Broader history, focusing on certain important developments in the 20th century.
Eric Raymond
Karma: 1,154
I actually have not seen such a bibliography, though I could infer a lot from his language choices in essays like Twelve Virtues. Can you share a pointer to his list of forerunners?
I don’t expect there is much on it that will surprise me, but I would very much like to read it nevertheless.
I agree that the distinction you pose is important. Or should be. I remember when we could rely on it more than we can today.
Unfortunately, one of the tactics of people gaming against freedom is to deliberately expand the definition of “interpersonal attack” in order to suppress ideas they dislike. We have reached the point where, for example:
The use/mention distinction with respect to certain taboo words is deliberately ignored, so that a mention is deliberately conflated with use and use is deliberately conflated with attack.
Posting a link to a peer-reviewed scientific paper on certain taboo subjects is instantly labeled “hate facts” and interpreted as interpersonal attack.
Can you propose any counterprogram against this sort of dishonesty other than rejecting the premise of safetyism entirely?
I’m considering writing, as a first post, a reflection on “Rationality Before The Sequences”: some history on what the public project of less-wrongness looked like before Eliezer’s heroic attempt at systematization.
This is a probe to discover if there would be significant interest in such an essay.
Eric Raymond’s Shortform
I agree with the reasoning in this essay.
Taken a bit further, however, it explains why valuing “safety” is extremely dangerous—so dangerous that, in fact, online communities should consciously reject it as a goal.
The problem is that when you make “safety” a goal, you run a very high risk of handing control of your community to the loudest and most insistent performers of offendedness and indignation.
This failure mode might be manageable if the erosion of freedom by safetyism were still merely an accidental and universally regretted effect of trying to have useful norms about politeness. I can remember when that was true, but it is no longer the case.
These days, safetyism is often—even usually—what George Carlin memorably tagged “Fascism masquerading as good manners”. It’s motivated by an active intention to stamp out what the safetyists regard as wrongspeech and badthink, with considerations of safety an increasingly thin pretext.
Whenever that’s true, the kinds of reasonable compromises that used to be possible with honest and well-intentioned safetyists cannot be made any more. The only way to counterprogram against the dishonest kind is radical rejection—telling safetyism that we refuse to be controlled through it.
Yes, this means that enforcing useful norms of politeness becomes more difficult. While this is unfortunate, it is becoming clearer by the day that the only alternative is the death of free speech—and, consequently, the strangulation of rational discourse.
I think this is utterly horrible advice.
I have blogged a detailed response at Against modesty, and for the Fischer set.
Now I’m laughing, because looking through those explicit lists I am finding pretty much all of the two dozen or so sources I expected to find based on various hints and callbacks. Almost all of them books very familiar to me as well.
Yes, this essay is going to be fun to write.