This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.
On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry.
This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,he wrote.
If it helps, Altman himself is gay.
No, it doesn’t help.
Altman himself is an entrepreneur, which seems to mean he hustles and shuffles money around, but hasn’t actually accomplished anything himself. He certainly hasn’t said anything novel about physics — he’s a college dropout, and his physics knowledge is probably somewhat less than mine, which isn’t saying a lot. Go ahead, check out his Wikipedia page, and tell me what he has done.
And that’s my objection to his statement — he has zero evidence for the idea that tolerating homophobia benefits science, or that a culture that actively promotes tolerance by rejecting bigotry is somehow equivalent to an oppressive culture that punishes people for their sexual orientation. I’ll just point out that it was people saying disparaging things about gay people that led to the chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. Germany had many prominent scientists and engineers in the 1930s, and supported science well, but also had the idea that Jews were bad, and so America was gifted with Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. One of my graduate advisors, George Streisinger, was a Hungarian Jew whose family fled the Nazis.
These are all equivalently stupid.
It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about women if we want them to be able to say novel things about computer science.
It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about black Americans if we want them to be able to say novel things about refrigeration technology.
It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about Jews if we want them to be able to say novel things about biology.
When you string it together that way, one thing that you ought to notice is the word “people”. Who? What people? It is the assumption about the identity of people: they are non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jews. They are, of course, rich white men, like the ones who populate the Silicon Valley tech bubble. We have to allow rich white men to say whatever they want in order to allow them to reinvent bodegas, reinvent the bus, reinvent food, and do all those other irrelevant things that will make the privileged richer.
It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible. “It’s possible” is not an evidence-based statement in support of a policy. It is the kind of open-ended, vague weasely string of words disconnected from cause and effect that allows great evil to thrive in the crevices of its ambiguity.
It’s possible that if we cook and eat the flesh of Sam Altman, we’ll become immortal gods on Earth. Won’t know until we try.
over the years I’ve become more convinced that “start up culture” is to business as “hook up culture” is to dating. Sounds fun, as long as you’re a young white male.
I don’t even understand the original quote. If a bigoted anti-gay person writes a legit badass physics paper and submits it to physics journals, I am 100% sure it will not get rejected because of the author’s abhorrent views. So yes, we allow them to say interesting things about physics if they can.
Wow I just learned I’m a ‘non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jew’. Sad, but at least I’m also non-rich.
And even if we don’t, “eat the rich” is just generally sound social policy.
Has he determined the number of brilliant women and men driven from the field of physics by sexist, racist assholes? Without this determination, there is no way to determine if the cost (permitting a social cancer to thrive) is worth the benefit (reveling in the glory of his mind?).
A counter argument is my general understanding of science. Let’s postulate that Einstein never existed. Would his theories remain hidden to us? I doubt it. There would have been a delay but how much of one is unclear. Is the argument that the sexist, racist asshole physicists are somehow brighter than Einstein and more critical to the progress of science. People like to think of themselves as irreplaceable and there is a cost if they are lost but no one is irreplaceable.
For anyone who cares the complete quote was: This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.
[1] I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say “gay people are ok” to make the progress we’ve made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.
I don’t know… when people say disparaging things about me for being gay I tend to have some rather creative thoughts involving high velocity impacts and the dispersion of energy across stationary bodies. If I were a physicist I might have come up with a novel line of research based on them!
The links to those Silicon Valley “innovations” are pretty funny and quite scary in their cluelessness about their impacts on people. The Lyft Bus article was particularly funny, with the venture capitalist nattering on about the cost savings from autonomous vehicles dooming mass transit. He seems unaware that the very first place autonomous vehicles have been tried on more than an experimental level is in, you guessed it, buses. Las Vegas has a test program running using buses by a French company that have already been deployed in Singapore and other cities overseas. So the very thing he’s dismissing by citing a new technology is the very thing that technology is being applied to. Real geniuses of prognostication, the lot of them.
chris61, #6
That makes it even worse by adding the both-sides garbage element to it.
We didn’t say “being gay is ok” because we were pissed off about our free speech. We said it because being gay is ok.
