Fool: I marvel at what kin thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o' thing than a fool! And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing i' the middle (King Lear I.IV.178-184).
“For example, someone might be offended by something on twitter, which they would just calmly disagree with if they were in the physical presence of someone saying the same thing.“
Physical discussion disintermediates the interaction and changes the incentives—i.e. if you act offended in person, you might get punched on the nose.
On Twitter, there are only rewards for acting offended: you will get more followers from the social tribe that uses taking offence at certain things as a pole to coordinate action around. The more extravagant (and, perhaps, amusing) your offence, the more you will be rewarded.
Behaving that way in real life, without guaranteed tribal support, will result in retaliation from your victim or will, in fact, lower your status with others—since most people in a random social setting will not be politically committed and will see the outrage display as excessive and silly.
Being offended is a learnt behaviour. Think back a few decades and it would seem normal for an "upstanding citizen" to be offended by someone admitting to being gay. Now the gay person would be just as likely to be offended by the previously upstanding citizen saying something to oppose gay marriage.
The feeling of offence feels intinctive, but it is learnt and picked up from others, and is very context dependant. For example, someone might be offended by something on twitter, which they would just calmly disagree with if they were in the physical presence of someone saying the same thing.
Being offended is much more likely from a position of a relative safety, just as Robin was explaining about people attacking or oppressing others. It is clearly a thing that is subject to conscious control.
After a bit of thought, and Robin is talking about people writing things, and conscious thought is required for that, it is a choice to continue to act offended. Maybe sometimes it's justified, but often not. The charity is required in that judgement about justification I think, rather than if being offended is ultimately a choice or not.
I don't think many people are consciously "choosing" to be offended by things, so what do you mean by that? It seems to me that accusing people of choosing to be offended is breaking the principle of charity, just like assuming Robin has a hateful intent is.
It is very strange to me how topics seem to be distorted by different lenses. I read, say, black people speaking about a topic, and then white people, and it seems weird how they see the same things (though are they in fact seeing the same things?) so differently. I'm not talking about differences in opinion, but in perception.
I think I can recognize the filter, because from birth on I was immersed in a diversity of cultural formations, and then from young adulthood, a diversity of philosophical languages, some of which helped me to recognized these filters.
Given my proficiency with recognizing the filters, and shifting between them, I would like to help black people and white people speak, young people and old people speak, men and women speak, to one another. But what's more unsettling to me is that I can't really figure out a good way of translating them...
In the Soviet Union, people who had written against the regime were arrested for creating “anti-socialist propaganda”. It was possible to have an argument about what anti-socialist propaganda actually was, but it would be a largely meaningless argument: power decided what constituted anti-socialist propaganda.
In the same way, it is power that decides what constitutes “privilege” and acceptable humour in today’s discourse. How power decides to define privilege and acceptable humour may well break the rules of logic, reason, and common linguistic usage—power doesn’t care. You could call it “privilege” or “anti-socialist propaganda”: it amounts to the same thing.
Academia grew out of theology and never fully cut itself off from the spirit of theology. There have always been topics you can’t touch in the academy—effectively religious topics—and today those topics revolve around a concept of privilege, just as the Soviet academicians were very careful about what they said about Marxism-Leninism.
If you have to constrain what you say due to your group identity—whereas other people from other group identities do not—then you are not the privileged group. You are the disprivileged group, even if you are called the privileged group for propaganda purposes. The word privilege derives from “private law”, a set of laws that make a group a law unto themselves: who has special legal provisions that protect them? They are the privileged.
Offense is in the eye of the beholder. It is ultimately always a choice. It might be instinctive to begin with, but anyone can choose not to be offended with a little bit of thought.
Jokes can reveal socially concealed truths by accident (sometimes by design). This is what makes humour dangerous to a regime: it can unintentionally reveal the concealed social reality that the regime depends upon to maintain its power mystique.
A joke is a form of desecration; if you joke about God or the gods in the wrong way, you have effectively desecrated the sacred—you have held the sacred up to ridicule and made it hard for people to believe, so diminishing the power of the holy. All regimes—however “humourless” their enemies say they are—have officially sanctioned humour: the Soviets had the satirical Krokodil magazine and the Nazis had cabaret reviews. It was permissible to mock the regime providing the humour was not a desecration, providing the concealed truth was not revealed. It was also, of course, highly permissible to use humour on the out-group.
When people say they are offended they mean that the joke has destroyed the mystique of the religion; it has destroyed the taboo and desecrated the sacred. The secular religion of the contemporary West holds that all people are equal from birth; ergo, it is taboo to draw attention to inherent differences between people (usually biological) through humour. In particular, there are sacred groups: women, ethnic minorities (particularly blacks in America), and sexual minorities that you cannot joke about in such a way as to suggest there are inherent differences between these groups and other groups—or in such a way as to suggest there is not a notional humanity that is entirely uniform and to which everyone belongs.
