paulgraham.com/say.html
January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the w ay you looked? It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in t he same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding o n it. They're just as arbi trary, and just as invisible to most people. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no ma tter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we cons ider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Eur ope in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves.
They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them. It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people bel ieved things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly th at you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise. To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right. It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future wil l find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in a ny era. The Conformist Test Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluc tant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If ever ything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that p ossibly be a coincidence? The other alternative would be that you independently considered every qu estion and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered a cceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so t hey can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mista ke, that's very convincing evidence. Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't d o it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independent ly decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea. If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in G ermany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dar e say out loud. Almost certainly, there is somethin g wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud. One way to find these ideas is simply to look at thing s people do say, and get in trouble for.
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or t hat people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false stateme nts might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would hav e been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it 's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some o f the statements that get people in trouble today. To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and star t asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever moder n equivalent), but might it also be true? What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in pub lic? In every period of histo ry, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to sho ot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotatio ns now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence t heir opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive pol icy was "defeatist". We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-p urpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it shou ld be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but w hen he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" inste ad of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for examp le-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think. In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer.
They found t hat even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious kn owledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, tho se will be the first to emerge. Time and Space If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as goo d: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getti ng wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable . Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's beca use we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than pa st generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seem s People in past times were much like us. W hatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believ e So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas aga inst those of various past cultures, and see what you get.
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and wha t isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as we ll. In one culture it might seem shockin g to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. In one cultu...
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