Being gay is not evil, therefore people saying so facing consequences isn’t a problem. His attempt at making the two seem similar is laughably stupid.
It’s not a free speech issue. People crying “free speech” over everything is hilarious.
This is such a profound misunderstanding (or a shitty deliberate attempt at excusing bigotry) that I’m not sure where to start.
But it’s strange how science progressed unhindered for centuries despite the complete lack of people in science saying disparaging things about white men. So weird. We should still be in the Stone Age.
Is anyone not being allowed to say stupid, insensitive, and dehumanizing things about other people? I don’t see that at the moment myself. In fact, we’ve got a bumper crop of this crap right now, although it’s only slightly more prolific than it’s been for…like…ever.
Given the current tone of conversation in America, we must be on the verge of a major physics break through, like time travel…back to the golden age of the 1840s when women, blacks, gays, et cetera were in their respective places (kitchen, field, closet).
Still, I live in this bubble where being nice to and respectful of other people is the norm. It’s not a bad place. And science still manages to march on.
I checked out the context of Sam Altman’s quote. It’s a blog post that discusses (in a very shallow way) the danger of punishing heretical or heterodox ideas, and how the SF Bay Area in particular has this problem. I live in the bay area, and I’m wondering, where exactly is he getting this impression? Unfortunately, his argument is mostly handwaving, and referring to Galileo and Newton. He provides only one modern concrete example:
Ooookay?
A few days later, Sam Altman posted a clarification post, basically repeating his point, clarifying nothing. I mean, the main question is, why use this particular example about gay people? Was he trying to come up with the most implausible example of the value of heterodoxy, in order to demonstrate the implausibility of his own thesis? Or does he think the example is actually plausible, and just doesn’t want to admit to it?
That said, I’m actually fine with saying disparaging things about gay people. For example: “Sam Altman is a bad writer and poor thinker.” Was that disparaging enough? Have I advanced the study of physics?
Siggy:
In what way is “saying disparaging things about gay people” heretical? Being anti-gay has been the norm in most of the world until very recently, and is still far too common. Someone saying mean things about gay people is not being brilliantly iconoclastic, original, showing extra-boxular thinking. They’re just repeating the same shit which has been around forever.
@9 Saad
You must either be very young or deliberately missing the point.
A most persuasive counterargument. You’ve really nailed it there.
@Chris61, #6, #15:
Since I am just some unimportant country bumpkin housewife and not a great mind of Silicon Valley, I was wondering if you could to explain to me how throngs of people across the country debating totally rationally I’m sure whether it’s okay or not for them to call my daughter anti-trans slurs helps advance physics. Also I’d like to know if we’re ever allowed to actually reach a conclusion on the matter or if it has to be debated forever.
Thanks.
In their glorification of free speech above all other human rights, a lot of Americans seem to lose track of the fact that true statements and lies are not morally equivalent, and don’t warrant the same degree of protection and promotion, just because they’re both “speech”. The bar for suppressing the truth in order to protect some other interest is higher than the bar for suppressing logically incoherent garbage. I find myself actually having to remind people that the debate is about the nature of reality, about sorting the truth from the garbage, and not about what you’re technically, legally allowed to say.
How long?
How often?
When the fuck are we allowed to say “this has been settled”?
Why do we still have to engage “Slavery was beneficial for black people” and “the Holocaust was a hoax by the Zionist world government”?
Here’s a very good explanation by a very smart lady why this is wrong. Applicable to other forms of bigotry as well:
Okay, so I’m going to come out and admit something: The Obama administration made me wealthy. Not super-rich, but I entered the 1% in 2016 and I stayed the in 2017. Whether this continues as a trend, I have no idea, but I’m working to see that it does. I consider myself very lucky, and I’d like a better society to go with it: I really don’t need all that money, and I’d like the payroll cap removed and yes, I’d be willing to see my taxes rise if it means the people who prepare my food get healthcare and child care and decent educations.
