Item — HN Reader

This blog piece perfectly encapsulates an interesting discussion we are having as a society - "Do we need to care if a word has a hurtful etymology (if nobody using it nowadays knows that history)?"

Taking it out of the superheated culture-war lens, let's examine a more chill example: There's a popular meme with a girl crying and pointing and a cat sitting at a table. After some number of years somebody online pointed out that the panel on the left is some reality-tv personality going through a genuinely terrible life experience. They were sort of implying that everybody on the internet should stop using the meme for this reason.

Most of the arguments in either direction have thus-far been name-calling (due to culture-war nature). I'd be curious to see a well-reasoned from-first-principles argument in either direction, though curiously never have.

2 comments

The girl already cried. Making it into a meme doesn't make her cry more. People using the meme are exercising their Freedom (of speech, in this case). That freedom of speech isn't really infringing on anyone else's rights, so it's essentially zero cost. Freedom is the second most important natural right, right after Life.[1]

The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.

I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.

And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.

There's your argument from first principles. QED.

---

1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.

Great argument overall. What strikes me is that I have also thought long and hard about fundamental natural rights, and my proposition is that Free Will is paramount and Privacy is the close second.

I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.

Thanks for the reply and for giving me further food for thought. I'll have to think more about it but I can see how Privacy fits this framework. My first inclination is to see Privacy as a consequence of Freedom, meaning you are free not to disclose something if you choose so. I'm still seeing Life as the foremost right because without it, you can't exercise any other rights, and because one's right to be free cannot infringe another one's right to live, generally speaking. But regardless, you've given me lots of great food for thought, so thank you again for that reply and I look forward to seeing your paper posted here one day

I think kindness is the answer and ironically often the reason people get so unpleasant.

It's OK not to know the hurtful etymology of something; it's also OK to be hurt by it and to educate those who don't know. To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life. What often happens however is either that unknowing party pushes back (often aggressively), imagining their rights to have been infringed, or else hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias (think: oppression of black people in 1950's USA just as one example among many). And then we get a super-heated culture war, which is really just mixture of people wanting to be heard and understood, and some people deliberately stirring the pot for ulterior reasons.

The answer to your question is thus another question - do you care if people suffer because of the actions of others? If you do, then try to be kind, and remember that being kind sometimes means making minor sacrifices to bring greater benefit to others.

Well I think you addressed the simplest case, which wasn't really the situation here (nor in the meme).

I think if somebody directly offends you by calling you something you don't like, then from first-principles, it does seem like you're always okay letting them know that and seeing if they mind stopping. And most kind people would.

But in the meme-case it wasn't the lady in the meme asking people to stop, it was just some random girl on reddit. Same with the cargo-culting, I don't think the cargo-cults themselves are objecting, rather it is somebody objecting on behalf of another group.

Or the case of how we name our git-branches is even more indirect (since nobody is calling anybody anything, except a git-branch).

I'd love to hear some from-first-principles, emotionless arguments with clear proposals (e.g. If x% of people think term Y offends group Z, at what threshhold do we care? And does only group Z get to vote?).

I think what you're asking for are the kinds of philosophical questions that don't have clean logical answers. I agree that the cases of people advocating for groups they are not members of are more challenging, but I think they're also highly situation-dependent; for example what representation does group Z have already? And how do you quantify that?

In my experience a lot of these problems ultimately trace their cause back to some systemic imbalance that's often invisible to those on the 'winning' side of it. Take the idea of 'white privilege'; a lot of white people live in very poor or difficult circumstances, and probably don't feel privileged, but the real meaning of that phrase is that their situation would be even worse if they weren't white, and purely because of their appearance. So I think if you want proposals for dealing with these kinds of problem, then fixing the societal systems is where you want to look, rather than dealing with the proximate causes. Most of us can only work on the level of symptoms with this one though, hence my initial reply.

I'm not asking for a philosophical proof of which terms are or aren't bad. I am proposing that rather than taking every single complaint seriously that we try to set some basic structure or benchmark.

I perceive that the current state of language-policing is anarchy: anybody can all anything bad/harmful/problematic/ism etc. Often a small group suddenly decides that their personal judgments on language should be followed by all, and it makes the remaining majority bristle, particularly if they try to enforce it without bothering to make a compelling case and win popular support.

I perceived this blog-post to be one piece of noise in this free-for-all.

Perhaps it's time for a better system than anarchy -- such as setting a standard (majority vote of the affected group?).

I don't think the general concept that "victims must be able to articulate the exact damage done to them or else no harm was done" nor "if some of the victims of something say it's ok then it is ok for everyone" are very sound.

This is not an attack on what you're saying and I'm not saying it even applies wholly right now, it just sticks out to me as a problem with any approach where "a majority of people publicly express an opinion" as a criteria.

> To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life.

What if the 'hurt party' is being unreasonable?

I addressed that in a sibling comment but to phrase my answer in a different way - your choice is between escalation, de-escalation, or stepping away. Escalation doesn't make anything better apart from providing a moment of catharsis, so if you choose to engage then you could try to understand the other person's point of view and where their unreasonable behaviour comes from. Some people are irredeemably unreasonable; those ones you step away from. Many others however were already feeling unheard and upset before they met you, and they brought that into the conversation.

For an example - if you're familiar with The Expanse (great scifi if you like that sort of thing), then imagine you're a belter living on an asteroid, and for your whole life you've been called a 'skinny' by planet-dwelling types in a derogatory reference to your low-gravity physique, then one day someone calls you that without realising what it means except that's a common nickname for belters. The reasonable response from you would be to politely ask them not to, and explain why. The more likely response is one of anger at the insult, even if the other party intended no such insult. You're behaving in an apparently unreasonable way, but based on a lifetime of experience. The other person could return the hostility, then everyone is unhappy. Or they could respond with compassion, and the outcome would likely be much better for both of you.

> hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias

Another thing that happens quite often, especially in the context of online discussions, is that a third party opens the discussion aggressively and/or condescendingly, explaining how the phrase is unvirtuous and insisting that the first party renounce it.

Yes; as I said:

> ...hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias...

It's understandable that people on the receiving end of what you describe should react badly; however the compassionate approach is to try to listen first, understand that the aggression or condescension may be an attempt to control the conversation out of fear of not being heard (a fear which may be grounded in experience), or a kind of emotional exhaustion at having been on the receiving end of hurtful treatment for a long time already.

So, you're right, that's not a productive approach, but I think it's more important how someone moves forward from that; if they dig in and fight back, then all we get is a war. Actually this applies in any interaction where someone is behaving unpleasantly towards you; if you can contain your natural defensive reaction and show kindness in return, you will often find that the situation relaxes, and maybe that person is upset for totally unrelated reasons - perhaps you just crossed their path at a bad time. And again, it's not OK for someone to shout at you - but the compassionate response will often make the outcome better for both of you.

I don't think that's the same thing. To paraphrase both cases to make it easier to correct me:

Case you're describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person2 demands that Person1 not act like this. Person2's manner is a little aggressive (in hindsight, understandably) because they've copped this too much in the past already, even if this instance isn't particularly egregious and a milder approach would have been more suitable.

Case I'm describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person3 starts aggressively demanding that Person1 not act like this due to the harm that it causes Person2, and instead conform to Person3's espoused 'correct' behaviour. Person3 is seeking social power by using Person2's alleged hurt as leverage, while Person2 may not even be aware of the interchange, let alone harmed by it.