Re: What You Can’t Say
23rd November 2009
Paul Graham examines Political Correctness.
The most extreme of the things you can’t say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.
The most entertaining thing about technically-oriented people is that they can blow through a social paradigm without hardly noticing it.
In fact, finding the outer limits is very, very hard. Popular controversialists just go for the low hanging fruit. To really solve the problem would take years of introspection. You have to untangle your ideas from the ideas of your time, and that’s so hard that few people in history have even come close. Isaac Newton, smart as he was, wasted years on theological controversies.
This in turn reveals a ‘default educated east coast belief’: that theology is a waste of time for a smart person like Isaac Newton. (Don’t get him started on Thomas Aquinas, I guess.) In every century other than this one, most intelligent educated people would characterize that as the best use of his time – and brain.