But being wealthy means I’ve also been in the space with insanely wealthy people. I’ve met Peter Thiel, for example. And Elon. And Bill Gates. And my overwhelming impression of these men is that their sexuality is a _nuisance_, it’s a _distraction_ from what really matters. It’s as if these people took the Steven Covey “What Matters Most” tutorial way, way too seriously and, being men, confused “being humane and intimate” with “getting laid,” and marked that one somewhere near the bottom of the list.
(And no, the sneering “If being rich makes you uncomfortable, you could give it all away” is nonsense: That’s called unilateral disarmament, and we know where that leads. I give to charities even though I believe charitable giving is a grey and unlovely activity because your biases lead you to tribe-oriented giving; what I want is a decent and moral government that takes its responsibilities to its citizens seriously.)
PZ wrote:
Let no one forget Emmy Noether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether . She was Jewish, and was also one of the most skilled mathematicians in history. Noether’s First Theorem shows, among other things, why energy is conserved; and was essential for the development of general relativity. Despite that; she was denied a professorship at the University of Göttingen due to sexism by the faculty in the 1910s & 1920s, and spent years as a lecturer teaching mathematics under the name of a colleague who was a man.
In 1933; Noether was fired from her lectureship position by the Nazis and, like the other scientists PZ listed, moved to the United States.
@Siggy, #13:
I also live in the Bay Area. We have problems of systemic sexism, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, classism and other bigotry. We do not have people objecting to “intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension” for no reason.
Regarding that last bit:
I suspect Altman is referring to things like people objecting to Peter Thiel & others wanting to be ghouls who consume the blood of young people because they wrongly think it will “radically extend their lives” based on gross misrepresentations of parabiosis.
The actual objection there is to very rich people exploiting & inflicting grossly unethical procedures upon poor people; and not to “radical life extension”.
I read Sam Altman from time to time and he’s a smart, compassionate, decent person. Disparaging people is not really Sam Altman’s thing. He makes an admittedly clumsy thought experiment involving the concept of unwise disparagement of a group of people, and as a result is disparaged mercilessly by PZ. The disparagement extends to questioning Sam’s achievements and work. PZ basically loves disparaging people, individuals and groups, all day long. It really is his thing.
Irony.
I find this post unhelpful and poorly thought out. It tells me a lot more about PZ’s character than Sam Altman’s. I continue to read PZ’s blog because he’s a brilliant writer and I think by challenging my ideas and preconceptions he’s changed my worldview and probably made me a better person over the years. But the temptation to stop and avoid the bile and nastiness that pours out of this blog is huge.
@bill: Maybe this can shed some light on the subject. Or maybe this.
It’s possible to be a “nice guy” and also be so shielded from the consequences of your actions and beliefs that you utterly fail to take into account the consequences for people who don’t have your shielding, and therefore be someone who needs to have those consequences elucidated for you. It’s possible to be a “nice guy” who presents himself as smart and decent, and also be someone who tolerates social conditions which create a hostile environment for people less privileged than oneself, and be utterly blinkered to those conditions.
Don’t forget to R e – i n v e n t __T h e__ W h e e l.
That’s a pretty good and fair encapsulation.
Well, in the San Francisco culture it’s not the accepted view. I’m not sure that makes it “heretical”.
The thing is for anything that wasn’t outright wrong in the blog, it was exceedingly shallow. His best point was that creative minds dont work well or appreciate being confined and second guessed by social niceties, but then he fails to give *any* concrete example. His *best* (and they are *bad*) werebiological in pharmaceutical research not being pursued for unsavory social implications (although surely the research not being pursued for lack of profit opportunities is far more likely) and SpaceX being criticized for catering to the 1% (which I don’t think would stop it in SF; sure there’d be blogs and opinion pieces in the alternative press but none of that would stop SpaceX from continuing it’s business any way.)
Like most anti-P.C. blogs this has some vague idea that the is some tangible social nicety called P.C. that has it’s handhold on us all and its foot on our neck is obvious real and identifiable. It is, of course, nothing of the sort.
“It’s possible”. So is bullshit. That refrain sure is starting to stink like it.
