, as much as it exists, doesn’t want single payer,
they want American oil deposits nationalized. You know, the stuff you
hear about on the news every night :/
While I find the modern conservative movement repugnant, I admire how well they have manipulated the media and thus public perception. It helps having sociopaths like the Mercers and the Koch’s writing checks.
They’re evil, fascist, bastards, but their propaganda is really, really good. It’s very frustrating how effective playing the ref can be with their whole “liberal bias” bullshit too.
I don’t think we need to cast aspersions about things like race
science, even though that is probably in play here as well - he could
easily be quite genuinely talking in general terms about things like
free enterprise and certain kinds of taxation
Paul Goober is correct right-wingers get banned more often, but as
per usual, he takes it as a given that right-wingers are behaving just
as well as left-wingers on average when that is simply not true:
https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
I thought the Twitter screenshot might be better for a submission,
but what I wanted to post was this “essay” from 2019.
http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Paul, again, collapsing everything into left and right, claims that
you should be an “accidental moderate”, where half of your views lie on
the left and half on the right, accidentally, instead of trying to be a
moderate by balancing left and right ideas.
Or more precisely, you have to be independent-minded about the ideas
you work with. You could be mindlessly doctrinaire in your politics and
still be a good mathematician. In the 20th century, a lot of very smart
people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects
Marxism involves. But if the ideas you use in your work intersect with
the politics of your time, you have two choices: be an accidental
moderate, or be mediocre.
On the one hand, I believe that maybe people should get healthcare when they need it. On the other, I believe that John Podesta is running a child trafficking ring.
Am I doing it right, Paul? See you at demo day?
It’s called the paradox of tolerance. The left is still for free
speech, they also know they can’t be so tolerant that they let bigots
and racists normalize their hate.
Throughout my life politics has been moving farther and farther left,
to the point that people who would have been regarded as far left when I
was born are regularly accused of being far right these days.
Seeing some comments in this thread suggesting the opposite has
happened is “interesting”
We just had 4 years of Trump and he’s the odds-on favorite to be the nominee in 2024 after refusing to concede, don’t tell me we’re moving left. Feels like there was a shift left with the civil rights movements and ever since then Republicans have been trying to simultaneously take credit for it and also make sure civil rights don’t advance any further.
I don’t remember math books getting banned in the 90s for mentioning black mathematicians.
If the linking works right, here's [a little visual of how politics have been.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8JXfpZVgAYZplf?format=jpg&name=small)
Been bouncing around for a hot minute that, on account of how true it is.
Politics has been blatantly pushing left for a while now, and heavily so. The current center used to be very far left.
It's frankly kind of insane to find anyone who thinks it's been pushing right... And the amount of people I've seen the imaged thing happen to, ooh boi.
Lol you used that image as a source? and you are going 'it is popular because it is true'. Hahaha. (People say the same about the horseshoe theory, or the fishhook theory, or whatever).
Here is a [counterargument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq37RClh4bY) (E: or, here is a different view on [the whole image](http://prntscr.com/pKTY0L8NN-Ak))
But more seriously, even our Dutch left wing socialist parties are drifting rightwards (at least on stuff like immigration, which was a big wtf moment).
E: ow [look actual research](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/)
>It's frankly kind of insane to find anyone who thinks it's been pushing right
Yeah I don't pay attention to things either. Especially not the mainstreaming of fascist rhetoric and ideology across the globe.
>people who would have been regarded as far left when I was born are regularly accused of being far right these days
What are the views (or people I guess) that were far left but are getting called far right now?
Well, in a way this is correct, the unabomber has often been regarded by people not in the know as far left. They are just wrong, he hated the left and blamed them for everything, even he wanted some sort of anarcho-primitism ecofash thing. No idea if this person identifies with the unabomber however.
(This person also is an anti-natalist so yeah those are some weird views).
>he hated the left
Reading the dude's manifesto it's genuinely hard to remember that he's supposed to be very smart, because he fell so utterly for the dumbest stances imaginable like "feminism has already won!" and "these people talking about racism or homophobia are just making up fake problems!"
>Well, in a way this is correct, the unabomber
Eh, I think it's not uncommon for some radical or extremist to be miscategorized.
But I doubt u/the-song had "unibomber" levels of beliefs in mind. Or maybe they did! I'd like to hear more from them about this extreme category shift.
(the image in [this response](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/ucz142/paul_graham_80_of_my_views_end_up_on_the_left/i6ih88y/), just so happened to be recently posted by Elon Musk on Twitter, seems to paint a different picture than a 'horseshoe' mischaracterization. But who knows!)
Ow yeah the song certainly didnt mean the unabomber, I was just joking a bit. Forgot to add a smiley as an indicator of that. Otoh, a more realistic group that now gets linked to the far right (because they teamed up with them) is the swerf/terfs.
And well according to research the image posted by musk is just wrong it is the repubs who shifted. What is more likely imho is that people became nore politically aware (and thus finally realized what the different sides stand for) or they changed themselves becoming more right, or they swallowed the far right propaganda whole. See musk complaining about how netflix became woke (while also being transphobic, gg manning).
I have mentioned it before but it is really weird to see what people complain about what 'the left' is doing and knowing some actual Dutch leftwing politicians and see what they are actually doing. When our local far right alt right politician speaks they often reacted with a sense of 'jesse, wtf are you talking about'. Sadly me being more forever online mind poisoned did inderstand it, but I also get that this makes me the weirdo.
