This is great individual strategy, and is an important part of being polite generally.

But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.

I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.

Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.

How is this not labeled (2022)? It sure hasn't aged well.

The oppression of billionaires and owners of the media by the few non-bots left on social media is kinda hilarious. The idea that litteral nazis and racists need to have their speech normalized and platformed, but that any opposition to it should result in state threats, imprisonment, and death is a bit twee.

Poor Henry Weinstein, poor Ghislaine, poor Diddy and Ye. The powerful and famous are so censored!

I feel a little more circumspect about Milikan, Shockley, and Watson, but thats because I believe humans are complex not because their oppinions deserve fanfare.

In my opinion, it's best to hold your views along a gradient of strength/importance.

It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."

It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."

Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.

Ideally, one would have a meta cognitive toolkit and regularly retest their beliefs, sincerely. But that's unfortunately advanced technique, and likely requires the better part of a decade of reading and practicing.

What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...

No because “strong opinions” mark you as “aggressively conventional”: Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”, and most people won’t try and find out.

Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.

People don't talk about it anymore. The list of things you can't discuss is quite long and it has many items that logically shouldn't be on it.

You can say for example that the sum of genetics, culture, finances and upbringing will have different results.

Make it ever so slightly more specific and the water gets hot fast.

The retaliation for different topics is also different and has little relation with how offending the topic might be (if at all) 100 people might call your employer or you will simply be considered a lunatic.

The worse part of politics is that any real opinion will cost votes. You can't really say anything. Everything is heresy at that point.

The set of things you can't publicly say without facing adverse consequences is never the empty set. Maybe your opinions happen to lie within this week's Overton window.

Losing your job, being "cancelled", publicly vilified and unhirable is not the same as being executed, so therefore we should dismiss it as a false equivalency?

He said this though:

> Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else.

How is that overlooking it?

Maybe it's being flagged because it doesn't have (2022) in the title.

Honestly, it speaks well of the community (in some senses, at least) that they're willing and able to flag pg articles.

> Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea?

This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"

Words shape worldviews of other people though, and in some circumstances they may act in accordance with those altered perspectives.

> Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.

There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.

However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.

If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.

The fashion of what is viewed as heresy changes ever so often.

Depending on how into 40k you are, you might be surprised to hear that many fans (though arguably closer to tourists, but that's another topic) don't see 40k as a satire at all, or at very least consider the Imperium to be overall a force for good, which I guess in a grim way only adds to the parody that you can be so on the nose about it and the propaganda still holds

Do you really not see to what degree you are proving his point here?

This seems like a strangely inverted observation, i.e. pretty directly backwards of what's actually happening. This is evident in the odd way you characterize your latter 2 of 3 examples. The first example is real though, and those are bad state laws.

Further reading for those interested: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.

My American-Israeli wife says the opposite FWIW

"Why is it true?" is usually an even more cancellable/fireable offence (which is also why you see it discussed less).

There's a causal relationship there, often expressed in some form of the idea "the pendulum swings". Heresy-hunting inevitably produces the backlash. It's fun during the upswing to push harder to punish the heretics more and harder, but the result is that the next phase of whiplash is even worse. As well as the inevitable attempt to hold on even harder and with more righteous fury as the grasp on power fades.

Of course if you try to imagine how to coordinate an awareness that people need to settle down a bit right in the middle of a purity spiral, well, one might as well try to hold back the ocean. You start to see how a something like psychohistory is at least an appealing idea.

> When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is.

Citation needed.

The idea that most statements contain hidden meanings or only serve to cover up hidden motivations suggests an incredible level of paranoia.

I would posit the opposite - when people say things you can & should generally take them at face value. Sometimes people will disappoint you some of the time. Some people will do it so often that you would do well to discount their future statements. If you find yourself believing that anyone who doesn't share your opinions & values is secretly a facist/nazi, carefully curating their public image until it's time to strike, then you should really consider finding some grass and touching it.

I cannot tell if you are being farcical or not. The article is very blatantly not that, if you take more than a cursory glance at it.