@24 I do not know what to say except where is my flying car?
what is it with concept people that allows them to be disconnected from any practical reality and the limitations there in.
it seems that the tech world is easily blinded by ideas as they seek to scrape the cream of the market.
all hat and no cattle
uncle frogy
Mmmm…longpork.
Wait, what were we talking about?
@billforsternz #22:
Altman’s piece is about his wanting people who disparage other people to be socially accepted. That is neither “compassionate” or “decent”.
Why are you bothered more by what has been written here than by the idea of giving social sanction to bigotry?
Aside from persecuting individual scientists, the Nazis had a bad effect. Shirer points out that by 1937 the quality of German graduates in chemistry had fallen markedly.
michaelwbusch @21:
That wikipedia entry got this wrong. It’s her second theorem which is relevant to GR, not the first. You can read a translation of her paper here.
@elfsternberg, #20
RE: Unilateral Disarmament: That’s a really good analogy that gets at the heart of the problem which is that, fundamentally, wealth is power, and like power, giving it up doesn’t make it go away, it just means someone else gets it. And wealth, just like power, tends to concentrate: having a lot makes it easier to get even more. Any individual wealthy person giving up their wealth won’t change things, as it will just be rapidly recaptured by other wealthy folks. The only real solutions are structural ones: wide scale changes that limit and slow the ability of wealth to concentrate. (Whether that looks like a UBI, a strengthening of labor power through increased union organization, a massive public employment scheme through infrastructure and public works, or even rejiggering the Fed to trade higher inflation for more employment, I leave up to the imagination of the reader.)
RE: The psycho-sexual dynamics of the insanely wealthy: I’m not in a position to speculate, having never rubbed shoulders -or any other body parts – with the ludicrously wealthy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if your impression was correct. Billionaires probably *do* view their sex drive (and other feeble human weaknesses like eating and breathing and sleeping and love and compassion and empathy) as a distraction, because people who put anything ahead of making obscene amounts of money in any way possible don’t become billionaires. If you’re in the 1%, you and me live in different worlds already, but we’ve got infinitely more in common than someone merely in the 1% and someone in the 0.0001% have in common. Not just because that level of wealth is isolating, but because it self-selects for people who ruthlessly prioritize accumulating wealth over literally anything else in the world.
(And on a different note, if you’re the same Elf Sternberg I *think* you are – and it’s not exactly a common name – then please let me personally thank you for The Journal Entries. Not only are they a good read, for a young queer sci-fi nerd growing up in the stifling Texas suburbs, they were close to a lifesaver.)
@Rob Grigjanis #31: You’re right. It had been a while since I read through the history on this (and longer since I had undergrad-physics-major introduction-to-general-relativity). While _both_ Noether’s First Theorem and her Second Theorem derived from her work to resolve various problems that were described after Einstein first proposed the Einstein field equations, the Second Theorem was the most relevant to developing GR.
If anyone wants a review of the history of Noether’s work, in addition Noether’s original paper: http://www.math.cornell.edu/~templier/junior/The-Noether-theorems.pdf .
I dunno, being afraid of werebiologists sounds rational to me. :)
I find it conspicuous that it’s always the same ideas that have to be dredged up again and again. Yet other questions, such as “is capitalism actually a good economic model for a fair and decent society?”, those never seems to get seriously discussed at all in the wider culture.
It’s almost as if “discussing ideas” isn’t what this is about at all. How about that.
Oh my gosh! Don’t do that! I mean, how would the blog ever stagger on without you?
> Oh my gosh! Don’t do that! I mean, how would the blog ever stagger on without you?
I hope you felt a wonderful sense of satisfaction as you wrote that stunningly original and insightful comment. Actually what worries me (obviously) is not the future of the blog which will clearly be entirely unaffected by my departure, but my own future self. As I wrote, following this blog has (I think) made me a better person. Not reading might make me slightly happier and reduce my blood pressure a little, but it does come at the risk of narrowing my worldview and not exposing myself to sometimes uncomfortable ideas.
No, I was just terribly, terribly concerned.
> No, I was just terribly, terribly concerned.
My diagnosis is that you are smug, and you enjoy sneering at other people for some reason.