E: thought of another 'formerly vaguely leftwing but now clearly rightwing' opinion, vaccines efficiency denial and the whole anti pharma shit.
> Throughout my life politics has been moving farther and farther left
[crowd starts clamoring about how this is blatantly ridiculous]
No, wait, everyone. hear them out. how long have you been alive? how many centuries we talking here?
I am so tired of people invoking "free speech" and "censorship" to claim moral high ground and invoke mental images of righteous freedom fighters struggling against tyranny, but leaving the specifics to vague hand-wringing about how people don't like their opinions. So if you're concerned about "censorship", please spell it out for me. Who is doing what to censor whom, and who should do what to solve this problem?
Over and over when I scratch the surface of these takes what I find is at best "private media companies refuse to lend a platform to shitty people who are unpopular to the point of being bad for business and the government should force them to", at worst "everyone keeps telling me to fuck off when I post about white supremacy [proposed solution deliberately left blank]".
If you ask them for concrete reasons, they will just tell you it's to avoid a slippery slope into tyranny and oppression, or pompously recite that quote about wanting to defend to death their enemy's right to express their views. Peterson, for example, thinks that laws preventing hate speech towards transpeople will lead to 100 million deaths because communism, even though he himself supposedly has nothing to say on the matter.
TheMotte is a good place to start if you want to see what advocates of "free speech" (i.e. of hate speech, since that's the only speech that's actually prohibited anywhere) think ought to be permitted without repercussions. Being extremely generous, it's very difficult finding a single worthy idea that isn't protected by free speech in the west. Some Motte users claim, for example, that it's hard to criticise some religions like Islam in Europe, citing certain cases where critics were jailed, but where in fact these "critics" were really being abusive towards others rather than merely presenting their objections. There are also a lot of Holocaust deniers, which of course feign an interest in historical accuracy to disguise their antisemitic motives.
This is way more than a response to my comment so I’m not really sure if it’s rhetorical or if you are actually asking me define free speech (my def or Paul’s?) or explain an argument for applying free speech laws to social media companies (which argument and who’s?…) let me know
Mostly just generally about this common techbro opinion, but you too did say Paul "clearly stated" what he's on about, while to me it isn't clear at all what he wants. Beyond the surface level aesthetics, that is.
Reporters: this is not targeted harassment at the very rich asshole on a different website
I mean ultimately we’re just guessing, but I sorta doubt you’d find many far-left employees in an average tech company. My guess is you’d have lots of sorta centre-leftish liberal types, and a good number of libertarians. The idea that silicon valley is full of communists just isn’t well born out by my experience.
lol OK… the right are over there burning books and censoring math textbooks…
Paul Graham: “Forcing” my politics onto the left-right political framing is silly. immediately continues talking in left/right political framing
drags the window far right
80% of my views are on the left.
(I will never not eyeroll when people call the democrats leftwing).
E: also Paul is confusing ‘left wing employees’ with ‘left wing companies’, if all your janitors are marxists, it doesn’t make your company a communist company. I would expect a tech nerd to better in these kinds of typeing systems. Clearly he should learn to code.
how these silicon valley types have developed a persecution complex is beyond me. they literally own and control everything in this space and their thinking is a veritable homogenous circlejerk. they just don’t like being held accountable by the rest of society.
I love it when people describe their positions as being “some on the left, some on the right”, as if they’re so smart that they they’ve magically escaped all political classification – as if those classifications are completely arbitrary, as opposed to describing tendencies that are already there.
Also it provides zero information. Like, which positions of yours are on the right? Is it your opinions on municipal zoning, or is it regarding the “Jewish question”? Are you conservative in your views regarding vehicle registration fees, or “HBD”?
> far left in the US of A: we should have universal healthcare
> center: nazis opinion is just as good as yours
> right: we want a dictator and everybody that disagrees with me is a child molester
> far right: we should make a ethnostate with legal slavery
The idea of what the “left” is has gotten shoved so far to the right … the “radical” left, as much as it exists, doesn’t want single payer, they want American oil deposits nationalized. You know, the stuff you hear about on the news every night :/
Leftist Paul Graham respects his slaves’ pronouns
I don’t think we need to cast aspersions about things like race science, even though that is probably in play here as well - he could easily be quite genuinely talking in general terms about things like free enterprise and certain kinds of taxation
I mean considering “far-right” means there racist pieces of shit perhaps thats why they aren’t “open” about it.
Paul Goober is correct right-wingers get banned more often, but as per usual, he takes it as a given that right-wingers are behaving just as well as left-wingers on average when that is simply not true: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
private ownership and mediation of communication is soooo “leftist”
I thought the Twitter screenshot might be better for a submission, but what I wanted to post was this “essay” from 2019.
http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Paul, again, collapsing everything into left and right, claims that you should be an “accidental moderate”, where half of your views lie on the left and half on the right, accidentally, instead of trying to be a moderate by balancing left and right ideas.
It’s called the paradox of tolerance. The left is still for free speech, they also know they can’t be so tolerant that they let bigots and racists normalize their hate.
He blocked me a while ago for pointing out how he’s a huge piece of shit.
80% of my days I end up not being a mass murderer
is it cheating to tag r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM
Filed under “Not even wrong”
Throughout my life politics has been moving farther and farther left, to the point that people who would have been regarded as far left when I was born are regularly accused of being far right these days.
Seeing some comments in this thread suggesting the opposite has happened is “interesting”
I don’t have to guess, he clearly stated that it’s censorship
The left does espouse hate speech on nearly the level of the right, so this is a false comparison.