However, you can joke about these groups in an approved way; but the nature of the taboo around these groups shifts and so some people, usually true believers, are caught out and demonised as heretics when they don’t move quickly enough with the times. Hence the most “offensive” humour is the humour that is slightly out of date, since those who are offended are showing loyalty to the latest iteration of the taboo—the previous iteration of the taboo is the salient enemy to be denigrated.
All groups make jokes, but if your joke breaks in-group taboos used to maintain group cohesion it becomes an offensive act of desecration to those keen to demonstrate in-group loyalty; this is what people mean when they say they are offended. Ironically, it is drawing attention these taboos that makes for genuinely funny jokes. This is because humour depends on highlighting the gap between appearance and reality and so the wider the gap between appearance and reality the humour reveals, the funnier the joke. The stronger the taboo broken, the funnier the joke—providing it is delivered with the right timing, the other element of comedy.
I hope Robin Hanson, and everyone else, just speaks their mind without consequence (excepting overt hate speech).
Perhaps Robin Hanson, and 99 other prominent-thinker types, should form a committee and send group e-mails when they feel another person's freedom of expression has been curtailed, with plenty cc' ed to the media.
The push for freedom of expression needs to be institutionalized, as the push against freedom of speech has now been institutionalized.
That one is about 0.98 on the joke-intentional_insult scale. I don't think that's what Robin is talking about. For sure there's no new idea in it.
Even for that one tho, hearing it may be unpleasant, but we all hear such things from time to time (mostly as children). No matter who you are, there's always someone out there who doesn't like people like *you*, and is happy to tell you so.
People who do that are simply assholes, no matter whether privileged or unprivileged, and no matter the audience.
BTW, you know what you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class? "Doctor".
Being the butt of a joke, especially when it happens often, can be pretty unpleasant. For example, consider what someone might feel hearing this (censored) "joke" in its less censored form...
Q: What do you call a [member of unpopular group] with a doctorate?A: [Racial slur].
Fool: I marvel at what kin thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o' thing than a fool! And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing i' the middle (King Lear I.IV.178-184).
Yep.
“For example, someone might be offended by something on twitter, which they would just calmly disagree with if they were in the physical presence of someone saying the same thing.“
Physical discussion disintermediates the interaction and changes the incentives—i.e. if you act offended in person, you might get punched on the nose.
On Twitter, there are only rewards for acting offended: you will get more followers from the social tribe that uses taking offence at certain things as a pole to coordinate action around. The more extravagant (and, perhaps, amusing) your offence, the more you will be rewarded.
Behaving that way in real life, without guaranteed tribal support, will result in retaliation from your victim or will, in fact, lower your status with others—since most people in a random social setting will not be politically committed and will see the outrage display as excessive and silly.
Being offended is a learnt behaviour. Think back a few decades and it would seem normal for an "upstanding citizen" to be offended by someone admitting to being gay. Now the gay person would be just as likely to be offended by the previously upstanding citizen saying something to oppose gay marriage.
The feeling of offence feels intinctive, but it is learnt and picked up from others, and is very context dependant. For example, someone might be offended by something on twitter, which they would just calmly disagree with if they were in the physical presence of someone saying the same thing.
Being offended is much more likely from a position of a relative safety, just as Robin was explaining about people attacking or oppressing others. It is clearly a thing that is subject to conscious control.
After a bit of thought, and Robin is talking about people writing things, and conscious thought is required for that, it is a choice to continue to act offended. Maybe sometimes it's justified, but often not. The charity is required in that judgement about justification I think, rather than if being offended is ultimately a choice or not.
There's definitely a correlation between interesting and provocative, and there's probably also a correlation between bluntness and offensiveness.
If you want to cause less offense, which I'm not sure if you do or should, maybe you could try adding more virtue-signaling into your writing?
I don't think many people are consciously "choosing" to be offended by things, so what do you mean by that? It seems to me that accusing people of choosing to be offended is breaking the principle of charity, just like assuming Robin has a hateful intent is.
It is very strange to me how topics seem to be distorted by different lenses. I read, say, black people speaking about a topic, and then white people, and it seems weird how they see the same things (though are they in fact seeing the same things?) so differently. I'm not talking about differences in opinion, but in perception.
I think I can recognize the filter, because from birth on I was immersed in a diversity of cultural formations, and then from young adulthood, a diversity of philosophical languages, some of which helped me to recognized these filters.
Given my proficiency with recognizing the filters, and shifting between them, I would like to help black people and white people speak, young people and old people speak, men and women speak, to one another. But what's more unsettling to me is that I can't really figure out a good way of translating them...
In the Soviet Union, people who had written against the regime were arrested for creating “anti-socialist propaganda”. It was possible to have an argument about what anti-socialist propaganda actually was, but it would be a largely meaningless argument: power decided what constituted anti-socialist propaganda.
In the same way, it is power that decides what constitutes “privilege” and acceptable humour in today’s discourse. How power decides to define privilege and acceptable humour may well break the rules of logic, reason, and common linguistic usage—power doesn’t care. You could call it “privilege” or “anti-socialist propaganda”: it amounts to the same thing.
Academia grew out of theology and never fully cut itself off from the spirit of theology. There have always been topics you can’t touch in the academy—effectively religious topics—and today those topics revolve around a concept of privilege, just as the Soviet academicians were very careful about what they said about Marxism-Leninism.
If you have to constrain what you say due to your group identity—whereas other people from other group identities do not—then you are not the privileged group. You are the disprivileged group, even if you are called the privileged group for propaganda purposes. The word privilege derives from “private law”, a set of laws that make a group a law unto themselves: who has special legal provisions that protect them? They are the privileged.
And yes, it’s alchemy.
Sounds like a whole lot of alchemy
Offense is in the eye of the beholder. It is ultimately always a choice. It might be instinctive to begin with, but anyone can choose not to be offended with a little bit of thought.
Jokes can reveal socially concealed truths by accident (sometimes by design). This is what makes humour dangerous to a regime: it can unintentionally reveal the concealed social reality that the regime depends upon to maintain its power mystique.
A joke is a form of desecration; if you joke about God or the gods in the wrong way, you have effectively desecrated the sacred—you have held the sacred up to ridicule and made it hard for people to believe, so diminishing the power of the holy. All regimes—however “humourless” their enemies say they are—have officially sanctioned humour: the Soviets had the satirical Krokodil magazine and the Nazis had cabaret reviews. It was permissible to mock the regime providing the humour was not a desecration, providing the concealed truth was not revealed. It was also, of course, highly permissible to use humour on the out-group.
When people say they are offended they mean that the joke has destroyed the mystique of the religion; it has destroyed the taboo and desecrated the sacred. The secular religion of the contemporary West holds that all people are equal from birth; ergo, it is taboo to draw attention to inherent differences between people (usually biological) through humour. In particular, there are sacred groups: women, ethnic minorities (particularly blacks in America), and sexual minorities that you cannot joke about in such a way as to suggest there are inherent differences between these groups and other groups—or in such a way as to suggest there is not a notional humanity that is entirely uniform and to which everyone belongs.
However, you can joke about these groups in an approved way; but the nature of the taboo around these groups shifts and so some people, usually true believers, are caught out and demonised as heretics when they don’t move quickly enough with the times. Hence the most “offensive” humour is the humour that is slightly out of date, since those who are offended are showing loyalty to the latest iteration of the taboo—the previous iteration of the taboo is the salient enemy to be denigrated.
All groups make jokes, but if your joke breaks in-group taboos used to maintain group cohesion it becomes an offensive act of desecration to those keen to demonstrate in-group loyalty; this is what people mean when they say they are offended. Ironically, it is drawing attention these taboos that makes for genuinely funny jokes. This is because humour depends on highlighting the gap between appearance and reality and so the wider the gap between appearance and reality the humour reveals, the funnier the joke. The stronger the taboo broken, the funnier the joke—providing it is delivered with the right timing, the other element of comedy.
I hope Robin Hanson, and everyone else, just speaks their mind without consequence (excepting overt hate speech).
Perhaps Robin Hanson, and 99 other prominent-thinker types, should form a committee and send group e-mails when they feel another person's freedom of expression has been curtailed, with plenty cc' ed to the media.
The push for freedom of expression needs to be institutionalized, as the push against freedom of speech has now been institutionalized.
That one is about 0.98 on the joke-intentional_insult scale. I don't think that's what Robin is talking about. For sure there's no new idea in it.
Even for that one tho, hearing it may be unpleasant, but we all hear such things from time to time (mostly as children). No matter who you are, there's always someone out there who doesn't like people like *you*, and is happy to tell you so.
People who do that are simply assholes, no matter whether privileged or unprivileged, and no matter the audience.
BTW, you know what you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class? "Doctor".
Most of the problem is from people choosing to be offended.
Being the butt of a joke, especially when it happens often, can be pretty unpleasant. For example, consider what someone might feel hearing this (censored) "joke" in its less censored form...
Q: What do you call a [member of unpopular group] with a doctorate?A: [Racial slur].